Remembered Gesture
Pina Bausch sits in the midst of another post-performance dinner in Wuppertal, fawning over a beatific-faced dancer recently arrived from the Paris Opera, seated at her right. She offers the long table three toasts, the first to her longtime companion, the second to her newest dancer, who debuted in Café Müller this evening, and the third to life and love.
Bausch is happy, and it’s because of the dancing. Tonight she performed her signature role, as the fitful somnambulist in Café Müller. On these infrequent occasions when the choreographer takes the stage before curtain call, she escapes her relentlessly hectic life. Dancing, she focuses simply on the music, and her own feelings. It’s like a holiday in the head, she says.
Bausch composed her first dances 31 years ago, not so much because she had something to say, although it is clear now that she did, as to give herself something to dance. Compared to the eclectic and iconoclastic work she had done as a student in New York City, creating new roles for Antony Tudor and Paul Taylor alike, her subsequent career as a soloist with Kurt Jooss’s Folkwang Ballet eventually frustrated her preternaturally doleful expressiveness.
At Juilliard she was quiet and serious and committed, and quite successful. She was favored by Tudor, a 20th-century master of the lyric-dramatic ballet, who admired her up on pointe, looking even skinnier than usual, her expression turned sorrowful. She even won the approval of Louis Horst, Martha Graham’s early mentor and a notoriously uncompromising composition teacher.
When Tudor created a recital role for Philippine in high heels and flamboyant hat, he made a comedienne of her. As artistic director of the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, he cast her as one of the three graces in Tannhäuser and in act two of Alcestis. Several years later, back in Germany, she appeared as Caroline, the desperately unfulfilled bride-to-be, in Jardin aux Lilas, when Tudor staged it for the Folkwang Ballet.
Paul Taylor, a Juilliard classmate, loved to watch Bausch. She was able to streak across the floor sharply, if unevenly, like calipers across paper, he says, and also to move slower than a clogged-up bicycle pump. He eagerly turned her into a praying mantis for a 1960 duet, called Tablet, which he choreographed for her and Dan Wagoner.
By the time she reappeared on the American summer festival circuit in the early 1970s, shortly before making her career-defining move to Wuppertal, Bausch was a discernible original. According to Dance Magazine critic Judy Kahn, she was the highlight of a Paul Sanasardo concert in August 1972, although her peculiar vocabulary, so well suited to her own super-limber and specially-trained body, proved a challenge for the other dancers: "She releases her back in a knee-bent 'S’ and flexes her foot hard, peering at the audience with a poignant sense of humor and foreboding. Her creaturesque humanoid forms hover in an abstract yet basic realm of human experience, devoid of direct intellectual association, functioning on a paradoxically distant yet intimate level, communicating in images tucked away in the subconscious, in private dreams and public mythologies. With looming pliés, elbow-led arms, chicken-claw hands, her body tensions employ opposition and each move follows from a natural gravitational path often motivated internally by breath impulses."
Bausch and Sanasardo must have felt like twin souls. He, too, was intense, gaunt, and absorbed with existential issues: "The fact is, we are all of us alone. We can never be totally in contact with another human being. But we can all embrace our loneliness in some marvelous way." Most likely she met him through Tudor, with whom Sanasardo had studied for eight years. Sanasardo had also danced for ten years with Anna Sokolow, whose angst-ridden dance dramas, most notably Rooms, foreshadowed Bausch’s tanztheater. His dances, described with the same kind of critical skepticism ("idiosyncratic," "strange," "bizarre") that would greet Bausch’s own productions years later, dealt with the underside of human relations. They starkly depicted the fiercely fearful and anxious need for love. "Paul Sanasardo whacked Donya Feuer on the head," Doris Hering began one review, "and [. . . ] she sank away from the impact, only to crawl back doggedly."
Although Bausch probably did not realize it at the time, she was apprenticing as a choreographer. By his example, Sanasardo legitimized the exploration of disquieting subject matter, and he demonstrated how to heighten human emotion and behavior using poetic imagery, irony and theatricality. He and Tudor served as models of the choreographer as an acute observer of human behavior. From Tudor Bausch had the opportunity to learn about the psychological implications of gesture, the engagement of dancers as individuals rather than instruments, the creation of character, the evocative value of nostalgia (especially in costuming), the metaphorical power of the male-female relationship, and the importance of formal specificity, especially in the delineation of emotion. Jooss’s technical training, which integrated classical and modern dance, produced the precision and expansiveness of her dancing; his choreography suggested the integral connection between dance and drama, the usefulness of the montage structure, and the effectiveness of vernacular dance as a social metaphor. Each mentor, in his own way, defined dance as an expression of primal human experience.
Bausch worked longest with Jooss (who coined the term "tanztheater"), first as a teenager in the Folkwang school and then as a soloist in the Folkwang Ballet. What impressed her the most in all those years with him, perhaps, was dancing the part of the old woman in his 1932 expressionist masterpiece, The Green Table. When the old woman is confronted by the figure of Death, her response is alternately apprehensive and accepting. She listens; his head lifts. A stand-off, then retreat. She approaches him with a stiff-legged walk on tip-toe. A bow, and they commence an intimate duet. She turns away but returns into his arms, and when she finally bends backward in surrender, he lifts and carries her off. The duet structure, even a similarly halting walk, but mostly the same abject attraction appear at the climax of Bausch’s own Rite of Spring, when a series of virgins confront their fate in the form of a male priest or elder who will choose one of them as a ritual sacrifice. Here is Bausch’s proto-male/female dynamic. He is a tempting as well as a menacing figure, and the Chosen One is driven as much by fear as by desire.
Bausch astonished audiences in 1995 when she appeared onstage for a solo in Danzón. It was her first new role in the repertory since Café Müller premiered 17 years earlier. Accompanied by the plaintive soul-scrapings of a Latin American singer-guitarist and partnered by an enormous fish swimming in projection behind her, Bausch stands rather diffidently, continuously stretching her long, longing arms outward and then recalling them back into and around herself again. This study in rhythmic flow—the spatial tension, the interchange of opposing forces, the organic cycling of outward and inward, the alternation between self and other, the dueling desires to reach out and to withdraw—is as explicit a manifesto as Bausch is likely ever to offer.
Her lyrical, even romantic, movement style persists from her Juilliard days, when the subtle interplay among arms, neck, head, and chest was already richly suggestive. Hers has always been an elegant and vulnerable neck, and her chest a sensitive register of emotion. Bausch arcs her arms with such concise intention that it looks like a narrative gesture; she requires only minimal vocabulary to explain herself.
Bausch’s aura is alluring, because she is present, even sensuously engaged, and yet still remote. Her figure is frail and her eyes veiled as she strokes her skin and waves her arms as if slipping through a summer pond. She is a creature both detached and deeply empathic—the sleepwalker in Café Müller, or the blind princess in Fellini’s "And the Ship Sails On." Each one sees, but with eyes closed. And what she envisions is meta/physical.
Bausch’s inward gaze is replicated in her dances. Composed, as they often are, of the performers’ re-enacted memories, fantasies and dreams, there is something charged behind the actions, something felt but not quite visible, that compels us. Onstage, the performers are Bausch’s doppelgängers, bright and dark, real and projected. Dominique Mercy, for example, carries her sense of existential isolation, and humor; the large, implacable Jan Minarik plays the bogeyman. Early 20th-century dance theorist Rudolf von Laban (who taught Jooss, who taught Bausch) had a beautiful phrase for it, the way that dance inhabits a larger social and psychic space than its own impulse. Remembered gesture is what he called those lingering, inexorable, imprinted shadows that haunt Bausch’s dancing body.