Pina. A film by Wim Wenders

Pina, shot in 3-D and directed by the acclaimed German artist Wim Wenders, has been touted by many as showing the way forward in terms of filming dance, giving back to dance the physicality that it apparently loses in regular filming. But I’m not sure that many of the reviewers who have hailed it as a breakthrough have actually sat in a theatre and watched a performance by Pina Bausch’s company, or any other dance company for that matter.

For me the most interesting review to date has been by Australian playwright and commentator Louis Nowra. Writing in the August edition of The Monthly, Nowra astutely says, amongst other things, that the scenes shot out of doors are ‘[drained] of their claustrophobic power’, and that ‘the uterine universe that Bausch created onstage is dissipated’. His concluding statement is: ‘For all its 3-D marvels, the film finally doesn’t do her work justice’. And it doesn’t.

Pina is not really a documentary. Nor is it really a dance film. It sits uneasily between the two. It shows sequences from four major Bausch works, Rite of Spring, Café Mueller, Kontakthof and Vollmond, in most cases danced by the current company. It contains some archival footage, although not as much as one might have hoped to see. It contains solos performed outdoors in locations around Wuppertal, the German city where the company, led by Pina Bausch and now since Bausch’s death in 2009 by Dominique Mercy and Robert Stürm, has resided for almost four decades. It shows Bausch’s current dancers talking about their experiences with the company and their thoughts about what it was like working with Bausch.

Company dancers now, as they have been across the history of the company, are great movers. No doubting that. They are also articulate about their experiences and their emotional involvement in the act of working with Bausch. But what horrors are perpetrated by the 3-D technology! The scenic space in which the dancers perform is often far too deep and distorts the dancers. They often look far too small and far too thin. They don’t inhabit the space as living human beings but as kinds of puppet figures. We also, especially in footage of Rite of Spring, get some hideous close-up images (3-D close-up) of faces—images that we never see in performance, and that we are really never meant to see. Distance in the theatre has a place.

Also having a place in the theatre and often missing in Pina is the intimate contact between performers that develops in the enclosed space of a theatre stage. In the deep 3-D recesses, dancers seem to be separated or disengaged from each other, from the props and indeed from the performing space itself, not to mention from the viewer—and I don’t consider having a face thrust straight into mine courtesy of 3-D an engagement with the viewer. How much more engaging is the archival footage (not filmed in 3-D) of Bausch herself performing in Café Mueller where we see her interacting with the space around her body, her personal space, as all great dancers are able to do, rather than seeing her placed within a technological extension of space.

Going back to Louis Nowra, he is absolutely right that the very inward looking, almost narcissistic approach that seems necessary for the creation of a work by Pina Bausch is lost when the works (or parts of them) are placed out of doors. In fact for me the most interesting part of the footage shot out of doors was seeing the Schwebebahn, Wuppertal’s suspended monorail system that, as far as I am aware, is a somewhat over-engineered rail system that has never been replicated elsewhere.

Worse than that, as far as I am concerned, is that the works lose their inherent, dancerly theatricality when shot in 3-D.

Michelle Potter, 20 August 2011

Out of context—for Pina. Les Ballets C de la B

Alain Platel founded Les Ballets C de la B (Les Ballets contemporains de la Belgique) in Ghent in 1984 and since then he has always taken rather large risks in creating work for the company. Out of context—for Pina is no exception.

The work begins slowly. We sit in our seats looking for a time at a bare, sparsely lit stage. We listen to the beginnings of a soundscape of animal-like sounds. Eventually, one by one, nine dancers stand up from seats in the auditorium, move to the stage, take their places upstage with their backs to us and begin to strip down to their underwear. They wrap themselves in orange blankets and turn to confront us before beginning to interact with each other. In these initial stages the interaction is minimal. The dancers nuzzle each other gently, sniff and rub against each other. They are a little like dogs greeting each other, sniffing out territory.

The work gathers pace from here with the dancers shedding their blankets to perform and returning to their folds when lesser activity is required of them. At one stage there is a kind of disco sequence when the dancers attempt to sing snatches of popular songs although their language carries a kind of speech impediment and their movements are marked by odd twitches and tics recalling physical disability.

Platel was previously a teacher for people with motor disabilities and throughout the piece his choreography explores some kind of dichotomy between apparently dysfunctional movement and a kind of transcendental power of the human body in motion. This is nowhere more apparent than in the closing solo by a male performer whom I was unable to identify (there was no program). Dragging two full-length microphone stands with him, one in each hand, this dancer seemed on occasions to have a disability, both physical in his slightly uncoordinated movements, and otherwise as he stared out at us at the end of the solo. Yet at other times he seemed more like an Olympic athlete with a javelin in each hand.

