Pina Bausch
Feb. 9th, 2014 02:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dormouse1953About five years ago I decided to take a short holiday in Vienna and travel there by train. This necessitated changing trains in Cologne to get the sleeper down to Vienna. There's a large book shop in Cologne station so I spent some of my wait there. Although I don't read German I do like seeing what is available in German translation out of mere curiosity.
Inside the door of the shop there was a large table carrying the latest magazines and newspapers. And several of the newspapers had big headlines of the form, "Pina Bausch ist tod."
I first came across that name back in September 1982. Somebody had left a copy of The Guardian around the office and there was an article about a German company called Tanztheater Wuppertal that was performing at Sadler's Wells in north London the following week. (I later realised I'd seen their version of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring on television earlier that year.) Now, I am no great fan of dance, but something about the article suggested I might like to see this and I got a ticket to see something called 1980 - Ein Stuck von Pina Bausch (1980 - A piece by Pina Bausch).
It is not dance in the conventional sense. It has a lot of acting and running around and shouting. For instance, it starts with a man sitting on a chair on a podium holding a large china bowl and a spoon. He speaks into a microphone, "Pour mama", takes a spoonful (I think it's mashed potato) and eats it. "Pour papa" - another spoonful. "Pour Mimi", "Pour Pepe", etc. working his way through an entire family. (This is the French word "pour" meaning "for" not the English verb.) Then, something that for me is a defining image of Pina Bausch's work: the rest of the company sashay out of the wings in a line to the sound of what I think is a German popular dance band of the 1920s. The men are wearing smart business suits and the woman are wearing elegant evening dresses. (Women's clothing never seems to fit right in Bausch productions. The dresses seem to be baggy in some areas, and it looks like they are going to fall out of them. Their nipples are often visible through the thin fabric.) The performers make complicated hand gestures as they proceed down into the audience.
Another famous scene in this piece involves the entire cast apparently sunbathing in a park. (The entire stage is covered in real turf for the production.) But each performer exposes different parts of their anatomy. A man hides beneath blankets so that only his buttocks are visible. A woman takes off her dress but puts white circles of paper over her nipples. And, at the start of the scene, the music is the soundtrack to The Wizard of Oz, the young Judy Garland singing "Somewhere over the rainbow". But this ends and the scene carries on, this time with a much later recording of a much older Garland singing the same song.
I was captivated, although I know other people were affronted. In the interval I heard couples nearly coming to blows arguing about its merits. On the journey home, travelling down in the lift that used to be at Angel tube station, people started chanting lines from the production to each other, much to the amusement of the lift operator. And the critic for the Evening Standard called it "profoundly boring".
They were doing another piece the following week and I went to see it. In those days before internet booking, as I dislike making phone bookings, I must have walked up to Islington from my office near St. Paul's to book in person in my lunch hour.
After that performance, nothing. The newly started Channel 4 showed a couple of productions but the company never came back to London. In 1995, after the end of Intersection in Glasgow, I took the train over to Edinburgh to see some of the festival and I saw a theatre advertising an appearance by the company. It was starting the next day and I had to travel back to London then to finalise my house purchase so I couldn't go.
It was a few more years before the company returned to Sadler's Wells. (By then they'd completely rebuilt the theatre.) And such was the fame of the company, such was its popularity, I found the only ticket I could get was way up in the gods. But after that, the company came over regularly. One piece I saw, Kontakthof, it was advertised that Bausch herself would be dancing. It was the only thing she still danced. But when I got there, it was announced she was too ill to perform. She still came out at the end to acknowledge the applause.
Wuppertal is a post industrial town about 50km north of Cologne which may explain why the news of her death made the front pages when I was there. In 1999 I went to a Eurocon in Dortmund and the train went through Wuppertal. At the con, I bumped into Martin Easterbrook. I was most pleased I had just passed through Wuppertal and told him there were only two things I knew about the place. "You know how to pronounce it, for a start," he replied. Well, the two things I was thinking of were the Tanztheater and they have an overhead suspended monorail train system, built in the 1890s and still running. You can see the tracks from the mainline train as it goes through.
It seems, not surprisingly, Bausch's death has made it necessary to do some rethinking about the company, now renamed in her honour. A former dancer with the company now leads it and they have decided to only carry on doing Bausch's work - no new pieces. They have an agreement with Sadler's Wells to perform there every year, and this week they brought back 1980 for the first time since I saw it, all those years ago.
I was a bit worried I wouldn't enjoy it after all this time. For a start, I'd forgotten it lasted over three and a half hours with interval. (I got home much later than I would have liked, and then only by running up the escalator at Waterloo so I could catch the last fast train to Guildford.) But it is still as captivating as ever. However, it's no longer a new experience. I do wish I could recapture the experience of seeing Pina Bausch's work for the first time.
