She was brought up in her parent’s café, where she played under tables, an emotional space that she reconstructs in Café Muller. In 1955 she went to Folkwang, in Essen, where she studied with one of the most significant promoters of modern dance - Kurt Joos. After graduating Folkwang, she continued her studies at Julliard, New York, where she get familiarised with the performance techniques and concepts of the school creators – Martha Graham and José Limon. In 1962, she returns to Germany and creates the first performances with Folkwang Ballet. In 1973, she is asked to take over the Wuppertal Ballet Company, later to be called the Pina Bausch Wuppertal Dance.
In an interview with Norbert Servos, Pina Bausch stresses out the extensions she attaches to contemporary dance: “The word dance is closely related to a series of clearly defined particularities. It is difficult to accept that dance may exist in a different structure. Dance is not actually given by a certain technique. I believe that only a very good dancer can do very simple things.
In the beginning I was interested in certain gestures, certain movements. Then I got more and more interested in the way dance is constructed’’.
One of the techniques employed by Pina Bausch in nearly all her performances is addressing the dancers a set of questions. The choreographer developed this method starting with Blaubart. She’d sit with the dancers in a circle and asked them questions about the motivations related to intimate options, certain personal experiences that were a basis for the construction of the performance, on how they resounded to various phases in the work progress.
The questions, uttered in a gradual script, have a double relevance: they gather a community around a common search, create a block of shared memories, in which the dancers interrelate and provide a support for the performance text. In all Pina Bausch’s performances memories have a flexible and fragile fabric and an extremely dense materiality. Dancers dive into a rhythm of broken, fragmented recollection, summing up childhood pieces and adulthood convulsions. Recollection stands several dramaturgical functions. It collates memories that reconstruct an arch of lost innocence, explored in all Pina Bausch’s performances, bring on freedom to playful movements, in towing the time of childhood, brings emotional information to the foreground, in games and fairytales excerpted from a memory book that dances flick through. Recollection is a vivarium of innocence getting gradually filled with the land of death.
Pina Bausch’s performances swing between the authority of the warm and frenzy times of childhood and the authority of the cold and anguishing times of the end; between the exuberance of the game where the child nips his fingers and the numbness of the final breath. Two time axes become the dramatic centres of bodily conflict.
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In Nelken (Carnations), the stage is covered in a sea of flowers, thousands of carnations stuck into the ground - a version of the fresh grass she used in 1980.
A dancer comes in and sits on the chair he brings along onstage. He is followed by the other dancers who sit in an Indian file.
Another dancer translates George Gershwin’s song – The Man I love – in sign language. The song becomes the leitmotiv of the entire play, an exploration of the moments you learn to enjoy small things, of those moments you don’t expect anything to happen but simply live every second to the full.
The flowers that encircled in running by man and women, most of whom are dressed in sleeveless tunics are guarded by leashed dogs.
The dancers throw bundles of carnations into a space with the depth and the peace of a suspended garden. Innocence comes out through every pore; innocence easy to recognise in the exuberance that the dancers send to each other as in a vital tig game, as in an extended circuit game (stage - hall), of an extreme contamination capacity. Play is privileged time in the middle of this playground where the epidermis of innocence spreads over carnations.
In a black, backless dress, a dancer obsessively and aggressively repeats conventional ballet steps, runs between carnations and names faster and faster the type of movements that he is performing. A man and a woman cover their heads with earth using some toys, as if they were performing a funeral ritual. An accordion covers the naked breast of a woman who is stepping forward, without singing, between the carnations. Severe admonishment covers a child’s whimper. Two voices of the same body put together two ages growing one from the other, as if in the simultaneous reverberations of one single whisper, of one single child – parent. Heart beats amplified by a microphone turn into a waltz of intensified emotions.
All dancers sit, holding their hands, on chairs placed in a circle. A woman stands up and reads in an affected tone a letter from her father. Suddenly all the dancers jump up and run to the front stage, after which they go back to their chairs and quickly reposition them in a straight line. Two stuntmen pile up cardboard boxes into two monolithic group, while a dancers is watching them, screaming and warning them that they're going to fall apart any minute. The order might destroy the cruel fastness of a clod crusher turning everything into a fall of dust. The two stuntmen climb up the piles and throw out boxes while the woman’s commotion grows into an impossible to stop hysteria. Throbbing noise, body under shock and then silence.
