It’s
interesting because there is no technique or classes to be taught that would be
Bausch style. She has influenced the dance world in a different Modern
approach.
She created the
Tanztheater Wuppertal and she had an enormous impact in the German community in
Opera and Cinema. Bausch threads her knowledge of
dance, speech, and theatrical effects and music. But she is influenced not only
by her life but her dancers’ lives. In rehearsals, she finds a way to make her
dancers express, explore, and spill out their secrets. One of her biggest
influence is the surrealism and theatrical boundaries. Most influence that she
uses in her works and choreography is with the people she has trained with. Kurt
Jooss, who was a leader of dance during the German Expressionism Movement, was
a teacher at the Folkwang Schule in Essen, Germany while Bausch was a young
girl studying. Bausch was also fortunate to get a scholarship to attend
Julliard in New York and her teachers there, Jose Limon, Paul Taylor, Antony
Tudor, and Paul Sanasardo were her influences. One artist that she never worked
with but followed his development of “dance theater” was Rudolph von Laban. His
idea of performing influenced Pina Bausch and is used in all of her work. She
understood movement from these people and they have influenced her to be what she
was and what she made from it.
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| Kurt Jooss |
I’m very interested on the theatrical influence that Laban had on Pina Bausch’s work. Her work delivers a message about different societal conventions and much about human behavior. It often challenges society’s rules on gender and the difference between nature and nurture. Using sounds, silence, volume, rhythms, music, space and light Pina is able to create an original stage form and give life to her aggressively realistic vision of contemporary society; her work is both timeless and unique.
ReplyDelete"I'm not interested in how people move; I'm interested in what makes them move." - Pina Bausch This quote says a lot about her aesthetic as a dancer, choreographer, and teacher. Pina was inspired by her dancers but did not tell them exactly how to move because it had to come from within. Could this be why she never developed or followed a specific technique? Was the movement open for interpretation? I also wonder if Pina Bausch required all of the dancers in her company to be technically trained and has she ever been inspired to create a piece by dancers or everyday people without technical training?
Pina's interest, I feel, truly lied within bringing out the passion within others. She is quoted to have said, "You just have to get crazier." I think that she let herself see someone for who they were and tried to enhance the emtions she needed for a specific piece. In this way, she didn't need to develop some sort of movement technique. Her technique was, in a sense, the way she went about pulling the honest emotion from her dancers as well as her specific way of choreographing her tanztheatre work. This being said, however, her dancers were trained with a background in ballet.
ReplyDelete-Brenna
So I think I might be kind of oblivious but I was wondering what the "Tanztheater Wuppertal" is? Did Pina ever talk about using Laban as an influence or was it more of an quiet influence? You said that Pina uses speech as well in her pieces, are there any specific words/poems/lyrics that she uses to help convey her sense of catastrophe and sadness?
ReplyDelete-Kym
Kym,
ReplyDeleteI haven't read much of what specifically influenced her from Laban but with the the Tanztheater Wuppertal, it was the theater in which she was put in charge as the director of dance. There she started to incorporate theater and dance which was unfamiliar at first but ended up being a main part of her work creations. From there, with speech, she worked with Operas and used pop music from Germany that speech was either her words, her dancers,and the poetic influences of the space she danced and lived in.
Kao