We would like to begin by asking you about your first years in Germany. You moved to Stuttgart fromNewYorkin1973.Whatwereyour impressionswhenyoumovedtoStuttgart?
In some way, I had always thought I might come to Europe. My grandfather is Austrian and I had this fantasy of coming to Europe. I had the idea in my head that Europe was more arts-aware, whatever that might mean. When I moved to Germany in 1973, my arrival in Stuttgart coincided more or less with that of Claus Peymann and Achim Freyer, some of the leading people in German theatre at the time. Stuttgart was a hotbed for theatre then, it was off the charts. They disassembled everything, the stage itself was no longer important, things migrated all over the theater. Their theatre was highly politicized and everyone seemed to have a political agenda. I had the impression, whether it was true or not, that the subventioned houses in Germany were there not to preserve things, but rather to further the definition of what they might be.Andthatinfluencedmyworldview.Iunderstood thatitwas perhaps anobligation,as amember of society,to furtherdefinethe conditions under which we all operated witheachother. Ithoughtthat if I didn’t do that, I would come under some critique, actually. People were very ferocious, they were adamantabouttheirpoliticsanddiscussionsinthetheatrecanteenwereanythingbutbenign.
Whatweretheytalkingabout?
It was political discussions, generally “gesellschaftskritisch”. I got sat down and heavily schooled, a fastlanecourseinMarxismandGodforbid Ishouldveerfrom it. Ihadother ideas,but theyjust lookedat me with horror if I wanted to do anything except something that was focused on their particular kind of critique.
Howdidyourelatetothispoliticizedartisticpractice?
It was difficult as I was working in a situation not of my own design. I became resident choreographer at the Stuttgart Ballet in 1976, after dancing in the company first. The directors of the company would ask me to make a piece for four soloists and 16 women, for instance. And I was like, ok, I’ll make it. It was about learning how to just do work at first. So on the one hand, there was a lot of pressure to do straightforward ballet pieces, and on the other hand I was confronted with all these politicized theatre makers.IworkedwithHansWernerHenze,anoutspokencommunist,andtheEnglishplaywrightEdward Bond on Orpheus (Orpheus – A Story in Six Scenes, 1979) for a commission. I was askedto choreograph a ballet; but how would one do a Marxist ballet? It was stressful but interesting. I also collaborated with thesetdesignerAxelMantheyona number of pieces.I’dhelpdesignthesetandhewouldalsodirectand choreograph. Everything began to get mixed up, nothing was stable. I think what I took away from it all was that the real political work was that of the work place, it wasn’t the product. That seemed a much
more viable form of immersion in political reality. Looking back at it today, it was definitely a situation that induced a certain kind of reflection that I think would not have entered my mind or become my practice had I not moved to Europe. There is no way I would have made the work I made, or worked the wayIdid,hadIremainedintheNewYorkballetenvironment.
Well, I enjoyed moving, I always enjoyed motion. Movement and sensation of motion. I often say to dancers that, forthe dancer, dancing doesn’t looklikeanything,it feels like something.I was focusing on the extended sensations of balletic torque and moving things off centre, basically working with gravity and torsion, both of which became politicised. The conservative press would say that my work was violent, and I said, well it’s not violent, it’s just fast. I think in the ballet world, though, people were also relievedtoseesomethingelse.
A group of New York choreographers were doing interesting dance theater pieces at the time. It was a kind of art performance theatre, perhaps further than Merce Cunningham in theatrical orientation, underminingwhatwethoughtheldcontenttogether.Fortraditionaldancing,astageisa safeplace,full of regulations. Clear the floor, we’re going to dance! And people like Paul Sanasardo seemed to have taken adifferentapproach.Hemadeapiecearound1971,Ithink,withahugetelephonepoleonstage,perfectly balanced. And that thing swung around and the performers had to deal with it. Pina Bausch had been in America and was familiar with the work of Sanasardo and Rudy Perez, all these people who were really pushing theenvelope.Later,PinaBauschtookthat approachandlitteredthestagewithdangerousthings, slippery things or impossible things. In her collaboration with Rolf Borzik,the two of them took that to a new limit. Look at painting from that time, in which artists were trying to rethink the surface. I think the stageisalsoasurfacethatpeoplehavetorethink.
When you began choreographing in Stuttgart, you were mainly asked to do commissions, choreographing and reinterpreting existent canonical works like Orpheus and Eurydice, for instance.Whatpropelledyouawayfromthecanonicalstoriesandrolesofballet?
I began with commissions and they were all neo-classical. However, even then I was criticised for being too modern in some respects. But look at what was happening in the visual arts, look at what was happening in literature, cinema! It was the time of Fassbinder, Schlöndorff and others. All these people were making work at the time, it was amazing. And God forbid you should go back, take one step back. Youfeltlike anidiot. In away, therewas alot of pressure.However,workingintheatres,thesame house could be very supportive of revolutionary gestures in the theatre department, while, concerning ballet, only so much was tolerated. They brought Claus Peyman as the theatre director to Stuttgart and I was workingfor theballet companyinthesame houseandtheywere like, ahem, no,you went too far,it’s too radical. And I was like, um, ok. Pina was independent quite early, so she could go her own way. Even thoughshe wasinaStadttheater,shemanagedtodoherownthing.
It seems that Pina Bausch as well as Susanne Linke and Reinhild Hoffman distanced themselves from classical rolesoutof an intuitiveemancipatory gesture. They couldn't identifywith the female rolesthatwere available to them.Can you relateto thisfeeling of not identifying withthe roles and storiesavailabletoyouinballet?
The women's movement was huge at the time, so much happened around the year ’68. Susan Sontag, HélèneCixous, Luce Irigaray, and soon andso forth.You werebombardedwith it fromeveryangle,and as a young person, you assumed that it was where the world was going, so you went along with it. It presented itself to you if you were in theatre, if you were an artist. I love Kathy Acker, she was a huge influencefor me.AndIlookedat thatandthought,oh,I'm anidiot, Ineedtogetmy assingear.All those people, they were very inspiring. Pina was a great inspiration, too. There was a kind of wreckage, people were strandedconstantlyinPina'swork. Theywere strandedinthe mostbanalway. JeanBaudrillardsays that against the banal version of the fatal we must find the fatal version of the banal. That's what Pina Bauschaccomplished.Shewas able,likeall great artists,torecontextualizethemostcommonexperience, tomaketheunderstructureterrifying.
Theunderstructure?
Yes,thepsycho-socialunderstructure.Irememberlookingat Blaubart (Bluebeard – While Listening To A Taped Recording Of Bela Bartok’s “Duke Bluebeard´s Castle”, 1977) and wishing I wasn't a man. I felt so ashamed of behaviors that were stereotypically manly, they were ridiculous. In this piece, Jan Minařík was posing in front of a doll and it was so creepy. I laid in my hotel bed in Wuppertal after the performance and didn't sleep the entire night. I thought to myself, oh, ok, I need to rethink. I knew that I was a ballet choreographer and I said to myself thatthat's ok. It was about questioning how to participate intheBigConversation,irrelevantofwhatmediumwithinonewaspractising.
When you saw Blaubart, were you able to detect that something had changed in the way that Pina Bauschwasworkinginthestudio?
No, I didn't know that. I only found out much later that she was working with questions. It was not something that was talked about, or that I read about. You have to realise that these kind of working methods, like those of Pina Bausch or Rainer Werner Fassbinder, came out of a general social milieu or socialsituation.Wewere not allowingourselvesto beteleological.Iwouldsaythatwasthebiggestthing. There had been Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a few years later came this political “Umbruch” of ’68. I think that the idea of a straight line beganto collapse,even the desire for a straight line was abdicated. In my case, I just said ok, there's only methodologies and the only thing that's new is methodologies. I thought that rather than keeping one methodology and looking for exchangeable subjects, I would try to makemethodologiesthemselvesmyrealsubject.
Do you think that shifting the focus of your artistic practice towards methods of work was a necessarystepforyouinordertobe abletocontinueworkingwithinthepracticeofballet?
Well, I continued working with an idea about space and dynamics particular to ballet. We applied different methodologies to the original balletic subject, never knowing where we would end up Then I
abandoned thatstrategyfor a longtime. I haven't done that for 10 or 12 years… simply because that was very difficult to… Well, I couldn't do it anymore. But it led me to thinking about taxonomies and inventing a language for what we do. It became a very abstract project in order to make it more available toothers.Ifwe cangetcategoricaldescriptionsdowntosimplerlevel,theyaremorelikelytobediversely communicative, they can be more easily shared. Abstraction in the process, like the improvisation technologies CD-ROM (Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye, CD-ROM 1999) was a means for shifting the hierarchies in the studio, making the working method and practices generally available. It was a way of making everyone equal, as it were, to some degree at least. At the same time, we tried to find a way towards an equitable descriptive language as well, by talking about what is actually happening,trying to encapsulate perception in a language that is contaminated as little as possible with the subjectivity of taste. We were trying to communicate about sensations and not what it looks like. How could we find a language between us that was politically neutral and psychologically neutral so that people felt they had a place to talk? The rehearsal studio is a political space, defined through our everyday behaviors. What were the problems that were being talked about in a larger way in society? Workers, goods, commodities, distribution, etc. All these things got applied on a local level. I wasn'tabouttogointopolitics,butIcouldperformapoliticalexperimentlocally.
I couldn't fully do it until I took over Ballet Frankfurt in 1984. Before that, I could involve people in the process,but asof1984Icouldalsopaypeoplefortheir extrawork.Therewereanumberofballetswhere peoplewere paidfortheircontributioninthesense ofprofitsharingandtheywere listedasco-authors.
I already started doing ballet improvisation in 1979 because of Hilda Koch. We premiered Love Songs (1979) ata galainMunich.Thepiecewas structuredarounda seriesofpopsongsbyArethaFranklin and Dionne Warwick. We had made the piece in a very short time, and during the performance, Hilda Koch jumped ahead in the choreography and finished in the middle of the song. But as a confident and great performer, she made up her mind to keep dancing “in the style” of the piece. And I thought that it was muchbetterthanwhatIsuggestedsheshoulddo.SoHildaKochistoblameforallthis.
What didyouseeinHildaKoch'simprovisationthatwassointeresting?
The relationship to time. You're not looking at a goal, you're trying to become a listener. And so the performancebecomeslessaboutdisplayingandmoreaboutlistening.Aboutlisteningoneverylevel.
