Pina Bausch had an outrageous idea, retrospectively a no-brainer: that the preposterousness of human existence, so thoroughly explored by the other arts, could also inspire modern dance.
Putting that idea into practice would yield a marvelous series of adjustments, crumplings, readjustments, tenacious embraces, accelerating failures and spectacular successes of physical communication. And Bausch’s work became at once more mesmerizing and more prone to audience walkouts. Who knew physical honesty could yield such artiness?
Yerba Buena’s rich retrospective, To the Limit: Pina Bausch on Film, reintroduces the famed German choreographer, who died within days of a cancer diagnosis at age 68 last year, and reiterates the pleasure and privilege of watching her work. What a figure she cut, with that long forlorn face and ropy frame, like a Giacometti sculpture come to life. Her performances, accordingly, could seem sometimes like perfectly embodied anguish.
“Bausch has left a deep print in America,” Joan Acocella wrote in the New Yorker in 2002. “In New York’s ‘downtown’ dance scene of the late eighties, dancing was largely replaced by a violent sort of drama, in which, very often, someone was dying and the audience was to blame. If I had to name the reasons for that, the first would be AIDS and the second would be the 1984 American debut of Bausch’s company, the Tanztheater Wuppertal.”
How’s that for a legacy? Well, incomplete. Yes, Basuch liked to work in sketch-like scenarios, and in a sexually charged theater of cruelty, often delineating the uneasy boundaries between heavy petting and patting down, between slapstick comedy and sadism. But as she aged, she lightened up. Some of what her performances describe is joy.