Pina Bausch's Role Of Modern Dance

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Pina Bausch was a German dancer, performer, and choreographer of Modern dance who was born July 27, 1940 in Solingen, Germany. At a young age, she performed in the restaurant her parents owned, which is where her parents saw her potential for dance. After performing with the children’s ballet of Solingen, she enrolled at the Folkwang School in 1955 at the age of fifteen and became a member of Kurt Jooss’s performing company. Bausch later became an exchange student at the Julliard School in New York where she studied under Limón, Horst, Tudor, and the Graham faculty. She took classes with Paul Taylor and attended Jacob’s Pillow summer school while studying in the United States. She also danced for a season with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet …show more content…

With Bausch’s neo-expressionist approach, their performances were well received by audiences, welcoming a “return to human values in dance” (McCormick and Reynolds 642). Audiences applauded their raw emotion. However, after multiple performances and visits, people became exhausted with Bausch’s obsessiveness in her choreography. During the 1980s, choreographic violence started to become an issue and some suggested that she crossed a line in portraying trauma. Anna Kisselgoff, who endorsed Bausch’s aggressiveness, said “Bausch’s realism is ultimately a form of cynicism which confirms and generalizes the evils it depicts” (McCormick and Reynolds 642).
Bausch grew up in post-World War II Germany, which is shown in her works through abrupt outbursts of fear and danger. Bausch also lived in a time where people were heavily experimental in the entirety of the art world, not just in dance. German expressionism played a major role in influencing Bausch’s work (Climenhaga 45). Bausch started making work in the midst of postmodernism, in which people rejected the “ironic rethinking” of the past (Bowman and Pollock 114). There was a loss of innocence to challenge the darker side of modernity and reality during this time that Bausch presented in her …show more content…

She narrates her stories and tells them through a sequence of scenes, insofar the audience can separate themselves from the scene. In Bausch’s work, her dancers and actors usually use their real names and recount their own anecdotes, giving insight into their own lives in the real world. This dissolves the line between illusion and reality and forces the audience to observe an authentic reality instead of a “story,” as many dances tend to do. She also tends to use almost empty stages, instead relying on the dancers and their props and costumes to convey the narrative. Bausch’s works stem from “observations of the human condition where she is the observer and the storyteller, bringing to stage, themes and stories she discovers in the quotidian life” (Ebrahimian 61). Whereas most ballets focus on the storytelling of fables, Bausch focused on themes that her and her performers “wished to explore, or have discovered, in observing their society: Themes often include and tell of childhood memories, falling in and out of love, the coming together and separation between people, and stories of hope and despair between two people or groups of people” (Ebrahimian

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