The Afterlife of Pina Bausch

The American première of the late, legendary choreographer’s “Água” shows what can be passed on to a younger generation and what can’t.
Previously unseen in the U.S. Bauschs “Água” draws inspiration from São Paulo.
Previously unseen in the U.S., Bausch’s “Água” draws inspiration from São Paulo.Photograph by Natalie Keyssar for The New Yorker

I have always loved the dances of Pina Bausch and her company, Tanztheater Wuppertal. Their performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where they have appeared since 1984, were her own theatre of the absurd: I remember seeing, that year, her astonishing “Rite of Spring” (1975), with the stage thickly covered in dirt and the dancers flinging their spines with a violence that was almost frightening to watch. And the melancholy “Café Müller” (1978), in which Pina herself was a fragile woman in a white nightgown who walked barefoot, eyes shut, arms faintly extended, as a man rushed to shove tables and chairs aside to save her from smashing into them. She said that she could find her way into that ghostly body only if her eyes, behind closed lids, looked down, not forward. That’s how intense she was as an artist.

Over the years, her dances grew lighter—to darker effect—as she developed her method of working. Rather than “making a dance,” she asked her dancers questions—“What do you do, in order to be loved?” was one—and they responded with stories and movements from their own lives and imaginations. With them, she would elaborate, cut, compile, and integrate the material into a dance. Many of her dancers and collaborators joined her soon after her start in Wuppertal, in 1973, and stayed for decades. A whole repertory developed out of these stories, and out of these people. (“She is a vampire,” one of her longtime dancers noted.)

The result was an uncanny mixture of spoken word, gesture, dance, and music. There was little plot, and her humorous and often ironic cabaret-tinged vignettes had a distinctive look: the women in spike heels and silky, lingerie-like gowns and the men in deadpan bourgeois slacks or suits. (But there was also plenty of cross-dressing, outrageous plumage, even tulle and toe shoes. “Das ist Kalbfleisch”—veal—one dancer proclaimed, as she stuffed meat into her toe shoe.) The dancers performed, memorably, against simple café tables, but also in a field of eight thousand (fake) pink carnations; or in the pouring rain (requiring thousands of gallons of water); or, in 1989, amid the ruins of a high wall that had cracked and fallen. Set against these theatrical elements, her formal dances, abstract and often performed barefoot in flowing materials, seemed sacrosanct—an arena of pure soul.

The feel of the work was distinctly German. Bausch was part of a generation that, in the late sixties, rejected the silence of their parents during the Nazi era and also the West German capitalist miracle that followed. Her themes were sex, memory, cruelty, and the strange habits of the human animal. Born in 1940 in Solingen, a town that was heavily bombed by the Allies, Bausch later recalled air-raid shelters and a bomb that fell on the family home; for a time, she lived with an aunt in nearby Wuppertal, where the shelter was larger. Her parents ran a small hotel and café—the source of “Café Müller” and her somnambular dance. When she was twelve, and her father fell ill, she even helped run the place, but mainly she and the neighborhood kids played make-believe in the war ruins. (She liked to pretend she was Marika Rökk, an actress sometimes known as the Nazi Ginger Rogers, who, it later turned out, was a Soviet spy.) At night, she hid under the café tables, where she could listen to adult conversations.

Some of her closest collaborators were part of this generation, too: Rolf Borzik, who designed costumes and sets and was also her partner, was born in 1944 in Poland and grew up largely in Germany. After his death, in 1980, she brought in Peter Pabst, also born in 1944 in Poland and raised in Germany. Marion Cito, a dancer and a costume designer, was from Berlin, born in 1938. Bausch’s company eventually became more diverse—at one point, there were twenty-nine dancers from seventeen countries—and this, too, was a way of breaking with Germany and its past. So was a series of co-productions with foreign cities—Istanbul, Palermo, São Paulo—which the company visited and absorbed, before fashioning new (still very German) dances out of the resulting material.

When Bausch died suddenly, of cancer, in 2009, at the age of sixty-eight, a painful drama of confusion and grief ensued. The dancers rallied and continued to perform her work, and two of her closest associates, Dominique Mercy and Robert Sturm, ran the company until 2013, when Lutz Förster, another veteran Bausch performer, took over. In 2017, Adolphe Binder was brought in to commission new dances that might fill the choreographic void that Pina had left, but this move soon failed amid recriminations and lawsuits. In 2022, the French choreographer Boris Charmatz, known for his conceptual dances, was hired to lead the troupe, but by then many of the stalwart, aging dancers had retired and been replaced by a new generation.

So the company that came to BAM earlier this month with the U.S. première of “Água,” from 2001, was new: Pina without Pina, and Pina without Pina’s dancers; only two of the dancers in Brooklyn had worked with her. “Água,” which grew out of the company’s visit to São Paulo, is a lush and visually spectacular work, with a musical playlist of some thirty artists, many of them iconically Brazilian (Caetano Veloso, Antônio Carlos Jobim), some not (Tom Waits). The costumes are a pageant of brightly colored gowns and richly patterned fabric. As the show begins, projections (by Pabst) onto curved walls send us rushing through palm trees; a woman stands onstage eating an orange with orgasmic delight, as she tells a man who holds a mike to her mouth about a cramp she had in her leg.

From there, we are whooshed past drummers, into rain forests, over water and onto beaches, in a dizzying tour, as the dancers drink, seduce, fight, laugh, loll on couches, play games. On the virtual beach, for example, they hold towels in front of them which are printed with naked bodies, to seemingly change sex. In another scene, an elegantly dressed woman wearing an old boot on one foot asks a man in the audience where he is from, and when he says Indiana she kicks off the boot and as it lands declares, “You see, this means freezing. So, tomorrow, Indiana will be a freezing day!” She then goes on to the next audience member to further demonstrate this method of weather prediction. Throughout, there are plenty of full-bodied Pina-style dances with intense and spiralling motion—an escape from the escapism.

But—and it is a big but—Pina’s irony and spirit elude the dancers, and they romp through the work as if it were standup comedy or a Disney cartoon. Julie Shanahan, a company veteran still fully possessed of her Pina gait and grit as she drunkenly warns a waiter, “Do not pass the line,” looks out of place; this is no longer her world. It is a circus, kids playing around, flirting and self-satisfied, as they grinningly break the fourth wall. Even the dancing suffers from the sunny disposition of the dancers, who mistake irony for vanity and futility for fun. The result is smooth, not serrated; if Bausch was hinting at human folly and extinction, it is lost in interpretation. “Everything has to do with the person who is performing,” Pina once noted. “If that person is replaced, it becomes just a role.”

The dancers all know the problem, of course, and they are doing their best. (A dancer learning a role for one piece interviewed the man who had originated it about what he had been going through emotionally when the dance was made.) But, by the time orangutans were swinging through trees (orangutans in Brazil?) and the dancers were spitting water at one another, dwarfed against footage of Iguazú Falls, all I could see was ghosts. Ghosts of the dancers that were and of the company that was. The feel, the environment, the gestures, the voices, the time that made Pina’s work both life-giving and poised at the abyss are gone. If these young dancers have something to say, they will need their own form, not Pina Bausch’s. Her Germany is not their Germany, and dance, like history, is nontransferrable. ♦