Wuppertal obituary

The city of Wuppertal is considered to be remembered for two people.One is Friedrich Engels and the other one is Pina Bausch.Apart from anything else they both have created "a strong and engaged sympathy for the misery of the underprivileged classes of bourgeois society".
Bausch was born on July 27,1940(five years before word-war II comes to an end).She grew up in Solingen,a city that tried to heal the wounds of a catastrophic war,within a family that struggled to make a living.She studied at the Essen Folkwang School where Kurt Yooss became the catalytic factor of her perception of dance(dance with a message).She was trained in a mixed technique of ballet and modern dance and she quickly stood out from the rest of the class."Her stark,eartbound personality,the stare of her eyes which always seemed to look under the surface of things to reveal the innermost sorrow and pity and the massive weight of each of her movements made it impossible to overlook her".She moved to New York with a scholarship where she studied with Antony Tudor,Jose Limon,Paul Taylor and many othes.In 1973,she took over the artistic direction of the then-called Wuppertal Opera Ballet and she tried to create her own codes in order to express her conception of the world around her.The subject matter of her work identified by Norbert Servos is the following:"Her pieces deal with love and fear,longing and loneliness,frustration and terror.Man's exploitation of man(and in particular,man's expoitation of women) in world made to conform to the former's ideas),about remembering and forgetting.They are aware of the difficulties of human coexistence and seek ways to reduce the distance between two or more individuals".But could her work be considered political?The Bausch herself denies that,by pointing out that "there are no political references or comments in my work".Pina studied in depth and in details the 'characters' of her pieces influenced by the psychological portraits of Antony Tudor as well as the analysis and continuous observation of the social web.She supported that her "pieces grow from inside out" while in one of her interviews she confessed that "the steps have always come from somewhere else.They never came from the legs.And working on the movements we always do that in between.And then we're alays making little dance phrases which we keep in mind.In earlier days i may have still started with a movement out of worry or panic,and dodged the question.Nowadays i start with the questions".Bausch used to say repeatedly that she is "not interested in how people move,but in what moves them".Hypocrites,well-disposed,living in fake state of awareness.Pesronalities that are about to fall apart from second to second,insecure and blunderers,capable of saying the wrong things in the wrong time.Her heroes were vulnerable,imperfect,children trapped in adult bodies.Scenes which cause melancholy,sadness,pain and inevitably driving the audience to recall personal memories that often cause uneasiness and bitterness.Not to mention that she has been accused as a "pornographer of pain"....Apart from enemies,Bausch has of course a fanatic audience around the world.Richard Siks considers that her contribution to dance is a process not a product:dancetheatre is in constant state of change..and poorer now that dancetheater's pioneer passed away....
farewell Pina