Over the years, Ballet Frankfurt became something like a 16th century workshop. Everyone was working onthework,everyone washavingtheir ownideasabout the work’s proposals,andpartof that camefrom theidea thatitmadesense intermsofequalityinthe workplace. Ialsofeltthatifit wasexpectedofmeto dancethework’smaterialoutonmyownbodyforthedancers,thenwouldn’titmakesensefordancersto acquire choreographic skills, a knowledge that enabled them to have the authority residing in their own
bodies? In a way, my goal became to teach everyone how to teach themselves to become autonomous. I assume that no one in the company, back then or now, really needs me. I'd like to assume that I have helped them achieve that condition for themselves. I would like to think that they are their own resource, that they are enough on their own, they don't need a “leader”. I like to think that I was a composition teacherratherthantheonemakingor arrangingthemovementstobeperformedbydancers.
I initially made the first act of Gänge with and for theNederlands Dans Theatre in 1983. Klaus Zehelein, who worked as a dramaturg in Frankfurt offered me the position at Ballet Frankfurt after having seen the first act of Gänge. When I moved to Frankfurt, I experienced this other burst of political impetus. Zehelein had been one of Adorno's favourite students, so he was real Frankfurt-school. Then, there was Hans Neuenfels and that crowd doing major Regie-Theaterin the opera and perhaps again my worldview was upended by Einar Schleef. I was reading a lot of French philosophy at that point, mainly Roland Barthes and Jean-Luc Nancy,tryingtoget tothe pointwhere a practice and the performanceofa practice would be it's own description and not something extra. So Gänge was working towards a non-object object,oranon-performanceperformance. Gänge wasadescriptionofballet,aballetdescribingitself.
Inwords?
And also in images. There was a woman standing in 5th position in the middle of the stage and she was saying, “From this position, I cannot cook spaghetti. From this position, I cannot pick up the kids. From this position, I cannot do the shopping.” What was important in these descriptions was the thing that it was not. In the third act, the “ballerina” would come on stage and say, “I come in, I lie down, and the room turns around me 32 times,” which of course was a reference to the famous 32 fouettés of the ballerina.Wetriedto describe,butfrom the inside. Iworked with questions,too,notevenknowing about Pina'squestions.
What kindofquestionswereyouworkingwith?
Peoplewereaskedto describewhattheythought. Onequestionwas,“Whatisthemostimportant position on stage?” And one of the performers answered, “Where I am.” It was about understanding your environment and understanding the meaning of where you were in space. The stage is not a hypothetical space, it's a real space. Theater is not hypothetical. By shifting the focus to a description of the environment, the performers become agents who are able to negotiate the moment of the performance by themselves.Itriedtoentertaintheideaofseeingpeoplenotasinstruments,butasagents.
In the beginning, there were about 60 people in the audience and 30 were booing and 30 cheering. We had to stop performances because people were yelling so much. At one point, I had to come on stage to talk to the audience. I never heard such an aggressive sound in my life, and it was directed at me! It was veryimpressivetohavethat many peoplescreamingatyou.I stoppedthemandsaid, "Kommt, dasistnur ein Ballett!" (“Come on, it's only a ballet!”), which provoked them even more. It was really crazy! I felt
shaky. I mean, it's not niceto have athousand people screaming aggressivelyat you. Only recently had it sortofallcometogether.Ithadnotbeeneasyforquitesometime!
Butyouinsistedandpersistedindoingyourwork?
Over time, people change, the whole thing changes. What was once called an abomination is called a classic now. I think the London Times called In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated (1987) aerobics from hell. Now it's considered part of the canon of dance history. So what am I to say? Marcel Duchamp says in his lectures on art that posterity is the only thing that finally determines the condition of the work. He said, it's all art, some good, some bad. In Frankfurt, it took four or five years to get an audience that wantedtoseewhatweweredoing.
Didthese reactionsaffectyourwork?
No,thatcan'tbe important.Thereaction means something,but whatit meansissomethingelse thanwhat you hear.Actually, I've never changed a piecebecause of a critiqueorreaction. If you go downthatroad, it'saveryslipperyslope.Itmeansthatyou'renotinterestedinyourownwork.
Was there a similar sense of conflict between artists and audiences concerning theatre or opera in Frankfurt,orwasthatsomethingparticulartodanceandballet?
Klaus Zehelein and myself were discussing this at the time. We couldn't figure it out. Regie-Theater was out there doing God knows what with opera, but maybe because it was still beautifully conducted and sung, there were only complaints about scenography and costumes. In our case, the whole concept of balletwasputintoquestion.Therewasnothingmoretoholdonto.
William Forsythe spoke to us about being a spectator of Pina Bausch’s work and about the German Stadttheater landscape of the 1970s and 80s, as well as about the development of his particular way of workinginrelationtotheissuesandconcernshefoundhimselfsurroundedin.
Oneofmyearlyworks, Solo mit Sofa (Solo with Sofa,1976),isbothadanceandaperformance piece.Thereisaconcrete sofaandIʼmtiedwiththematerialofthesofacover,spreadoutintoa longcorridor,whichmeasuresmydistancetothesofabythelengthofthematerial.Thelimitation isthechallengeinthispiece.Ifollowedthisinterestlateroninmyothersoloworks,usingother materialsaswell,suchaswoodorstones.Orinthepiece Vier (Four,1992),Iusefourstone sidewalktiles.Eachstonetilemeasures30x30cm,andtogethertheycreatea60x60cmsquare, whichdeterminesthespaceforthedance,whichlasts30minutes.Duringthistime,Idonʼtallow myselftoleavethisspace.Thecombinationofdanceandperformancewasmyinterestinmysolo works.
Reinhild Hoffmann spoke to us about the slow shift in the dance studio towards equal mitspracherecht (German for, literally, “the right to speak with”) of the dancer and author. She furthermore offered an insight into her own working method and her collaboration with Arno Wüstenhöfer, who offered choreographic directorships to Pina Bausch in Wuppertal and later to HoffmanninBremen.
You asked me to speak about the 70s in Germany. I was writing for newspapers at the time. In thebeginning,Ididn’twriteaboutdance,butaboutvisualartandtheater. Iwasinterestedinhow so-called “real life” could be given a form in art. I was interested in theater at the time. I very much liked the work of Peter Zadek, who was the head of the Schauspielhaus Bochum, Peter Stein from the Berliner Schaubühne, Klaus Michael Grüber, George Tabori, Augusto Fernandes and many more. German theater was interesting, especially when you compare it to theater today. It was more radical, more far-reaching, very strong works with very different styles. Peter Zadek was working with the best actors in Germany; he was also the one who invited Pina Bausch to create a performance in Bochum. She made a piece for actors, dancers and one singer about Macbeth, with the very long title: Er nimmt sie an der Hand und führt sie in das Schloss, die anderen folgen [He Takes Her by the Hand and Leads Her into the Castle, the Others Follow ...,1978]. Somethingnewstartedinthe70s.Itwasn’tjustPinaBausch. But I didn’t only write about art; I worked for the newspaper Die Zeit and I was interested in people’s stories. I discovered that a portrait of one life can reflect a lot of other lives as well. There was a great Jewish poet living in Düsseldorf – Rose Ausländer – who was born in Bucovina, and I wrote texts about her work. Through her, I visited a home for elderly Jewish people in Düsseldorf and talked to some of them and wrote about them. All of this was very important to me. I wrote about social minorities in the late 60s and during the 70s, when people were coming out. People came out from the corners, the outcasts, homeless people, disabled people, gay people. I wrote about prostitutes, cleaning women, very different kinds of people. In the80s,IwrotemanyarticlesaboutpeoplewhowereHIVpositive.
There was a lot of pressure in Germany after WWII, there were many things that people didn’t talk about. Within families, they didn't talk about sexuality and parents didn't talk about their roles in what happened during the war. Yes – they just didn’t talk. It’s difficult to understand now, but people didn’t talk. Some people didn’t know who their parents were, whether your father was your real father. No one talked about it. They simply couldn’t say anything. They didn’t talk about the Holocaust either. At some point, this television mini-series – Holocaust (1978) – was shown on German television, and people started talking about the Third Reich and Jewish people. It was a Hollywood thing, but it touched people. Things slowly started to come
out into the open during the 60s. But this development happened slower perhaps in Germany than in some other countries. Even nowadays, on German television, for instance, you only see people with disabilities or different skin color in certain roles. This may be something else, but I don’t see why the person reading the news can’t be sitting in a wheelchair or having some other disability. Why is it that this is still not possible in Germany? It was stronger in the past than today – you didn’t seepeople with disabilities on the streets,they stayedat home, you neversaw them. Nowat least you seethem oncein a while.They cameout.They present themselvesmore. Butacceptancebytherestofsocietyischangingveryslowly.
What was the position of the German government in the 70s regarding what happened duringthewar?
Therewerestillalotof Nazisinthe Germangovernment afterthe war.But notjust peopleinthe government continued in the same positions as before the war, so did popular actors from the ThirdReich. Historyclassesinschools neverreacheduptoThirdReichtimes;theystoppedlong before.
Whichartistsmadeinterestingworkforyouatthetime?
There were so many. For example, the early works of Werner Herzog Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle [The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, 1974], Wim Wenders’ Alice in den Städten [Alice in the Cities, 1974]. Everything from Rainer Werner Fassbinder. I also liked the American film Nashville (1975) by Robert Altman, because you couldn’t see the line between documentary and fiction.
Howweretheseworksreceivedatthetime?
People thought that it was very strong work. But I wasn’t speaking to people about this too much. Iwasmoreformyself, alone. I was always abit on theoutside, because of my body. Iam part of a minority. In my writing, I could express many things or make contact. I was working full time for the newspaper, I wrote all these portraits. I didn’t have so much time and I didn’t have so many friends. It was through the work with Pina, the theater work, that I became more open.Thereweremanypeopleinthecompanyandyouspendsomuchtimetogether.
The way of working together and the diversity of the people, their different backgrounds, differentnationalities,differentbodiesandsoon.
Howdidpeoplefeelaboutyourportraits?
People felt that they had something in common with the portraits. I put a lot of energy into the people I wrote about, to understand how they thought. I wanted to do a portrait of them where they could say, “Yes, that's me”, not something that was far from reality. For example, I wrote about an old prostitute here in Düsseldorf; and normally, people didn’t have much contact with someone like her. So to discover that she was a human being, too, that maybe some things about her were not so remote. It is important to remember the history of people in different social groups,whathappenedtothemandwhatcanhappennowadays.
