Pina Bausch

Pina Bausch is a German dancer and choreographer (1940 - 2009) she pioneered a style of dance which combined everyday life with a poetic quality, she was able to do this when given a role as a choreographer where she renamed her ensemble Tanztheater Wuppertal.

Looking at some of her own works as well as those inspired by her on YouTube, I'm amazed at the beauty of the movement with all the pieces requiring a huge amount of skill and trust e.g. in one clip I saw, it required the girl to fall forward till nearly falling on her face without putting her hands out and relying on her partner to catch her by the shoulders. Although I do not think I would ever be able to execute something of that beauty with that amount of skill, I'd love to give the type of dance a go and have a go at choreographing something like it.

You can see echoes from Pina's childhood in her dance pieces; music is heard, people come and go, and talk of their yearning for happiness, but there is also the influence of her experience of WW2 as there are sudden bursts of panic and fear. 

After already having been trained in ballet, at the age of 14 she attended Folkwang School in Essen and studied under Kurt Jooss who was a significant person in pre- and post war modern dance, teaching his students both the freedom of modern dance whilst keeping a classical form allowing Pina to break away from the restraints of classical ballet. 

With funding, Pina attended Julliard in New York for a year as a 'Special Student' as this was seen as the centre of dance with classical ballet being reinvented and modern dance being advanced. She decided to stay another year but had to fund herself so got a job at the Metropolitan Opera where she gained a respect for Opera equal to that of her love of dance.

She returned to work with Kurt Jooss in Folkwang Tanzstudio and eventually began to choreograph her own pieces winning prestigious prizes for her work.  In 1973 the director of the Wuppertal theatres Arno Wüstenhöfer appointed her head of the Wuppertal Ballet, which she soon renamed the Tanztheater Wuppertal.

In an unusual move while producing a version of Shakespeare's Macbeth, Pina was able to finally find her form for her work: dream-like, poetic imagery and body language. She took people's essential emotions as its starting point allowing the Tanztheatre Wuppertal to be understood throughout the world, sparking an international choreograph revolution.