She curls her body upright, rotates to face the pebble, and bends over to pick it up. This repetitive action is perhaps futile, but certainly not laborous. It requires flexibility, not strength or stamina. Yes, actual talking. Even singing at times. However, despite the use of speech in her pieces, the non-verbal communication — the physical movement — always tends to make the most sense. Yet in theatre, we are often so focused on verbal communication that we forget how effective other means of communication, like physicality, can be.
Makers of theatre should strive to make more use of it, and lovers of theatre should strive to appreciate it more. Basic HTML is allowed. Your email address will not be published. Name Required. Email Required. Notify me of new posts by email. More info about Venture Grants. Venture Grants. When I am moved, I understand from the inside. Words alone can only hint at the depth and complexity of our emotional experience, but art, and in this case, dance, accesses and transmits emotions directly, bypassing spoken language and reaching us in deeply personal ways.
The German modern dance master Pina Bausch understood this and built her opus around it. Her work addresses our first language, the language of affect, a language that needs no translation. The bodies of her dancers embodying emotion subjectively — they become its creator, carrier, choreographer and narrator. It is her dancers as subjects, telling their own stories and experiences that communicate meaning and move us to our own.
They are not only the performers but also the subjects of the emotions in question. This constitutes a huge departure from ballet and other types of modern dance, where the bodies of dancers disappear into the dance becoming objects that interpret the vision of the choreographer.
Until Pina Bausch created Tanztheater , dancers executed an aesthetic vision. In her work they embody the experience. She has been accused of being too much, not subtle enough in her pieces; theater, not dance, it has been said. But Bausch was not interested in how people move but, rather, in what moves them. Her dancers come in many shapes, sizes, ages, colors.
They are often the authors of the dances, providing memories, experiences, bits of their lives which power the movement that follows. Bausch did not consider herself a choreographer, even though her Tanztheater pieces had a structure, a purpose, a meaning.
She was interested in the expression of feelings in the best way that they could be conveyed, and for her this involved movement and dance. Bausch would begin many of her pieces by asking dancers for a movement that expressed a particular emotion and on that basis build a dance. To my mind she was building emotional mind-body circuits created in relation to another, and in her dances those circuits are alive and firing away between the dancers and us.
That art — again, in all its forms — generates a map that guides our bodies toward emotional states that are otherwise unattainable has now been documented by a growing body of neuro-biological research.
Yet, artists have always known this implicitly, and to my mind, this is one of the many reasons why we need art: it helps us to access internal experience directly, and through its movement within the self, momentarily symbolizes affective experience for us. It touches and accesses what is implicitly known and makes it known in our bones, connecting us to the echo of early experience and its resonance in the present.
Art in all its forms finds us, surprises us, awakens us and envelops us in the deepest of personal meanings. The day of the presentation came.
I had to go on stage. I got into position, the light went on — and nothing at all happened. Great excitement in the hall, and the pianist was nowhere to be seen. I stayed on the stage, still standing in my pose. I became calmer and calmer and simply kept standing. But it was quite a long time till they had found the pianist. He was somewhere completely different, in another building.
In the hall, people were astounded that I had remained standing there in that pose for so long with such conviction and tranquillity.
I grew and grew. When the music started, I began my dance. By that time I had already realized that in extremely difficult situations a great calm overcame me, and I could draw power from the difficulties. An ability in which I have learnt to trust.
I was ravenous to learn and to dance. And I did in fact receive it. Only then did it become clear what that meant: travelling by ship to America, aged 18 years, all alone, without being able to speak a word of English. My parents took me to Cuxhaven. A brass band was playing as the ship was setting off and everybody was crying. Then I went onto the ship and waved. My parents were also waving and crying. And I was standing on the deck and crying too; it was terrible.
I had the feeling we would never see each other again. He had been one of the lecturers in Essen. I was hoping that he would pick me up in New York. I therefore had to spend many hours on the ship waiting until the 1, passengers had been dealt with. Then they took me to my suitcase. I no longer believed that Lucas Hoving would still be there, even if he had received my letter at all.
Yet when I walked off the ship, he was actually standing there. And hanging over his arm were some flowers that had wilted because it was so hot.
He had been waiting for me all that time. When I wanted to eat, I went into a cafeteria where I could simply point directly at what I wanted to have. It was gone. What was I supposed to do, how was I going to pay?
A terribly embarrassing situation. After some time, I then went to the cash desk and tried to explain that my purse had gone. Then I took my point shoes and my other shoes out of my bag, laid everything on the counter and explained that I would leave everything there and return. The man at the cash desk simply gave me five dollars so that I would be able to travel home.
I found it incredible that he trusted me so much. I then kept going back to this cafeteria, just to smile at the man. I often experienced situations like this in New York; the people were so ready to help.