Wereyoupoliticallyactiveinthe70s?
I was not in a political party. I felt like an outsider. In the 60s, people with disabilities started to form groups like all the rest, but I never participated. In Germany, the view regarding a different bodylikeminestillheldconnotationsoftheThirdReich.
Nowadaysaswell?
Yes, nowadays. In reviews about my performances from German newspapers, they write incorrect things about my body. They write that I suffer from dwarfism. And I have to respond that this is incorrect. They don't have words for me. I don't have any explanation why this is so different in Germany, why people on the street react so differently to me and my body than in Belgium or France. When I did my first solo Meinwärts [Meinwärts, 1994] about and with the music of the Jewish tenor Joseph Schmidt, I read many reviews about him. The Nazi papers alwayswrotethathewas sosmallandugly–andaJew.
HowdidyougettoknowPinaBausch?
It was in the 70s that Pina started making her work and, as everyone now knows, it was very difficult for her in Wuppertal. The audience didn't like her work and neither did Klaus Revermann,the person responsiblefor culture in Wuppertal. It wasvery hard. Shewas not using the orchestra of the theatre, and that was a problem. Not many people came to see her work; sometimes there were only 50 audience members in the opera house. But the director of the Wuppertaler Bühnen, Arno Wüstenhöfer, who had engaged Pina, was always behind her and protected her. What I remember and what is important to remember is that he gave her the possibility to work for several years despite small audience numbers, when people were not behind her and only some critics liked her work. She was developing her work for five or six years without having any big success in the city. I don’t think this would be possible today. No director would give a young choreographer a chance to work in a big house only for a small audience.Today,yourworkneedstobeimmediatelysuccessfulinordertogetsupport.
The first piece that I saw from Pina was Blaubart [Bluebeard – While Listening to a Taped Recording of Bela Bartok´s “Duke Bluebeard´s Castle”, 1977] and I liked it very much. I interviewed her and wrote about her for the magazine Theater Heute. Later, this text became the first chapter of my book about Pina. She liked what I wrote, and when I was visiting her rehearsals sheasked me ifI wanted towriteabout the creation of Keuschheitslegende [Legend of Chastity,1979]fortheprogrambooklet in Wuppertal.Thething with Pina isthatshedidn'twant toexplainanything–shedidn't wantyoutoreadintheprogramwhatthepiece wasabout. Itwas more about finding a way to express things, the process of creating something that people could follow. She wanted people to find the meaning by themselves. The text about Keuschheitslegende lateralsobecamepartofthebook.
And then, in 1980, her partner and set-designer Rolf Borzik died. They had developed the work together, and in the beginning she always said that without him she couldn't have done it. He supported her a lot. With his death, our relation became very strong. She asked me to speak and to write something for his funeral and this was special. I didn't know them for a long time, but she said that he had liked my writing verymuch.Shenever asked meto become herdramaturge; thiswas neverthecase.Itwassomethingthatcameaboutslowly;Ididn'tthinkaboutitatfirst.It happened because of our personal relations. I was interested in her work and she was interested in my writing. Iwanted to support heron herjourney,to givehercourage to do what she wanted to do.Tobe behind herif shehad doubts.Weliked thesame things, so there weren't discussions aboutthat.Andshedidn'tdiscusswiththedancers.
Sowhatdidyoudiscussabout?
Weneverdiscussedthings.
Youneverdiscussedthings?
No.Shedidn'tdiscussmuchingeneral.
Why?
She was shy in a way, and she didn't have an education in the classical sense. She didn't go to high school. She had this feeling that she didn't know enough. Her family had a restaurant in Solingen–shedidn'tgrowupwithliteratureormusic.
Sowhatwereyoudoing?
I wanted to support her. Sometimes I brought her coffee. She was a very sensitive person, not always strong, she had lots of doubts. I was someone who followed the rehearsals. Sometimes, she’d say that something was not so good, and I’d say “Oh no, look at this. It's very interesting from the outside.” I had this outside view, because I didn’t live in Wuppertal, and I continued with my writing work. Later, I could help to combine things, putting scenes together, making
connections between different scenes or bringing a piece of music or a text. But there was never a discussion. Maybe she’d ask, “What do you think about this?”, but it was never a discussion. She didn’t want to speak much in the beginning. She didn't like to give interviews. It was like a friendship, she was like a sister. It was a very strong period. Some people, now, say that they weretheonlyonesgoingto therestaurantwithherafterrehearsals,buttherewereseveralpeople whodidthat.Peoplearetryingtocreatealegendaroundher,and I'mnotinterestedinthat.Inthe beginning,everyonewas fromthesamegeneration,Pinaandthedancers;butlater,shewas40or more years older than the dancers. Of course, she was already a legend by then. Far away in the sky.I'mnot theonlyonesayingthatitwasanotherPina,anotherperson,in thebeginning. Ahnen [Ahnen, 1987] was the last piece I did with her. It was a very radical work Outside Wuppertal it was shown only in Paris, never went on a big tour. But it opened a lot of doors, and after this, thingschanged.
Whatdidshedoin Ahnen?
The previous creation was called Viktor [Viktor, 1986]; it was made in Rome. She was working for the first time outside of Wuppertal and something was breaking out. She was opening up to theworld,toothercultures,othermusic.Thisisverystrongin Ahnen aswell.
Underwhatcircumstancesdidyoustopworkingforher?
It did not happen one day all at once. After our last collaboration, the film Die Klage der Kaiserin (1990), Pina took a break and was going back to old pieces like Orpheus und Eurydike [Orpheus and Eurydice, 1975] and Iphigenie auf Tauris [Iphigenia in Tauris, 1973]. There was no work for a dramaturge because the work was already done. At the same time, some very strong dancers left the company. After 10 years with her, it was a good moment to look for my ownwork.
Could you describe how Pina Bausch worked, for example, on the piece 1980 [1980 – A Piece by Pina Bausch,1980]?Shewouldcometotherehearsalspace...andthen?
She would come in, sit down at her table and say, for example, “What does spring mean for you?”Allofthedancerswouldanswer,eitherinwords,orbydoinganactionoradance,andshe would write it down. Then she would say, “Thank you!” and move on to the next question, “To fight for something.” It would go on like this for weeks. After three or four weeks, she would returntosomeoftheanswersshelikedandaskwhethershecouldseesomeanswersagain.Some people could remember very well what they had done, and these people later would have bigger parts in the pieces. Some people did great things in rehearsals, but couldn't remember well what they had done. There was a lot of material, and Pina put it together. There was no discussion aboutwhetherthingsfittogether.Thiswastheprocessandshedidn'tdiscussit.
Did she have the ideas for the set with grass and the different scenes before the studio rehearsalsstarted?
No, no. It all came during the rehearsals. It's not that she came in with a concept. Before the piece 1980, Pina and Rolf Borzik had worked with water and earth; he wanted all natural elements on stage. There was a very strong feeling in 1980, after the death of Rolf, to remember him and to say goodbye. There is one scene with Judy Garland singing Over the Rainbow. I had this record, which I gave to Pina. I found this mixture very interesting, first it is the young Judy singingandlateritistheoldJudyGarland.
So, during the rehearsals, you’d say that it would be nice, for example, to have the Judy Garlandsonginsuchandsuchscene?
No, no. In the rehearsals, she’d know what she was looking for and she’d ask the questions. She didn't ask me questions, but sometimes Icould feel what shewas looking for. And then I’d bring in the thing that she was looking for. For Viktor, I brought in a text from Georg Büchner. The text fit very well, so it ended up in the piece. But it was not part of a concept. It fit in with somethingthatshewaswantingtoexpress,apersonalthing.
Soyousaid,"Ithinkthistextwouldfitinwiththepiece"?
No,I neversaid this. Iliked the text and said thatitwould maybe be interesting. She tried it, and asked, "Who do you think could read the text?" Then she gave it to one or two people and they tried it out. One dancer was there from the beginning, Jan Minařík. He was more involved sometimes. He would offer more comments. I was there to help her do what she wanted to do. SometimesIcouldfeel what shewas lookingfor.It is thesameaswhenyouknow someonewell andthinkacertainmoviemightbeniceforthem,orthatacertain bookcouldbeinteresting.And you cannot really explain why. It was a friendship, and she never wanted to be pushed. She was very scared thatsomeone would try to pushheror explain to herin what direction she had to go. I can understand this very well. She was like a sister, and we wanted something very similar. After rehearsals, we’d go to the restaurant and she’d continue to work in the restaurant. She always took her notes with her after rehearsal, to look at some things or think about what to do the next day. All of this after a rehearsal, often in a small Greek restaurant. There were only two or three restaurants around the Lichtburg [editor’s note: The rehearsal space of Tanztheater Wuppertal is located in a building called Lichtburg in Barmen, Wuppertal], so it was always the same.She sometimes asked, "Did you like it?", but I wasneverthere to say,"This was good and this is not good", because she was the director, she knew what she wanted. I didn’t have to tell her.Ilikedthatsheneverthoughtabouttheaudienceorabouthowtopleasetheaudience.
Shewantedherselftolikeit?
She wanted to like it, so she made what she wanted to see. She came to see every performance. Sometheaterdirectorswouldsufferalotiftheyhadtoseealloftheirperformances.Pinawanted to do something that she could watch, after some years as well. I also came to watch all of the performances. I liked it. You see how the audience is different every night. Her later pieces changed towards being something “easier” for the audience. When they showed Bandoneon [Bandoneon,1980]lastyearinParis,however,peoplewentoutofthetheaterscreamingagain.
Why?
Because they were used to the later pieces. They came to see women in evening dresses, long hair, beautiful colors and big projections. Bandoneon was of a different kind and quite rough. Theaudienceisstillshockednow.
I was very touched. Sometimes I cried. And the presence of the dancers was very strong. The pieces were connected to their lives, their experiences. To see these human feelings so clearly onstage.Theywerenotplayedemotions. Itwasverydirect.
Pina was the only one for me that showed emotions on stage so strongly. Emotional reactions. Reinhild Hoffman, who was more successful in Germany than Pina for some time, worked with very strong images, very strong set designs. It was strong work, but not on this emotional level. With Pina, you had this strong image, but also the emotions. And this is special for me. The combination of both the art form and the emotions. She wanted the personal to gain a form, an artform.Shesaidthatit'snotenoughtoexpressemotions,youalsoneedaform.
Whatistheform?
