Monday, February 20, 2012

Pina Bausch


Biography



Pina Bausch was born in Solingen, Germany on July 27, 1940. 
Dancing at the age of 14, she danced at the Folkwangschule in Essen which was then directed by Kurt Jooss. After her graduation, she received a scholarship to study abroad to The United States; specifically Julliard in New York City. She has worked with Paul Taylor, Antony Tudor, and Jose Limon in which she traveled to Spain and performed at New American Ballet and the Metropolitan Opera Ballet Company. She then joined Kurt Jooss as his artistic director and soloist with the Folkwang Ballet Company and from there she started to create her own choreographic pieces. The most common theme with Bausch's works show female and male interactions. Whether it is simple dialogue to the structure of repetition, Bausch always had a surreal nature to her works. She was married to Rolf Borzik who died of Leukemia and then she partnered with Ronald Kay that together, they had a son named Salomon. Pina Baush died of an unstated form of cancer in the year 2009. In 2011, her company members and director Wim Wenders filmed a documentary of her works and the film has $13,992,869 dollars at the box office total worldwide. 



Pina was a woman with the innate ability to see the depth within a person.  To guide someone towards the next step in their lives with as few as six words, "You just need to get crazier!"  This ability of hers is what made people from across the world flock to see her choreographic works.  Pina Bausch was able to capture the essence of a feeling, moment, even humanity in her works and this is why she will forever be an inspiration for our world.


3 comments:

  1. Do you know why or have an insight as to why Pina's inspiration for many of her works were female and male interactions? Did this have anything to do with her home life growing up (mother/father relationship)? Also, how did her choreography change before she met her husband, while he was living, and after he died?
    -Kym

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  2. That's interesting and I'll have to look into that. I am familiar with her interest in interactions between men and women from the PINA movie but I'll look deeply into her inspirations and her life growing up.

    -Kao

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  3. 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.
    -Brenna

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