In New York I took on everything, which was offered to me. I wanted to learn everything and experience everything. Almost every day I watched performances. There were so many things, all of them important and unique; therefore I decided to stay two years on the money that was only intended for one. That meant saving! I walked everywhere. For a time I live almost exclusively on ice cream — nut flavoured ice cream.
Accompanying this was a bottle of buttermilk, a lot of lemon that was lying around on the tables and a large amount of sugar. All mixed together, it tasted very good. It was a wonderful main meal. However, I liked getting thinner. I paid more and more attention to the voice within me. To my movement. I had the feeling that something was becoming purer and purer, deeper and deeper. Perhaps it was all in the mind. But a transformation was taking place. Not only with my body.
The Met was another important experience. It was the time when Callas had unfortunately just left. But you could still sense her. Apart from the fact that I was dancing a lot, I was also watching plenty of operas or would hear the singers in the changing room over the loudspeakers.
What a joy it is to learn to distinguish between voices. To listen very exactly. And then there was another very special experience. When I flew back from my stay in Europe to come to the Met, the plane was overbooked. In New York, I had an appointment with a lawyer who was intending to insert something into my passport so that I would be allowed to work at the Met.
Consequently, I had to get to New York no matter what. And then, instead of waiting, I took a flight to New York via a roundabout route. I had to change flights five times or more. It was madness: one flight to Toronto, then one to Chicago, and so it went on to yet another place — and it was all highly complicated. But I managed it somehow. The flight took a very long time. Finally, I arrived in New York, but at a different airport. I have no idea how — but somehow I also managed with my broken English to arrange for someone to fly me by helicopter to the right airport.
And they did actually do it. I had succeeded. After this flight, you could have sent me anywhere on earth. I had no more fear. Of course my luggage was no longer there. I received it 14 days later. And so I arrived with only my handbag. All of these actions were unexpected.
Nothing was planned. I had no idea that I could act in this way. That I was capable of doing that. Even less so, that I could appear on the stage like that. It just happened — without thinking.
You do something without imagining or wishing. It is something different. After two years came a phone call from Kurt Jooss. He had the chance again to have another small ensemble at the school, the Folkwang Ballet. He needed me and asked me to come back. I wanted both of these things so much. I loved it so much being in New York; everything was going wonderfully well for me. However, I returned to Essen after all. Jooss now had a company again — the Folkwang Ballet.
I continued working with wonderful teachers and choreographers. Jooss placed so much trust and responsibility in me, not only by letting me dance in his old and new choreographies, but also by allowing me to help him. I was hungry to dance a lot and had the urge to express myself… So I started to choreograph my own pieces. Simply out of respect. What I had seen and learnt was taboo for me. I put myself in the difficult situation: why and how can I express something?
When Jooss left Essen, I took over the responsibility for what had become known as the Folkwang Tanzstudio. The work and the responsibility were very fulfilling for me.
I was trying to organize guest performances abroad. Choreographing small pieces. Twice I was also invited to do something in Wuppertal. I never actually wanted to work in a theatre. I was very frightened. I loved working freely.
In Fritz, my first piece, I was still following a plan. Then I gave up planning. Since that time, I have been getting involved in things without knowing where they will lead.
Actually, the whole time I only wanted to dance. I had to dance, simply had to dance. That was the language with which I was able to express myself.
Even in my first choreographed pieces in Wuppertal, I was thinking of course that I would be dancing the role of the victim in Sacre and in Iphigenie the part of Iphigenie, for example. These roles were all written with my body. But the responsibility as choreographer had always held back the urge to dance.
And this is how it came that I actually have passed on to others this love, which I have inside me, this great desire to dance. For the audience our new start was a big change. My predecessor in Wuppertal had done classical ballet and was very much loved by the public. A certain type of aesthetic was expected; there was no disputing that there were other forms of beauty apart from this. The first years were very difficult.
Again and again spectators would leave the auditorium slamming doors, while others whistled or booed. Sometimes we had telephone calls in the rehearsal room with bad wishes.
During one piece I went into the auditorium with four people to protect me. I was scared. You can simply shut your eyes. I wanted so much to develop something with the chorus. They turned down every idea. In the end I managed to have the chorus singing from the boxes — from amongst the audience — that was then very nice. That hurt a lot. I never wanted to provoke. Actually, I only tried to speak about us. The dancers were full of pride as they accompanied me on this difficult path.
But sometimes there were enormous difficulties as well. Sometimes I succeeded in creating scenes where I was happy that there were images like this. But some dancers were shocked. The shouted and moaned at me. Saying what I was doing was impossible. We therefore did Sacre with a tape recording. With a wonderful version by Pierre Boulez. In Bluebeard I was unable to put my idea into practice at all because they provided me with a singer who, although I liked him very much in all other respects, was not a Bluebeard at all.
In my desperation I thought up a completely different idea with Rolf Borzik. We designed a sort of carriage with a tape recorder that was fastened to the ceiling of the room with a long cable.
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