Pina Bausch’s nightgown hangs limply from shoulder straps, she holds her arms outstretched, in a pose halfway between groping her way along and pleading. As in a trance, she stumbles into chairs, runs into walls, circles through a revolving door like a hamster on a wheel and is spat out over and over in the same direction back onto the stage. Pina Bausch’s piece Café Müller debuted in 1978. She was 38-years-old at the time and had been the director of the Wuppertaler Tanztheater for five years already.
Hard years lay behind her. Years in which the viewers booed, shouted and left the building in rage. They were shocked. Not because Pina Bausch wanted to shock them, but instead because they saw something that they were not familiar with. Something so new, so different and deeply moving, that many viewers couldn’t take it at first. However, in 1978 many people were beginning to get the truth slowly: here was a brilliant artist at work! One who understood how to tell stories about human beings, with all their flaws, desires and longings, in a manner as upsetting as it is exhilarating.
This new element that Pina Bausch brought to contemporary dance can be seen in her working method as well. She did not prescribe that her dancers do certain dance steps, she didn’t give instructions. Instead, she asked questions, often little, seemingly mundane questions about everyday life. Pina Bausch could look into people’s hearts, that is how many have described her gift. As a child, she helped out in her parent’s restaurant, where she learned to pay attention to people, to observe them. In her work, she wasn’t interested in how people moved, but in what moved them. As such, she was not searching for the aesthetically convincing in the answers and improvisations of her dancers, but instead she was only hunting for the personal, the idiosyncratic, the true, which often only make use of small gestures. From this material, little by little she developed her pieces, in which her experiences of war in early childhood are also reflected as sudden outbreaks of panic, as the fear of a nameless threat.
Pina Bausch doesn’t tell closed stories with a beginning and ending. Her dance theatre consists of small fragments, of associations. Diverse actions take place on stage in parallel, others repeat themselves. The pieces adhere to an inner logic that blurs the boundaries between dream and reality. This is at the root of the strong impact Pina Bausch’s work is capable of making. At the same time, the real is present. Genuine walls of stone topple, actual water splashes on stage. The dancers speak, they tell jokes. Pina Bausch uses elements borrowed from satirical revue. Women run through the air towards the outstretched arms of men in endless variations. Dancers address viewers directly from the stage or even climb down frequently into the audience’s territory themselves. Society was changing in the 1970s and 80s: topics such as equality and the development of less authoritarian structures were becoming important. In her works, Pina Bausch showed that this is no easy process. At the same time, over the years her pieces became milder, lighter. However, they remained at once inexplicably upsetting and exhilarating to the very end.