It'snotonlyapersonalstory–youneedtofindthepoint, wheresomething canbeshared. Weall have emotions, feelings, desires. Everyone is born by a mother, for instance. Some things are similar. Pina was able to find things and talk in a way that people from all over the world could understand,somethingthattheyhadn'tnecessarilyexperiencedthemselves.
Soformmeansthatalotofpeoplehaveaccesstoit?
It’snot aquestionofaccess. It’simportantthatit'snotonlyapersonalstory.Ialsodid thisinmy writing. The person represents themselves, but also other people. For example, one of my favorite stories was about a cleaning woman; and what she said was true for many women who are in the same social group. It could be waitresses, cleaning women or shopkeepers. This one woman,shespoketoandaboutalltheseotherwomen.
Is it possible that Pina was the first choreographer to ask her dancers to talk about themselves in dance? Do you think that at this time, people also wanted to talk more about themselves?
No,Idon't,butyouneverknow.WhatIlikedaboutPina'ssystemwiththequestionswasthatshe didn't judge. She asked questions and she wrote down the answers without judging, and this is exceptional.When I work with people, Idon't ask questions like Pina did, Iam watching people, maybe because of being a journalist. Pina also watched people, but she also had these questions, so many questions. Seen from today’s standpoint, some of them are no longer interesting forme. Questionsaboutone’sfirstkissforinstance,orwhatyourparentsorgrandparentsdid.
HowwouldyouwantPinatoberemembered?
IknowthatpeoplewritealotaboutPina,andit'sveryfarfromthepersonIknew.Theycreatean image of her as a legend; this legend is far away from reality. This is not just in Pina's case, but with many others as well. But I knew Pina personally, and I can see what they are doing. They create an image of her like Mother Theresa. Maybe people need this; some people might need to have this. But it’s simpler. She did what she wanted to do and she did it with amazing dancers. Shehadverydifferent periodsinherwork,so Icannot saythat onethingisher. The80s arevery differentfromthe2000s.Butshedidverystrongwork.Evenafter30years,it'sstillstrong.
RaimundHoghewas borninWuppertal. Formerly awriterforthenewspaper Die Zeit,hewasa long-timedramaturgefor PinaBauschatTanztheaterWuppertal. In1992,hebegancollaborating with the artist Luca Giacomo Schulte, who continues to work with him today. Hoghe’s performances have toured the world and have met with acclaim, receiving awards such as the PrixdelaCritiquein2006.
Abstract
Raimund Hoghe spoke to us about his work as a writer, articulating and giving form to the political and artistic climate of Germany from the 1960s onwards. Having worked with Pina Bausch as one of the first dramaturges of dance, he recalled the development of their friendship andworkingrelation.
I started my studies at the Folkwangschule in 1967. At that time, Germany was pretty blank. A completely different situation. Everything’s changed a lot since then. The different federal states of Germany were completely separated. The overall situation was, that if one was studying in Berlin at the Mary Wigman school like me, one didn’t know anything at all of what was going onindanceintherestofGermany. Itwasunknown. Mary Wigman was fantastic, she was spiritual, very special. In her teaching, she focused on the entire body: one ought to do everything with the entire body. Body, soul, spirit, no separation or isolation. Mary Wigman taught us that being on stage is something dangerous, something special, not just technique. But after three years of studying with Mary Wigman in Berlin, I felt that I needed more technique, I was missing the information of classical ballet. I had heard from somewhere that a former student of Laban’s called Kurt Jooss was working and teaching in a place called Folkwangschule Essen. But like I said, we didn’t know anything about him or his work.IonlyknewthathewasaformerLabanstudent,acolleagueofMaryWigman.
Imovedto Essen in 1967. The school washoused in this old monasterycomplex, very beautiful, but slightly run down and I realized rather quickly the difference in spirit. In Essen, the focus was on technique, classical ballet was taken very seriously. It was hard for me, I was already 23 years old. Everything seemed overly technical to me. During my studies there, I experienced a lotoffrustrationanddidnothavealotoffun.ButIsurvived,andduetoKurtJooss,whohimself was a German modern dancer, there were a few very good modern dance teachers. Hans Züllig, who taught Jooss-Leeder technique, Jean Cébron and Pina Bausch, these were the important moderndanceteachersto me.Initially, Iwantedto stayatthe Folkwangschuleforonlyoneyear, butIendedupstayingforatotalof35yearsinEssen.
Could you describe to us more in detail what was different in Germany back then, comparedtonowadays?
Germany was stuffy, philistine. I didn’t like it. This has of course, to do with everything that happened during the Third Reich. We didn’t know back then what had happened yet. Even the word Holocaust didn’t exist yet. And then there was this veil of silence, which somehow, yes, I
don’t know... It wasmy generation, the generation of’68, thatstarted to ask the older generation whatactuallyfuckinghappenedduringtheNazi times.Alot ofintelligentyoungpeoplebeganto ask their parents about the past. We had to learn to look closely, to look back honestly and start talkingaboutwhathappened.
I first realized the gravity of the recent past at the time during my first year at the Wigman school.ItwasonlythenthatIhadmyfirstconscious encounterwithaJewishperson, CarryRick from Canada. And I said to myself,ah ok,so he isa Jew. Ihad neverseen aJewbefore, this was my first conscious encounter. It was then that I asked myself, where had they all gone! So naive – we were completely naive politically. Soon after, I had a second shock at a party at the Folkwangschule. There was a student called Alicia Goldfarb from Argentina, we got along very well and arestillfriends to this day. Duringthis party, westartedtalking about ourgrandparents. Alicia, who was usually very outspoken, had turned completely silent. So I asked her about her grandparents, and she answered, “Gassed!” At a later point, she told me how shocked she was at the reaction of some of the other students at the party. For me, the party was over at that very instant.Andshewasrelieved,thatIhadfeltthatway.
I would like to ask you if this emerging political consciousness that you spoke about influenced your dancing. Did dance offer you a way to address and further this consciousness?
Not in terms of politics – but in terms of honesty, yes. The kind of honesty that touches all the way down. The themes addressed in dance until then were concerned with the glories of mankind. As a female dancer, the roles available to you were either the whore, the angel, the saint… or then the Greek goddesses, with figures like Electra and the like. Even during German Ausdruckstanz, it was still all about Electra, Medea, etc. We left behind these stereotypical rolemodelsandsaid,“Whatthefuck?”Ididn’thaveanychildren;howwasIgoingtoembodysucha character? All of these constructs from the leaders of the educated middle-class. We didn’t want to have anything to do with it. We wanted to try out new themes. In this respect, Pina Bausch was magnificent; she focused on the small things and found inspiration in everyday events and relations between people. Pina was the master when it came to relationships. This was not my main topic; I focused, rather, on the banality of everyday life and labor, as in Im Bade wannen (Im Bade wannen, 1980). Something like this had never been subject-matter for dance. No one had done anything like this before. In Frauenballett (Frauenballett, 1981), I worked with the banal monotony of work, of cleaning materials. It was women, who worked at the front of breaking open old roles and patterns. There was Reinhild Hoffmann, of course, but also Rosamund Gilmoreinthe south ofGermany, Heidrun Vielhauerand many others. ButalsoHans Kresnik shook things up as well. This entire generation was very important. The dance in East Germany at the time was called Tanztheater as well but it was a fully narrative dance, not comparabletowhatwasgoingonin theWest. Thedoctrineof classicalballetwasmuchstronger there; they were better educated and seemingly didn’t dare to do silly things. But sometimes
inspirationcomesfrom acorneryouneverexpecteditto.It can arise from somethingverysmall, outofthedirt,outofprotest.
Were you aware then that your interest in making the private public and exhibiting and problematizing the daily work of women overlapped with the cornerstones of the feminist movementatthetime?
No, it just developed like that. Today’s youth is much better informed about history. They work more cerebrally, from their head. If one would ask Pina Bausch, she’d never want to say anything.It wassheerfeelings,intuitions.I’dreadalotandknewalotbecauseof myfamily,but I realized that itwas of no importancewhenit cameto creating good choreography.You haveto forget all your cerebral knowledge. You can lie with description. Anything can potentially be explained. This is what we’d learned from what happened during the Third Reich. When people losetheirinsides,theirintuition,theirmodesty,itgetsdangerous.
I never asked myself these wonderful questions. I only wanted to dance. This had nothing to do with reason. It was pure passion. There were many rational dancers, ones who decided to join a StadttheateraftergraduatingfromtheFolkwangschule.Butallofthembecameunhappy.
What did you hear from your colleagues who had joined a Stadttheater, why they were unhappy?
The choreographies were just, oh God, oh God... and about the mental state of the choreographersatthetime,onecouldonlyrollone’seyes.AsforwhatIdidlike,IlikedMaurice Béjart and a few others. When Pina asked me if I wanted to join Folkwang Tanzstudio (FTS) after Ifinished mystudies, Ithought Iwasdreaming.FTSwasa semi-professional grouplocated in the same monastery as the Folkwangschule; it was something in between a school and a company.In1968,PinaBauschtookoverthe directionofthegroupfromKurtJoossandIjoined twoyearslater.Pinabroughtnewwindintothegroup,shewaslookingforcertaintypes.
Certaintypes?
She was looking for types who didn’t need to be that well trained in classical ballet, but possessed strong personalities. FTS was the only possibility for me. I didn’t like anything else going on in Germany at the time. It was my only chance. I worked with Pina for three years, togetherwith10otherdancers.Shechosepeoplefromallovertheworld,somewithstrongballet technique,otherswithnodancetrainingatall.
Howdidyourehearse?
Pinachoreographedall themovement material, andit wasfantastic.Shewasawonderfuldancer, with hersoft, tall and long body,butextremely skinny,anorexic. Onstagein the Folkwang-Aula, youcouldseeeverysingleone ofherribs.Butherpresence onstagewasstunning,shehadavery special aura. It wasn’t easy to work with her. She was always depressed and worked very hard and long hours with her gentle force. We rehearsed and worked and worked but barely performed. Very modest. We were desperate, nobody was interested in what we were doing, it was not easy. We wanted to get out of there sometimes. It was unhealthy. But there was no management,noproducertakingcareoforganizingperformances.Thatdidn’texistbackthen. Every rehearsal day started with technique class, mostly classical. Then rehearsal until 2pm. After a short break for lunch, we continued rehearsing until 6pm. And sometimes we took a slightly longer lunch break and continued rehearsing from 6pm until 10pm. Rehearsal schedules changedconstantly,oneonlyfoundoutaboutthescheduleonthesameday.