Inside the door of the shop there was a large table carrying the latest magazines and newspapers. And several of the newspapers had big headlines of the form, "Pina Bausch ist tod."
I first came across that name back in September 1982. Somebody had left a copy of The Guardian around the office and there was an article about a German company called Tanztheater Wuppertal that was performing at Sadler's Wells in north London the following week. (I later realised I'd seen their version of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring on television earlier that year.) Now, I am no great fan of dance, but something about the article suggested I might like to see this and I got a ticket to see something called 1980 - Ein Stuck von Pina Bausch (1980 - A piece by Pina Bausch).
It is not dance in the conventional sense. It has a lot of acting and running around and shouting. For instance, it starts with a man sitting on a chair on a podium holding a large china bowl and a spoon. He speaks into a microphone, "Pour mama", takes a spoonful (I think it's mashed potato) and eats it. "Pour papa" - another spoonful. "Pour Mimi", "Pour Pepe", etc. working his way through an entire family. (This is the French word "pour" meaning "for" not the English verb.) Then, something that for me is a defining image of Pina Bausch's work: the rest of the company sashay out of the wings in a line to the sound of what I think is a German popular dance band of the 1920s. The men are wearing smart business suits and the woman are wearing elegant evening dresses. (Women's clothing never seems to fit right in Bausch productions. The dresses seem to be baggy in some areas, and it looks like they are going to fall out of them. Their nipples are often visible through the thin fabric.) The performers make complicated hand gestures as they proceed down into the audience.
Another famous scene in this piece involves the entire cast apparently sunbathing in a park. (The entire stage is covered in real turf for the production.) But each performer exposes different parts of their anatomy. A man hides beneath blankets so that only his buttocks are visible. A woman takes off her dress but puts white circles of paper over her nipples. And, at the start of the scene, the music is the soundtrack to The Wizard of Oz, the young Judy Garland singing "Somewhere over the rainbow". But this ends and the scene carries on, this time with a much later recording of a much older Garland singing the same song.
I was captivated, although I know other people were affronted. In the interval I heard couples nearly coming to blows arguing about its merits. On the journey home, travelling down in the lift that used to be at Angel tube station, people started chanting lines from the production to each other, much to the amusement of the lift operator. And the critic for the Evening Standard called it "profoundly boring".
They were doing another piece the following week and I went to see it. In those days before internet booking, as I dislike making phone bookings, I must have walked up to Islington from my office near St. Paul's to book in person in my lunch hour.
After that performance, nothing. The newly started Channel 4 showed a couple of productions but the company never came back to London. In 1995, after the end of Intersection in Glasgow, I took the train over to Edinburgh to see some of the festival and I saw a theatre advertising an appearance by the company. It was starting the next day and I had to travel back to London then to finalise my house purchase so I couldn't go.
It was a few more years before the company returned to Sadler's Wells. (By then they'd completely rebuilt the theatre.) And such was the fame of the company, such was its popularity, I found the only ticket I could get was way up in the gods. But after that, the company came over regularly. One piece I saw, Kontakthof, it was advertised that Bausch herself would be dancing. It was the only thing she still danced. But when I got there, it was announced she was too ill to perform. She still came out at the end to acknowledge the applause.
Wuppertal is a post industrial town about 50km north of Cologne which may explain why the news of her death made the front pages when I was there. In 1999 I went to a Eurocon in Dortmund and the train went through Wuppertal. At the con, I bumped into Martin Easterbrook. I was most pleased I had just passed through Wuppertal and told him there were only two things I knew about the place. "You know how to pronounce it, for a start," he replied. Well, the two things I was thinking of were the Tanztheater and they have an overhead suspended monorail train system, built in the 1890s and still running. You can see the tracks from the mainline train as it goes through.
It seems, not surprisingly, Bausch's death has made it necessary to do some rethinking about the company, now renamed in her honour. A former dancer with the company now leads it and they have decided to only carry on doing Bausch's work - no new pieces. They have an agreement with Sadler's Wells to perform there every year, and this week they brought back 1980 for the first time since I saw it, all those years ago.
I was a bit worried I wouldn't enjoy it after all this time. For a start, I'd forgotten it lasted over three and a half hours with interval. (I got home much later than I would have liked, and then only by running up the escalator at Waterloo so I could catch the last fast train to Guildford.) But it is still as captivating as ever. However, it's no longer a new experience. I do wish I could recapture the experience of seeing Pina Bausch's work for the first time.