The strongest performer overall to my mind was, however, a woman who looked a little like Frida Kahlo and who I imagine was Rosalba Torres Guerrero (similar problem with identification—no program and I relied on advertising material to guess). She had a commanding presence that showed itself in every movement, large or small. She was especially remarkable in her duets with male members of the cast, which often bordered on the erotic and which involved complex partnering, and in a scene in which she lay on the ground wrapped in her orange blanket and reacted with diverse facial movements to the appearance of an opera singer (who was not one of the dancers but who appeared from the auditorium at one stage during the performance).

As for the work’s relationship to Pina Bausch, whose name appears in the title, Platel has remarked in an interview for the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail:

‘Pina died during the creation process, so I added on the dedication. I’d known her for 30 years and admired that special way she used dancers, transforming them into personalities. She also established the practice that any movement or thought could be used in dance.’

I would argue that there were choreographers in the United States working with the concept that anything could be dance well before Bausch. However, the notion of ‘anything’ is likely to be more expressionistic and emotionally confronting in choreography made in Europe than in a society like that of the United States, where a veil is often drawn over the less pleasant aspects of human behaviour (99% of the time the toilet is euphemistically referred to as the bathroom for example). The ‘anything’ vocabulary created for Out of context is confronting, but like that of Bausch demands that one have an opinion.

Michelle Potter, 16 November 2010

Postscript: The performance I saw took place in the beautiful old Teatro comunale di Ferrara. The construction of this theatre, whose auditorium is horseshoe shaped in the tradition of many old European opera houses, began in 1773 and much of its original decoration remains.

Thoughts on Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring

Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring has always fascinated me. I had seen her production on video in 1989 but never in the flesh. What I had seen in the flesh was the famous (or infamous) Nijinsky version, the original Rite of Spring, as restaged by Kenneth Archer and Millicent Hodson for the Joffrey Ballet, as well as Maurice Bejart’s Rite of Spring danced by the Tokyo Ballet. But the Bausch version kept haunting me, largely because in my mind it was closely connected with Meryl Tankard who had made such an impact in Canberra with her Meryl Tankard Company between 1989 and 1992. The opportunity to see, at last, a live production of the Bausch version arose in early 2008 when Tanztheater Wuppertal was visiting London. At the time I made some brief, random notes in the hope that one day they would be useful in some context:

Stravinsky did not dominate, such was the power of Bausch’s choreography. The movement was so expressive of changes in rhythm, sonority, volume and so forth that the music and movement became powerful partners. There was an organic relationship between the music and the choreography, which seems to be missing in the Hodson/Archer reconstruction.
This was much more ‘pure dance’ than in any other of Bausch’s works that I had seen and as such it displayed the great technical prowess of her dancers. Not only are they actors in the mode of dance theatre but they are also dancers of the highest order. Dancing in unison they were breathtaking as they were when displaying their capacity to become totally involved in the unfolding of the drama, almost to the extent of entering into a trance like state. Their classical training was clearly in evidence – they could jump, they were turned out, they could extend their limbs. They danced with the whole body and each part of the body was allowed to be expressive to the utmost degree.
Looking beyond technique, their shudders, their shaking, their actions of fear and panic built to emotional crescendo after emotional crescendo. One of the most moving moments occurred when the whole stage was filled with frenzied bodies sometimes rushing past each other, sometimes hugging each other giving not just the feeling of impending disaster but of the capacity of human beings to offer support to others.
Although it seemed so much like ‘pure dance’, the dancers’ gasps, sighs, and other ‘verbal’ outpourings of exhaustion, panic and fear, were given a place in the work. They were never intrusive. They were gut wrenching and such an essential part of the overpowering drama of the situation.
Bausch has an eye for the structure of movement and for arranging bodies over the space of the stage. Whether she arranges the dancers into one or two or several tightly knit groups, or has them move around the stage in one large circle, or scatters them apparently randomly over the stage space with each dancer performing individually, the effect is always powerful and always harmonious.
The ‘chosen one’ was a tiny Filipino girl who stood out from the beginning as if she knew it was her destiny to be selected from among the females. She seemed overpowered by the red dress that the victim must wear as she tossed it to others. It was as if it were burning through her. As a powerful foil to the huge emotional involvement by the ‘chosen one’, the male who made the choice played the role almost without emotion. Lying on the floor motionless with his arms stretched forward as if waiting to receive her, or dressing her in the red dress, his back to the audience, his movements were solid, steady and totally without feeling.

I saw Rite of Spring performed at Sadler’s Wells, London, by Tanztheater Wuppertal on 20 February 2008 (with Café Müller as the other work on the program). I wish now, almost eighteen months later, that I had written more.

Michelle Potter, 13 June 2009