Later, when Pina Bausch started questioning her dancers, it seemed to be so much about transportingone’slifeandlifeexperiencesoutsideofdanceintothestudio...
Pina learned a lot with time. It is a long process. Such a development takes years. Precision, coming from the inside, takes time. To be able to transfer your ideas and movement to others, to the point thatdancers can convey it, might takeyears. And on top of that, Pina always dealt with thesehugenegativetopicslike“theendoftheworld”,“afterzero”,etc.
Doyouknowwhyshewassointerestedinthesedarktopics?
German angst. Shebelongstothe1940generation.Theywerebornduringthewar. I wasbornin 1944, just after the war. It’s difficult to imagine the horrors and the difficulty of this time from ourperspectivenow. The angst has todo withtheNazitimes.Afterwards, nooneknewanymore whyonewasscaredorwhatonewasscaredof,justthatonewasscared.
Kurt Jooss still had a good reputation. We performed in Holland once, once in London, and then Mannheim, a few times Berlin and then Stuttgart. We performed Aktionen für Tänzer (Actions for Dancers, 1971) in Stuttgart, yes... For this piece, Pina was talking to a friend of mine and myselfoneday,sittingonabenchintheinnercourtyardoftheFolkwangmonastery.Shewanted to make a piece on the idea of the apocalypse set to the music of Günther Becker. We started brainstorming together, everything had to be ugly. My friend and me liked the idea very much and told her that we would join. The performance turned out to be extremely abstruse; we were lying on the ground like ants, then a corpse in bed, constant orgasms... We went to Stuttgart to
perform the piece at the Noverre-Gesellschaft. After the performance, silence... We were completely segregated. But we also saw the other pieces, all of which were classical ballet and found them equally terrible. There was no acceptance between the worlds, but absolute separation.
Was this at the same time a case of gender conflict, a confrontation between the young, femalemodernchoreographersandthemaleballetchoreographers?
Yes, the moderns were women. But this seemed obvious to us and wasn’t singled out as a topic. We didn’t think in this way. We worked, we toiled and struggled, Pina, Reinhild and later myself.Fromonepiecetothenext.Wedidn’tthinkpoliticallyinthisway.
Couldyoulivefromyourwork?
There was very little money at FTS. Later, I won prizes with my pieces and prizes meant both attention and money. When Pina left to Wuppertal in 1973, Reinhild Hoffmann and myself were offered the chance to choreograph and direct FTS for 600 DM per month. We both wanted to work creatively. One wasn’t asked and didn’t ask about hours spent working, only whether the piecewasfinished.
When Pina started posing questions to her dancers towards the end of the 70s, did you see thismethodatworkwithotherchoreographersatthetime?
Later, during my time in Bremen, I also started using questions. But I continued to provide all the movement material myself and I never pushed it as far as Pina did. I think other choreographersstarted using the question methodthemselves at a later point aswell. Iremember reading about Orpheus (Orpheus – a story in six scenes, 1979) from William Forsythe in Stuttgart. He said back then that Pina was an important inspiration for him. He was one of the first balletchoreographersto have a similar kind ofmentalfreedom. Later, Isawthe premiereof Gänge (Gänge, 1983), his first piece for the Frankfurt Ballet. It was an amazing piece, a combinationofTanztheater andballet,butnot atalllikePina, completelydifferent. Manypeople use this kind of question method nowadays. But the difference lies in the spirit, your spirit. Everything has to be brought together somehow, bundled through your perspective. And this particularity of perspective is not at stake with every choreographer. Many choreographers are notusedtogivingasubtexttotheirdancers.
Do you think that this subtext is related to the strict working ethic that you spoke about before? Do you think that working to the point of physical exhaustion participated in the creationoftheparticularartisticimageforPinaBausch?
Nobodywantstoworkhard,myselfandPinaincluded.Buthardworkhappensautomaticallydue to precision. Precision is of most importance. Finding out what you want to say, and which way, automatically turns into hard work. The precision of the idea needs to become the precision of the body. It needs to enter the movement – sometimes even without having to say anything, whichisevenbetter.Intuitionisanotherpossibilityforosmosis.
Whendidyoustartdoingyourownchoreographies?
In the Wigman school, creation was the most important part of the education. But the education at the Folkwangschule was so exhausting that I couldn't work in the evenings. The only chance for me to work was from 7 to 9 in the morning. Folkwangschule was not as strict about creation andcreativityastheWigmanschoowas.
Whatdoyoumeannotasstrict?
You need a very good teacher who has a good eye. For me, the teachers at the Folkwangschule were not so strong, because after Mary Wigman... She was able to bring out the personality of everyone.Shesawsomethingspecialineveryoneandhelpedbringitout.
So at the Folkwangschule, the focus was on technique rather than on creativity and choreography?
Yes, somehow, yes. Even though I made one piece called Mono (Mono, 1970) during my last year as a student. There were very good reactions to the piece and Pina asked me about performingitwithFTS. Afterwards,Icontinuedmakingmorepieces.
Susanne Linkeunifies the heritage of German pre-war Ausdruckstanz with contemporary German dance theatre and has had a decisive influence on Germany's choreographic landscape. Shetrained as a dancer under Mary Wigman in Berlin before studying at the Folkwangshule in Essen. From 1970 to 1973, she worked as a dancer in the Folkwang Tanzstudio directed by Pina Bausch,going on to direct the studio herself until the summer of 1985. In the early 1990s, she was an artist-in-residence at the Hebbel-Theatre in Berlin. From 1994 to 2000, she was director of dance theatre at Theater Bremen and continues to choreograph freelance today. Since2015, shehasbeentheartisticdirectorofthedancedepartmentatTheaterTrier.
Abstract
Susanne Linke spoke to us about the state of dance in post-war Germany, her experiences of dancing for Pina Bausch at Folkwang Tanzstudio and her generation’s intuitive emancipatory gestureofabandoningclassicalrolesandthemes.
In the summer of 1972, I got invited by the Puerto Rican American dancer and choreographer Manuel Alum to participate in a summer academy in Saratoga. Manuel had taught at the Ballet théâtre Contemporain in Amiens, where I was working at the time. It was the summer and I was on holidays from the ballet company and had never been to the United States before. Saratoga is this wealthy little town in New York State and we were housed in beautiful villas. I shared a place togetherwith Manuel Alum,Malou Airaudo, who had moved from Franceto NewYork to work with Manuel, and Pina Bausch, who had been invited by Paul Sanasardo himself. The two knew each other from the years that Pina had spent studying in New York. So we were living together for one summer, but at that time Pina didn’t speak any French and I didn’t speak any German yet, and so we were sort of trying to make the best of it with our English. Pina was teaching technique classes, understudying one ofher piecesand performing a solo herself. Inher classes, she was teaching a mixture of Laban and Jooss-Leeder techniques and her way of moving was a big discovery for me. I liked it very much. Until then, I had mostly taken ballet classes.
Whatwasspecialaboutherclasses?
I immediately felt very confident and at home in her class, there was such a sensitivity in the movement, I loved it. And then I saw Nach Null [After Zero, 1970], the piece she was understudying and her solo. I found it all incredibly fascinating and she was just like, you know...
I remember talking to Manuel about how much I liked Pina’s classes and her work. And he said thatwhatPina wasdoing wasnotmodern, because,for them,modernwasGraham. Idon’tknow whether it was because Pina came from Europe, or because of her being influenced by Rudolf von Laban rather than Martha Graham. I could never really understand why Pina was not consideredbythemtobe modern.
Didyouseeanyperformancesduringyourstay?
When I was in New York, I got to know the work of Antony Tudor. Manuel Alum had already been talking to me about his work, and once, when we were walking in Central Park, he pointed out a tall man with a bald head and told me that it was Tudor. Tudor was also a big influence on Pina when she was studying at The Julliard School. I had never seen work like his before. He used ballet language, but in a way Ididn’t know it could be used. It was pure ballet, and while it was touching and beautiful, there was at the same time something “realistic” in the work. It portrayedhumanbeings andtheirfeelings,but notinatraditional,romanticway. Itseemedmore concretethanwhatIhadseenbefore.
The whole summer was a huge and wonderful shock for me. I learned and experienced so many things, everything there was different, not only the dance experience... It was an important time formeonapersonallevel.Therewassomethinginthe airthatIhadnever feltinFrance,whereI was dancing in a ballet company, a repertory company. It was a conventional sort of company and I was completely involved in it. It was my life then. I think I didn’t really understand what was going on outside of the dance world. May ’68 was very strong in Paris and in the whole of Franceaswell,ofcourse,butIwasalreadya dancerbythattime. Iwas so involvedindanceand mylifeinthetheater.
WhathappenedafteryoucamebackfromSaratoga?
When I came back to Europe, I knew that the company, which in the meantime had moved to Angers, was no longer the place where I wanted to be. It was neither the place I wanted to be, nor was it the work I wanted to do. I was feeling the impact of the experience that I had gone through with Pina and with Manuel and with all those people around. So I said I would resign after the season. Pina had asked me already in Saratoga if I wanted to work with her. She said that she mighthavea project, but everything seemed very open. So back in France, Ihadnoidea what wasgoingto happen, just thatI knewI didn’t want to continueworking for the company in Angers. And after a while, I received a letter from Pina in which she asked me whether I would still like to work with her. She was about to take over the company in Wuppertal. The encounter we’dhadoverthesummerhadbeenso important forme,Ididn’tknowatthetimewhatitwasor whatitwouldbecome.Butformeitwasclear–Iwantedtoworkwithher.
How was your arrival in Wuppertal? Could you tell us a little about the first pieces you wereworkingontogether?
I think we were 23 or 24 dancers at the beginning, most of whom had worked with Pina in Folkwang Tanzstudio or somewhere else. Jan Minařík was the only dancer who had stayed from the old company. We were from all over the world, a few of us not speaking even one word of Germanyet.Westartedtoworktogetherimmediatelyandslowlygottoknoweachother. During the process of Fritz [Fritz, 1974], the first piece we made, I had a strong cough. So we made a soloforme,whereat one pointIstartcoughingandthenthewholegroupstartscoughingandwe
played with this. It was an incredible experience for me to realize that there are no borders as long as it makes sense somehow. I think that’s the strongest and most beautiful thing I went through with Pina,this spaceforexperimentation. When Iwas working for otherchoreographers before, I’dalwaysfound awayto express myself. Dancehasalwaysbeena wayofbeingforme. But I have to admit that, when working with Pina, I had this strong feeling that everything is possible,thatyoucandoeverything.
