Spectrally thin, a woman shuffles blindly in a corner of a stage littered with black wooden cafe chairs. More than 20 years ago Café Müller took the stage at Ryerson Theatre in Toronto. I am with my husband in Vancouver watching a film called Pina begin on a stage in an empty theatre. In Toronto I am the same and different, married to a different man. Diaphanous drapery parts to reveal archival and recent footage of Pina Bausch and her extraordinary company of dancers. At intermission, loam is spread over the stage for Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. One by one dancers file past the camera, walking offstage onto a field of grass.
Le Sacre du Printemps and Café Müller—two touchstones of her remarkable repertoire—are intercut by Wim Wenders, the first of many such intrusions, by short "signature" pieces from individual dancers. As the film progresses, it becomes clear (?) these dances—often following brief silent "interviews" dubbed with personal recollections of Bausch in voice over—are tributes to their late and much-loved mentor.
Near the end of Pina one of the dancers identifies yearning as a key emotion in Bausch's relentless search for expression. That search yielded breathtaking moments. Seeing Pina tonight reminds me of what drew me to theatre.
The way she continually pushed against what's safe and feasible. Her refusal to acknowledge limits in her dancers, in space, in venues: Full Moon features a huge rock the dancers climb and leap from into a shallow pool of water that threatens to engulf the stage. Elemental is how one of her dancers assesses her approach; that's what I recall from Ryerson Theatre.
Seeing her work liberated from the confines of a black box theatre—danced literally and dangerously close to the edge of a dusty cliff, astride a natural stream, in traffic, aboard public transit—feels natural for someone who blurred the line between theatre and dance, whose interpolations of natural movement and non-dancers inhabited the dialogue between art and life. The daring of her work springs from a personal, whole-hearted embrace of pain without glamour, her willingness to literally go up against a wall time and again.
To have seen two of her signature pieces live; what a gift. Watching the film I look back at my younger self, for whom that performance meant so much. And now, what's important has invariably changed as I have, unlike Pina who remains constant, forever now. Watching Pina and her amazing dancers—each with their own tics and wholly individual cares and griefs—so many feelings arise.
Melancholy, yes, recognition, unquestionably, and everywhere beauty. And wonder. Beauty born of grief, spun from exhilaration. Beauty from ugliness, clumsiness, missteps, falling down hard and rising without counting the cost. Her work is spare and elegant, even as she mucks about with dirt and has two male dancers spurt water from their mouths at each other. There's nothing crude or lewd about the intense physicality of her choreography; what's evident time and again is her embrace of what can't be known: the missed moment, the forgotten love, the wrong partner relentlessly pursued, the inescapable eventuality of hurt, solitude, silence. Yet her work is anything but dreary or ponderous; she constantly pushes against what cannot be, but must. That's what makes her stagings so exciting: the rules are broken and the performers exult in abandon at the freedom to play.
Wenders wisely shoots the offstage dances in both contained and open spaces, reflecting Bausch's appreciation of stillness and formal geometry on the one hand, and her need to defy limits that saw her bring the natural world onstage. So immersed in materiality, Bausch allows her dancers to soar, to kick up their heels in pools of water while sketching worlds of loss and longing brought into heartbreaking, thrilling focus.
