Provocative German
choreographer to speak, perform
BY DIANE MANUEL
Will she fill Roble Dance
Studio with 10,000 pink plastic carnations, or import
police dogs from greater Palo Alto?
Those are among the
questions campus aficionados of choreographer Pina Bausch
are asking as opening night of the Autumn Quarter series
of the Presidential Lectures and Symposia in the
Humanities and Arts approaches.
When Bausch conducts a
rehearsal of her dance troupe at 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 18,
and follows the performance with an onstage interview,
the outcome is difficult to predict -- except that it
will be controversial and provocative.
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Information:
"Lounging about in
the coal mine, a man plays piano," the German critic
Christoph Neidhart wrote about a 1986 opening night in
the German weekly Die Weltwoche. "An old man
walks by. Two waiters trip on the stage and prevent each
other from falling. The old man falls and is left alone.
The hole becomes his grave.
"This is a scene from
Pina Bausch's new dance piece Viktor, a piece that
I found deeply unsettling."
As one of Germany's most
influential post-World War II choreographers, Bausch is
known for questioning her dancers about their emotions
and personal relationships and incorporating their
feelings in her work. Sharp bending and turning, sudden
neck movements, caresses, ear tweaks and pinches, rather
than formalized balletic movements, mark many a Bausch
production.
"In the beginning I
had dancers who were busy with the way they looked and
were afraid of losing something onstage," Bausch
told a New York Times writer in 1985. "Then I
found dancers who had less to lose and they were not
afraid to go somewhere further.
"I love these dancers
very much. I think they are beautiful. I don't mean
outside beauty, I try to show how beautiful they are
inside."
Based in the small
industrial German city of Wuppertal, the Pina Bausch
Tanztheater (dance theater) Wuppertal is known worldwide
for its innovative blending of dance, theater, music and
visual arts in a format that often includes speaking,
singing, chanting and props.
Menacing German shepherds
circle the stage in Carnations, and sheep roam
quietly throughout Viktor. Productions of Le
Sacre du Printemps require a stage filled with dirt
or sod, and dancers in Arien (Arias) perform in
three inches of water in a plastic basin.
"It is almost
impossible not to have a strong response to Pina Bausch's
works," Stanford music bibliographer Mimi Tashiro
writes on the website that advertises the Oct. 18
performance[http://prelectur.stanford.edu]. "From
the beginning and even today, reception has been divided
and controversial. While some see Bausch as the most
influential creative force in postwar world theater,
inspiring two generations of choreographers, dance
theater makers and opera directors . . . there are
[critics] who regard Bausch as the queen of 'angst
theater,' and her works as 'depressing, self-indulgent
ramblings of interest only to anthropologically minded
theater scholars.'"
Born in 1940 in Solingen,
Germany, Bausch studied in Essen at the Folkwang School,
birthplace of the Jooss Ballet founded by expressionist
choreographer Kurt Jooss. Bausch graduated in 1959 and
studied at Juilliard in New York for two years with
Antony Tudor, the British choreographer who recruited her
for the Metropolitan Opera Ballet. In 1962 she returned
to Germany to join Jooss' Essen Folkwang Ballet.
"I wanted to be a
dancer, not a choreographer," Bausch has told the New
York Times about her earliest productions. "When
I did my first piece, maybe I felt frustrated. So I did
something I wanted to dance.
"I just know, when I
did my first piece, I could not copy -- out of respect.
When I'm creating now, I don't want to see anything. The
impulse is what is life."
Since her early days in
Wuppertal, Bausch has created more than 30 full-length
works, including Ich Bring Dich um die Ecke (I'll
Do You In), Fürchtet Euch nicht! (Don't Be
Afraid), Nelken (Carnations), Nur Du (Only
You) and Kontakthof (Difficult Place).
"Some hallmarks of
Bausch's mature style have been the absence of a
sustainable plot, or conventional sense of progression,
or revelation of characters," Tashiro writes on the
Stanford website. "Her pieces are built on brief
episodes of dialogue and action that are often centered
on a surreal situation, prop or costume. In Viktor,
a female dancer pounds a steak and then stuffs it along
with her foot into a toe shoe, and performs
bourrées."
Bausch also has been
criticized for her frequent depictions of violence,
particularly against women.
But in Bluebeard, a
rendition of the traditional wife-killer tale, Bausch has
defended her vision, arguing that "I'm so afraid of
violence, that I am able to face it."
Bausch's troupe made its
New York debut in 1984 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music
and that same year opened the Los Angeles Olympic Art
Festival.
The Oct. 18 rehearsal and
interview in Roble Dance Studio are open to the public,
although some seats will be reserved for invited guests.
All who attend are invited to a reception that will
follow the interview. SR
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