Whydidyouleavethecompanyaftertwoyears?
Both Malou and I left in 1975 to go to Paris. After a while, we started to make work together with some friends who we knew from New York and Saratoga. There were five of us and we called ourselves“Lamain”. Itwas difficultat first. Wewereayoung company, but westarted to have performances here and there. Paris can be very difficult though, it can be a hard city. During a guest performance of Tanztheater Wuppertal at Theatre de la Ville in Paris, Pina came toseeoneof ourperformancesin thesuburbs of Paris. Ithinktheyearwas1977.Wedecidedwe wanted to come back to Wuppertal. We were four dancers, and Elena Pikon was our babysitter. Malou and I had gotten our daughter in the meantime. Pina said that the four of us should come back to work with her. After a while she liked Elena so much that she invited her to join the companyaswell,andwefoundourselveslookingforanewbabysitter.
IthinkthefirsttimethatPinastartedaskingquestionsmoredirectlywasfor Blaubart [Bluebeard – While Listening to a Taped Recording of Bela Bartok’s “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle”,1977],but it’s difficult to say for me since I was mostly away until 1978. I joined Bluebeard as a guest, but by then, she already had another approach. I think it was also due to the hard time she had with thecompanythen.
Doyourememberthecircumstancesoftheconflict?
Well, there were disagreements about the way of working. I think that some people didn’t understand what Pina was looking for. She was demanding a lot, sometimes very personal things. Even if she did not ask the dancers questions yet, she was already searching and looking for things, sometimes very intimate things. The difference from later was that we didn’t look for these things intheframe ofasking and answering. So in1976, due tothe difficult circumstances, Pina decided to work in the studio of Jan Minařík and asked that only the ones who wanted to workwithhershouldcomethere.And after awhile,people cameback–andtheycould. It wasa difficulttimeforeverybody.
When we did the project in Bochum Er nimmt sie an der Hand und führt sie in das Schloss, die Anderen folgen [He Takes Her by the Hand and Leads Her into The Castle, the Others Follow…, 1978], there were only four dancers, the others were opera singers, actors and one baker. It was just Jan Minařík, Jo Ann Endicott, Viviennne Newport and I from the company. Since Pina was working with people who had less movement experience, she started asking questions, working withtext.Inthebeginning,thequestions wereverysimple,like“six differentways tobe angry”, or“sixdifferentwaystosaygoodmorning”.
Much later, she said that she started asking these questions because, on the one hand, things she didn’t prepare or expect were often more interesting than what she was trying to prepare or fix, and on the other hand, she realized that each one of us had something special. That’s why she slowly got away from making pieces with main roles. She was trying to make space for everybody to be in the piece. She started to work with a white page and started asking us questions.
Of course, it’s different with each choreographer, but most of the people I worked with seemed tocometothe studiowithsomeideasand askwhetheryou couldtryaphraseordosomethingin a particular way. From there, it’s up to the relation between you, the dancer and him or her, the choreographer. Sometimes you get a chance to give a little bit more of your ideas, sometimes not.In thebeginning,Pinawould alsocome with amovement phrase,whileatthe same time she was interested in getting something from us, too. When we worked on Iphigenie auf Tauris [Iphigenia in Tauris,1973]or Orpheus und Eurydike [Orpheus and Eurydice,1975],wewere all intervening with one another, provoking one another, it was a sharable process. Later, when she’d already started asking questions, she still kept doing phrases for a while, teaching us movements or little phrases of movements, gestures. But eventually, she started provoking us with questions about movement and didn't teach us any movements anymore. Then she would onlyintervenewiththeoverallconstruction,thecomposition,somehow.
Do you remember the first time that you performed your own dance material? Do you rememberthepieceandthecircumstancesofmakingthatpiece?
The first dance that I did all by myself was for Ahnen [Ahnen, 1987]. In Ahnen, I found some movements from one of Pina’s questions, which I constructed a solo with, together with the material she had provided. And then she took it as it was. My dance was a little piece within the piece of Pina’s. We all put a piece of us in the piece of Pina’s, but the piece was always Pina’s. It's her eyes, her sensibility, her predictions, her way of feeling, seeing, her genius about constructionandtiming.That'sallhers.
Could you describe to us how the process of making and constructing a dance would come about when using the question and answer method as a way of producing movement material?
She would ask questions about movements and we would answer. Our answers would be filmed while she also took notes. We made notes, too. And at one point, she would ask each of us individually to watch the movement material together, to make a selection from what we answered. While watching, she would comment on what we were looking at and make the selection. She would give slight guidelines, like go more in one direction or the other, or ask whether this one thing was really necessary. That was the first step. After doing this selection with her, she’d say, “Ok, now you can start doing something.” So most of us would start to construct little phrases. These were filmed again, looked at again and she would intervene again and say something was too long maybe. But she was still leaving us a big amount of freedom. SometimesIkeptthingsshedidn'tlike,becauseI feltthatitwasnecessarythattheybethere.
That's a very interesting question, but I don't remember how we dealt with this before we had video. I know that she filmed every performance from the very beginning. But it’s a very practicaltool, in fact, because after a while you sort of forget the movements you’ve done – then you can always go back to the video. To be able to start making a dance, I had to start by learningmyownmovementfromvideoagain.AndmyproblemwasthatIwasneverabletostart working on a little phrase after Pina had done the selection of movement. I just couldn’t start workingontheselittlephrasesandshowthemtoherasIwentalong.
Why?
I first had to find something that made me enter into the dance. To call it a dance, I first needed to find something took hold of me and made me move. And until I found that, I couldn’t start constructingandputtingthingstogether.So italwaystookmequiteawhilebeforeIknewwhat I wantedtodo.AndPinakeptaskingmeif Iwasreadyyet.She wantedtoseewhatIwasworking on. Sometimes the piece was starting to get finished and I still couldn’t show her anything. But when I showed her, I always thought that it was finished, that it was the way it was supposed to be.
No.Thatwasmyentry.Ihadtofindsomethingthatwouldhelpmestartcomposingalittledance phrase. And Pina gave me complete freedom about this, she never... I remember one dance Idid for the co-production with Hong Kong, Der Fensterputzer [The Window Washer, 1997]. I
remember that Ishowed herthedance andthatshetoldmethatIstayedin oneplacefortoolong inthebeginning.And Isaidyes,that'swhatit's about,that'swhat Iwant.In theperformance,my dance comes back a second time, and when it comes back I leave out this very beginning which she thought was too much in one place. But she understood what I wanted and needed. Another process, which was very important for me and which made me go somewhere else, was Nur Du [Only You,1996],the co-productionwedidwiththeUniversityofCalifornia.After Ishowedher the dance I did, there were no comments for three to four days, maybe longer. When she finally called me, she asked what I had wanted to do. It felt as though she had pulled the floor out from under my feet. In a few words, she told me that I should do something else, because what I did was not going to work. It was a big shock for me, I have to admit. In the end, it was good, because it made me look more specifically for what I wanted to do. But for about a week, I was completely destroyed, I couldn't do anything. Later, towards the end of the process, – we were working onstage already – I started to try things backstage during rehearsals. And finally, after rehearsal one day, I said, “Ok, I will show you what I did.” I didn't want anybody else to be there. There was just one of my friends and Jan Minařík, who, because he was working very closely with Pina and the person responsible for the music, put on a piece of music. Afterwards, there was again no comment, just a big embrace and tears. And the dance stayed like this and finishedthepiece.
Was there a clear distinction in the rehearsal period between the time for making material andthetimewhenPinawouldthenputitalltogether?
There was the material-creation period and then the moment where Pina started to construct, but everybody continued to make more material during this time as well anyhow. Pina always said that our job wasn’t finished just because she started to construct things. We could still propose different answers and were always welcome to do something, to show something new. Sometimesshewouldaskanotherquestionorputthesamequestiondifferently. Oftenshewould eventually say, “I don't know, but there is nothing…” It was a little bit depressing to hear that there was nothing there for her with which to do a piece. In the end, of course, it became a piece ofthreetofourhours,withthis“little”amountofmaterial.
Concerning the selection process, could you follow or understand why she would choose onethingoveranother?
Sometimes yes, but more often no. The first selection, in a way, related to what we had been proposing. And sometimes you thought, well, that wasn’t so bad, but she’s not gonna to take it, she’s gonna take some little “fart” I did somewhere in the corner, something that you were almostashamedof.Ithinkitalwaystookmea reallylongtimetounderstandwhatwasgoingon, what the piece was going to be. But, in a way, I think that this was one of the big richnesses of Pina’s work, this sort of innocence and freedom. She never wanted to explain what she did or
what her questions meant. If you asked for clarifications about questions, when it got too complicated, she would ask you to do what you understood at first. It was never about interpretation. She would take things the way they were and react to them with her own sensibility.
The beauty of what is happening onstage sometimes occurs because the one performing doesn't really know completely what he or she is talking about, or who she or he is at that moment. I think this is one of the richnesses of Pina’s work, this sort of naiveté and innocence. If you start toknowtoomuchorsaytoomuch,youstarttokillsomethingatthesametime.
How exactly does this occur, this shift from proposing an answer to a concrete question to thisformofinnocencethatyouaretalkingabout?
It is complex, because when you propose an answer, you don't do it in a context. There is no context at first, because Pina will create the context later. What comes before and what comes after influences what you do inasmuch as you influence what comes before and after. Since she wouldn't comment on what we did most of the time, I had a certain idea about what I was doing and why Idid it. But she might have a completely different idea as to why she took it. In a way, she worked with what she thought it was and we worked with our ideas and feelings around the same material. Sometimes you discovered her thoughts and ideas about your material. And this wasactuallywhenitbecame complex, because younow knewwhatshe wasthinking,soit made youchange.I’mnotsurethoughifwealwaysdiscoveredwhatPinawasthinking.
How does this innocence relate to a practice of performing? How do you care for this innocenceinaperformancethatyourepeat50timesormore?
This is the very paradoxical thing. Sometimes Pina asked us to do something again or wear something again that we’d thought were only preliminary solutions. But for her, she wanted to see it exactly the way we did it the first time. She often said that those little moments had to endure the repetitiveness, the fact of seeing and doing it again and again and again. She watched everyperformancefrom theauditoriumand what wewere doingonstagehadtoreach her, inone wayoranother, everynight.If it didn't workafter seeingit10times, shewouldeventuallytakeit out of the piece. This is this paradox, animating this aspect of freedom and freshness, on the one hand,withherveryaccuratesenseofprecisionontheother.
