Biography of Pina Bausch

Pina Bausch (born Philippine Bausch on 27 July 1940 in Solingen; died 30 June 2009 in Wuppertal) was a German dancer, choreographer and director of Tanztheater Wuppertal. She fundamentally changed contemporary dance theatre by bringing together movement, speech, music, everyday gestures, memories and powerful stage images.

Solingen, Essen and New York

Bausch grew up in Solingen, where her parents ran a restaurant. From early on she encountered people, gestures and stories that later seemed to form a distant background to her stage world. She studied at the Folkwang School in Essen with Kurt Jooss, whose connection of expressive dance, theatre and social observation became important for her. A scholarship took her to New York in the early 1960s, where she studied at the Juilliard School and gained stage experience as a dancer.

Wuppertal

After returning to Germany, Bausch first worked in Essen. In 1973 she took over the Wuppertal ballet, which soon became known as Tanztheater Wuppertal. At first her works met with incomprehension and rejection. Audiences often expected classical dance forms, while Bausch searched for inner states, memories, social rituals and ruptures. From this tension emerged a language of her own that made Wuppertal an international place of dance.

Working method

Bausch asked her dancers questions and developed whole evenings from answers, movements, repetitions and small scenes. Her pieces showed people not as smooth figures, but as vulnerable, comic, desiring and contradictory beings. She worked with strong materials and spaces: earth, water, chairs, flowers, walls, doors and empty stages could become landscapes of memory. Dance in her work was always also theatre of looking and encounter.

Works

Her defining works include Le Sacre du printemps, Café Müller, Kontakthof, Nelken, Palermo Palermo and Vollmond. Many pieces connect tenderness and harshness, repetition and surprise, humour and loneliness. Bausch was not interested in simple stories. Her evenings open spaces in which people reveal something of closeness, power, longing, fear and dignity.

International impact

Tanztheater Wuppertal toured worldwide, and Bausch developed many works in collaboration with cities and cultures outside Germany. Her work influenced dance, theatre, performance, film and visual art. In 2008 she received the Goethe Prize of the City of Frankfurt am Main. For many artists she became a point of reference because she showed that dance need not be separated from language and that bodies can make social experience visible.

Farewell

Pina Bausch died in Wuppertal on 30 June 2009, shortly after a cancer diagnosis. She was 68 years old. Her work remains alive because it does not explain people, but gives them space on stage: with movement, silence, glances and a great attention to what happens between human beings.