When you were proposing answers to her questions, do you think thatyou proposed things thatyouthoughtwouldbeoktorepeat?
Yes. I recognized the feeling that I wouldn't want to do something sometimes, because I had done the same role already in other pieces, for instance. I wanted to move forward instead of showingmyselfinthesamewayoverandoveragain.
Howdid Pina choose thepeople she wantedto work with? You weresaying earlieronthat, in a way, she “fell in love” with your babysitter Elena, and so invited her to join the companyaswell.
I think she had a special connection to each one of us. Some pieces in the repertoire, however, require a certain technical level, or things like that. That's why she started doing auditions for Das Frühlingsopfer [Rite of Spring,1975].Inthis piece,thedancersneed tobeabletoperforma demanding choreography and make it look good. At the same time, she was meticulous in her corrections and feedback. People have to be able to endure this precision as well. In the end, however, Ithinkshe was always lookingfor somethingotherthan technique.Shehadto feelthat something could happen between this person, the work and her. Sometimes it didn't work, and that’sok, too. It's life. But she had a connection withall ofus somehow. Ithink between thetwo of us, there was friendship, or maybe something that I don't know exactly what it was, maybe sisterhood. It's important what you do onstage, what you are. I don't know. Pina and I never talked about this, we never had the feeling that we had to speak too much. We believed that we understoodeachother.Ithinkwedidmostofthetime.
Dominique Mercy received his education in classical ballet in France. During a stay in the United States in 1972, he met Pina Bausch, who invited him to join her in Germany, where she was to found the dance company Tanztheater Wuppertal in 1973. He became one of the most famous European contemporary dancers, was made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2001, and he received a Bessie Award in 2002 for his performance in Masurca Fogo [Masurca Fogo, 1998]andtheLégiond'Honneurin2013.
Abstract
Dominique Mercy first met Pina Bausch in the United States ata summeracademy organized by the choreographer Paul Sanasardo. Telling hisexperience of the NewYork dancesceneand how he perceived it as differing from both living as well as dancing in Europe, he moves on to provideadetailedaccountofthedevelopmentofPinaBausch’squestioningmethod.
Keywords
Paul Sanasardo, Saratoga, New York, beginnings at Tanztheater Wuppertal, questions and methodsinthestudio,performingonstage,friendship.
I was interested in Modern dance, but I was never interested in technique and becoming a technical dancer. Ever. I went to a school in London called the Rambert School. It was the opposite of the Royal Ballet in a way, because the Royal Ballet had the cream of the cream of possible future classicaldancersandRambertgotabunchof... It wasstillaballetschool,butitgot theweirdos,the characters. In my time in London, everybody was training as a classical dancer. The first contemporary dance school, called The Place, opened just after my study years in London. I would have probably wanted to go there, but it was too late for me. If you wanted work in dance in England, there were about two and half companies. The Royal Ballet, London Festival Ballet and a couple of obscure things. Germany, on the other hand, had lots of work. There was an Opera house with a dance company in every other town. That’s why you went to Germany. We all travelled to Germanytoaudition.
It was dance that was relevant for me. No fairytales basically. I am saying this now in retrospect, because at the time, Ijust... GeneKelly! Iloved theideaof movement and theatre. Iam much more atheatricaldancerthanadancer-dancer.Iwasanactingdancerasopposedtoamovementdancer.
Couldyouexplainthedifferencetous?
I suppose it has to do with expressing something. This is light years away from what Pina Bausch later came to do. I didn’t know anything about it then. But I did know that there must be a way of expressing where you don’t have to run around in tutus. I knew that there must be something like that. It’s about being confronted with things that make you feel alive,that make you think. And this couldbespokenorpictures.Iwasn’tintomime.
Yes, but I only did around three auditions. Then the money ran out and I had to go home. Later, I heard from a friend of mine with whom I had studied in London that Folkwang Tanzstudio, run by Pina Bausch in Essen, might have an opening for a dancer. I didn’t tell anybody about it and went therefortheweekend.Icouldonlystayfortheweekend,whichwasmyluckinaway,becausePina could never make up her mind. She always kept people for weeks, asking them to do another class. But Icouldn’tdothat,Ihadtogobackto England.Andshetookme.IwasatFolkwangTanzstudio foraboutoneyearbeforePinawenttoWuppertal.Mostofuswentwithher,somedidn’t.
I was living in this tiny little room that Susanne Linke, who was living upstairs, rented to me. Living in Germany was difficult in the beginning. I was very young and I didn’t speak any German
yet. At the time people, would really size me up, they would somehow know that I was a foreigner and I didn’t even look that different... Germany was sort of insecure at the time, but that died out afterafewyears.
Whatdoyoumeanwithinsecure?
It wasn’t long after the war when I showed up in ’71. There was this culture of silence. Sons and daughtersbornafterthewardidn’tknowanythingabouttheirparentsandgrandparents.Theparents didn’t want to talk about what had happened during the war. Regardless of what they had done or even whether they had done anything, they just didn’t talk about it. There was always this huge elephant in the room. And it didn’t start being dealt with until ’78 or ’79. It was only then that they started speaking about the past, but the damage had been done. We had ’68, we had the barricades in the streets, we started to have the RAF with Baader and Meinhof, etc. We all have our theories about it. At the same time, by the 80s, Germany was one of the richest countries in Europe again. I didn’t know that back then, but I did know that I got paid a bit more than in London. I was kind of rich for my standards. Then I followed Pina from Essen to Wuppertal in 1973 and I had a contract and all... I had a lower income than some of the other dancers because I was just a beginner. But relativetoEngland,Iwaspaidverywell.
Oh yes! There were a lot of things going on. The 70s were the time of eat-pray-love; it was all sex, drugs and rock ’n roll. It was good times for us British because we didn’t have Vietnam. America had Vietnam, but the British just had sex, drugs and rock ’n roll. And the Germans were always a bit... It was happening in Germany as well. Although it seems that sex, drugs and rock ’n roll only applied to students in Germany. It wasn’t a sort of general young people thing like it was in England.Itwasmoreofanelitething.
Concerning theatre and dance, theideathat you can show things on a theatre stagethatare direct as opposed to being wrapped up in pretty colors and things – this kind of direct aesthetics was very new. Pina had this artistic quality of being able to feel what was going on around her. And I mean feelingit andnot analyzingit.Beingable toputthefeelingof itonstage. Butwhatshe putonstage were things that people were afraid of looking at. Some people loved it and of course some people were frightened by it. At first, most people hated it, but by ’78, it was normal again. We were done withmostoftheaudiencewalkingoutbythen.
Do you remember what you thought about Pina’s work when you first came to Folkwang Tanzstudio?
I remember that Pina interviewed us all before we went to Wuppertal. We all had a talk with her. And I remember saying to her that the most important thing about her work for me was that it was relevant. I remember saying that. I found it relevant to what was going on. And later, she became possiblyevenmorerelevant.
WhatcanyoutellusaboutyourtimeinWuppertal?
Wuppertal is in the middle of the Ruhrgebiet, which is industry, industry, industry. It has its charm butit’salsoquitehard.Butithadanoperahouseandatheatreandithadapublic.Thepublicdidn’t have an easy life, nobody had an easy life in that part of the world. It was a workers’ city and the people there weren’t really impressed with Pina’s work. The aesthetics were quite confronting. Nobody likes being confronted, especially with what you just left your home for. You should have seen them, how they were dressed up nicely and everything. It’s kind of understandable. You don‘t
know that when you are on stage, you don’t know anything. But they got over it with time. They gotusedtoit.
Could you tell us about how you worked in rehearsal during your time at Tanztheater Wuppertal?
During Iphigenie auf Tauris (Iphigenia in Tauris, 1973) or Orpheus und Eurydike (Orpheus and Eurydice, 1975), we started with a piece of music. First, there was a piece of music and half a movement.Butwhenwelistenedtothemusiconceagaintogetherwith people,thereweresuddenly 35 movements because the music tells you what to do. Pina was stunningly musical and very influenced by it. It was only later that she started from an idea and put the music to it afterwards. That’s a pretty different thing. By then, she was interested in the people she was working with and started working from them, from the way they moved. She loved the way they moved. But it never stopped being herart. That’s the most important thing. Ithink thatby working with questions in the sense of asking us questions that we then each answered with movements, sentences and little dances,itbecamemoreaboutexpressingthingsthathadtodowithus.Byaskingquestionsaboutus as both people and dancers, we started talking about us, how we were doing, in this world, on this planet,now.Ithinkthatwasthemove.Andit’sveryhardtosaywhetherthiswasdoneconsciously. Things changed again in the pieces after the 90s. There weren’t hardly any more big groups left at allbythen.Itbecamemostlysolosandeverybodyworkingseparately.
You participated in the piece Er nimmt sie an der Hand und führt sie in das Schloss, die Anderen folgen (He takes her by the hand and leads her into the castle, the others follow, 1978) based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth that Pina Bausch did in Bochum with both dancers from TanztheaterWuppertal andactorsfrom SchauspielhausBochum.Thisseemstobe thepivotal pieceinwhichPinaBauschstartedtoaskquestions.Couldyoutellusaboutthisproduction?
It was difficult. We drove back and forth between Wuppertal and Bochum every day. We had rehearsal in the morning and evening and I went to sleep on a sofa in the afternoon. Fortunately, there was all this furniture in the production, so there was somewhere to go to sleep on. After the evening rehearsals, we drove back to Wuppertal. The same thing every day. It was a bit hard, we didn’thavemuchofaprivatelife.
During rehearsals, Pina asked us to come up with things like blowing our noses six times, or six times yes, six times no, etc. We would always write our answers down because we knew we were going to do themto music, first slowly and then half as quick again and then differently once more. We were looking for gestures and movements as opposed to feelings in this piece. There’s a difference between when you say “give me three times being in love” and “six times yes”. The latter is not necessarily a feeling. You can do it with feelings, but it’s not necessarily a feeling. And it’snotaboutyou.It’snotaboutwhatyouthink.It’sjustabouthowyouexpress. At the end of the rehearsal process, we had this extraordinary repertoire of gestures that we performed crossing the stage in the famous diagonal. There was this other scene where Mechthild Großmann is sitting in the middle of the space on a chair looking forward. Vitus Zeplichal is running around doing stuff, but she is ignoring him. One of the most profound statements that Pina ever made is reproach. And silence is the strongest form of reproach. During rehearsals, Pina said that this was a piece about men and women. It was Pina’s way of trying to get through to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. She was trying to take the essence out of the piece and put it in her own way. Unfortunately, the Shakespeare Society had been invited. That wasa mistake. Theyjustdidn’t getit.Howcouldthey?
I think that if you are curious about human beings, these are the kind of questions you ask each other over a drink. Pina was just putting these questions in another context. So the questions themselves werenot unusual. Although answering questions like“your first kiss” in front of a large dance company of about 20 people you are not necessarily close to… But we got used to it. What was unusual was the form it took when it got onstage. The form it took when it reached the stage is themostimportantthingaboutit,yousee.Itwasalwaysaverystrongform,itlookedandfeltgood. Thethingonit’sownisnotreallyinterestingunlessitisinthisframe.
Whatdoyoumeanbyform?
The set, the costumes, the composition. Part of the form is the music, though sometimes there wasn’t any. Colours, make up, costumes, expression, people together, or one alone. It’s all these things. Don’t forget the set! Until the 80s, most of the sets were done by Rolf Borzik. I think that partly thereason whyPina’spiecesweresosuccessful was becauseGermanOperaandTheatrewas experimenting with the idea of set design. It was set designers who were starting to direct plays, working with space and the spatiality of theatre. And the tremendous sets of Rolf Borzik accompanyingPina’schoreographiesweretheicingonthecakeinaway.
We were 20 of us in the company, which is a lot. You make friendships with some and not with others… I was friends with Jo (Josephine Ann Endicott) and other English speakers like Colleen Finneran and Barry Wilkinson. But, in a way, it was always the work that came before friendships; we were conscious of the fact we were there for the work and not for the social life. So we could have been closer than we actually were. But anyway, we were all love and peace; it was that time. Youcouldnotnotbetouchedbywhatwasgoingonintheworld.
Auniversalthingaboutdancersis thattheyareactually verygenerous.Withtheirtime,theirenergy and their curiosity. If you can avoid the inner company dynamics that can sometimes be very damaging,youareleftwitharelationshiptothechoreographerandthefellowdancersthatismostly about trust. Dancers tend to be very generous people with their trust. Dancers tend to love each other, they keep their friendships going. Some of us started loving each other now as opposed to then. But you know, with time we get a bit more mellow (laughs). It was lovely to see everyone again at Pina’s funeral. But it was also frightening, because I knew that I was quite probably not goingtoseethemagain.
Yes, of course – we are like a big family in a way. The Pina family… even though I used to say back then that the only thing we really had in common was the fact that we were onstage at same time.
Long after I had left Tanztheater Wuppertal, when I was working in San Francisco in 1996, the company came to Berkeley to perform. I stayed in the hotel with them for a few days and then travelledaroundCaliforniawithMechthildGroßmann.ThePinafamilywasthere.Itwasnice.Even though it was mostly people who I hadn’t worked with. But, you know, we each had our special relationtoPinaandtoeachother.
In the 70s, Pina once said that one of the main reasons to do anything is to be loved. She did strongly believe that. But the point is that she could also… If you were loved by Pina, you got nice
things todo.Ifyouwerenot lovedbyPinayougot nothingtodo.Buttheemotionality andjealousy resulting from this can be found in any theatre or dance company. That is not special to Pina. But there was something special in the relations amongst the company nevertheless. I’m thinking about this thing of going over the borders of either normality or pain thresholds, to make a point, to be able to express things, to get attention and be loved. The way we approached this was different to both performance art, where you would cut yourself in order to bleed, and theatre, with its fake knife and blood. We weren’t bleeding, because that would be going too far, but we did get bruised. And it looked hardand awful, because it washard and awful. But it hada very strong effect and we were doing it for the effect. If it works and looks good in the sense that it has the effect you want it to haveand doesn’tactually killyou, thenyou arealright. But Ithink this wasall partof feeling the borders. Going very close to the borders and even going over them. You don’t really know your border unless you’ve been to them. If you get a certain dynamics going amongst people trying to out do each other, the goal post gets pushed further and further. We once had a task that was about melting into your surroundings and there was this big rubber mat on the floor. I thought that if I do it on thatit would not hurt because it’s a rubber mat. Ijust stood thereand fell into the mat… But it wasn’tsoftatall,it wasagony!ButPinaunderstoodthatIcouldn’tdoitagain.It lookedgoodbut it wastoopainful.Butifitlooksgoodandyoucandoitoverandoveragain,Pina’lltakeit.
Explain to us how exactly this worked. She asked you tomelt into your surroundings and you broughtthemat…?
Pinawould pose a question into the space.Everybody thought about it a littleand then, oneby one, we would get up and do something, or not. If you couldn’t think of anything, you did not do anything. That day, the mat just happened to be there. And so I thought to just fall straight down. HowcouldIbesowrong?
Pina’s attention. When you are onstage, it’s the audience, of course, but in rehearsals it was about Pina. I think that’s what made it kind of… almost unhealthy. Suddenly you get this fixation, everything was for her. In the film Pina by Wim Wenders, Julie Shanahan at some point says “Pina was looking at me or watching me for 22 years. That’s longer than my parents.” And that’s the thing. You do it and she is watching you, looking at you and deciding if it’s good material for her piece or not. And it is up to you if you want to be part of that, because it’s her piece, it’s not your piece. Pina’s pieces will always be Pina’s pieces. It becomes your work the moment you go on stageandperformthepiece.Butinrehearsals,it’sallforher.That’showitis.
How did this spirit of ’68 that you talked about before fit in with working in such a big institutionastheSchauspielWuppertal?
That was the problem. The theatre as an institution was the establishment. But I think our tendency wasto pretend it wasn’t there. We couldn’t survive without the theatre, but the theatre was awful in a way. Even Arno Wüstenhöfer, the Generalintendant of the Wuppertaler Bühnen, who hired Pina in the first place and supported her more than anyone else, could not save us from having to do Operas. He could only save us from extinction (laughs). That’s all. I’m sure Pina would not have madeitpastherfirstcontractinWuppertalifithadn‘tbeenforhim.
Can you tell us why all of the dancers except for Jan Minarik wanted to leave after Fritz (1973),Pina’sfirstpieceforTanztheaterWuppertal?
Well I think most of them thought “Shit, this is not what I thought it was going to be.” You have to consider the times. Before Pina, the dance company was an Opera Ballet company. All of the
dancers except Jan Minarik had either been fired or left by themselves upon Pina’s arrival. So Pina hired a bunch of new people, some of whom she did not know before. For some, I think it was simply not interesting artistically, others wanted more straightforward “dance”. In a way, there was a lot of sitting around in rehearsals. When 20 people are to answer a question, how many questions do you think we got done in one rehearsal? Not very many. We spent a lot of time not moving. So peopleleftbecausetheywantedtouseallthistimetomove,otherwisethetimewasgone.Youwere not going to get it back. But Pina wanted to get somewhere that she herself didn’t yet know what it was going to be. She wanted to look for it. And she could only do that with people who went that way with her. Some did and some didn’t. Pina herself was never very good at firing her dancers. Shewastookindforthat,butsheencouragedthemtogoiftheywantedto.
HowdidPinareacttosomanydancersleavingthecompany?
It gave her more determination. But there were also times when she was quite difficult and did not haveagoodrelationshiptoanybodyatall.Butthathelpedinaway.Itwassospecialthen,itwasso difficult andspecial. And it worked. Ifeverything iseasysailing,beverysuspicious ofit. You need friction. It was all about finding the right thing to do, trying to make it work. There are some directors and choreographers that seem to react, but actually they tend to presuppose what is going to happen to us. It is not only about what is happening to us, but where are we going. And I think Pinawas oneof these artists. It was never calculatedor thought through. That’s just what happened whensheworked.Youseethings.
Was there a point when you felt that things changed? That there was less friction both inside the company as well in relation to the audience? Was there a moment when you felt, ok, now sheishappywithit?
Evenifshewashappywithit,sheneversaidverymuch.Butthesethingsprovethemselves;youget asked to perform more. I don’t think Pina changed that much over time. She went to the restaurant every night after rehearsals. If you wanted to find her, you knew where she was. In the afternoon she was in one restaurant, and in the evening she was in another. For me, she didn’t change that much,exceptthattherestaurantsgotbetterandthatshegotmoretiredandmoresecluded.
Could you feel Pina’s background and upbringing in post-war Germany playing itself out in thekindsofquestionsandconcernsthatformedherwork?
Ithink sheexperiencedthings asa child that were not very pleasant. Not thefamily. Shealmost got attacked… She had to run for her life. This happens to many people. I experienced a similar situation. These are the things that stay with you, when you realise that you are running for your life. But at the same time, she was protected by people who saw something in her. The first was Kurt Joss. Pina was very privileged in the way that she was recognised by Kurt Joss from early on. Shewasvirtually hisdaughter.HansZulligattheFolkswangschule alsoadoredher.WhenPinawas studying at Julliard in the United States, Anthony Tudor made fun of her for being a “Kraut” by calling herFritz. So it’sno wondershe made this piececalled Fritz (1973), thesethings stayedwith her. The joke in all this is that I got made fun of for being a Kraut even though I am English. So I know what it’s like. The things that happen to you in your normal life and in the beginning of your career make a big impact on you. But you can’t reduce it to that. She was an artist. A real born artist. The only thing that can stop her from making art is not being alive. All the things that happened to her surely had an influence, but they are not the cause of her art. They are not the beginnings,theywerejustthereatthetime.
Vivienne Newport(*1951, Bristol; †2015, Berlin) waspart of the first generation ofdancersof the newly established Tanztheater Wuppertal (1973). In 1981, she founded her own ensemble at TheateramTurm(TAT)inFrankfurt,whichgainedwidespreadrecognitionovertheyears. In2004, she started working as a freelance choreographer and director. Vivienne Newport died in Berlin on April27attheageof63afteralongillness.
Abstract
VivienneNewportspoke tousabouttheearlychoreographicworksofTanztheater Wuppertalunder the direction of Pina Bausch, in which Newport participated as one of the seminal dancers. Furthermore, she spoke to us about the internal dynamic in the company and the particularity of PinaBausch’srelationstothedancers.
