FESTIVAL FEATURES | Sweet Mambo
10 THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT PINA BAUSCH
One of the legendary choreographer’s fi nal pieces of work, Sweet Mambo, comes to Edinburgh at the end of August. Colin Robertson offers an introduction to the fearless dancer’s career
BIGGEST FANS
1CRITICS WEREN’T ALWAYS HER Today, Philippina ‘Pina’ Bausch is recognised as one of the most inl uential choreographers in contemporary dance and a pioneer of dance theatre. But it wasn’t always that way: critics were divided when her work was i rst unleashed. It was seen as being too ugly to be called dance and needlessly repetitive. Perhaps most scathing of all was The New Yorker’s dance critic Arlene Croce’s denouncement of it as ‘theatre of dejection’ and ‘pornography of pain’.
2GROWING UP WITH PARENTS WHO OWNED A RESTAURANT INSPIRED HER PIECE CAFÉ MÜLLER
Born in Solingen, Germany (known as the
‘city of blades’ for its heavy manufacturing industry of swords, knives and razors), Bausch was the youngest of three children, and her siblings were ten years older than her. She would often i nd herself spending a great deal of time in her parents’ restaurant, amusing herself by gazing at the customers who walked in, running the gamut of emotions from pleasure to pain, tenderness to bad tempers. She would i ll in the blanks and create back stories relating to their lives. It’s these memories which inspired her seminal work Café Müller.
3 SHE WAS INFLUENCED BY THE TIME When she was 18, Bausch won a scholarship to the prestigious Juilliard School
SHE SPENT IN THE UNITED STATES
in New York City. Arriving in 1960 and studying under esteemed choreographers such as José Limón and Paul Taylor, her time in the city was brief. She returned to her native Germany in 1962, but she credits this as a formative period of her life. This is evidenced throughout her career in the use of multimedia and her fondness for breaking the fourth wall; two things which she arguably picked up from her experience in NYC during that experimental period in the early 60s. 12 THE LIST FESTIVAL 14–25 Aug 2014
4HER EARLY WORKS COURTED Bausch’s earlier works were often brutal in their rawness and were extremely
CONTROVERSY
direct. As such, they would often provoke strong reactions from the audience, who would do everything from simply walk out in horror to hurl objects at the stage. ‘My i rst production Fritz was considered outlandish,’ Bausch said in an interview with Indian dance critic Sunil Kothari. ‘There was disbelief and also open hostility, and you will not believe, people threw oranges, banged the doors. My dancers from the audience came on stage, picked up a bucket of water and when a dancer ducked her head, water spilled over the audience . . . this was all shocking for the audience.’
5 SHE PUSHED HER DANCERS TO ‘Pina? You work for her . . . I think it’s like joining a cult,’ Sylvie Guillem, the revered
EXTRAORDINARY LENGTHS
French ballerina, said about Bausch. She often shocked audiences and those in the wider dance community by the formidable workload she put on her dancers. She pushed them to gruelling lengths during her shows with the aim that they would be completely immersed in the experience, leaving them emotionally and physically spent. However, many of those on the inside were happy to oblige. One of her former dancers, Jo Ann Endicott, remarked: ‘You meet Pina, you fall in love.’
SHE WAS SCARED TO SPEAK
6 SHE TOOK UP DANCING BECAUSE Throughout her life, Bausch was an intensely private i gure. Her personality in private was noted for being at odds with her work; gentle, soft-spoken and sensitive, compared to the obsessive, acerbic and insolent tenor of her pieces. Speaking about how she felt going to dance class for the i rst time as a young girl, she admitted: ‘I
loved to dance because I was scared to speak. When I was moving, I could feel.’
Playing the part of a blind Duchess, she appeared in Federico Fellini’s 1982 i lm And the Ship Sails On. 7 SHE WAS IN A FELLINI MOVIE... 8 . . . AND HER WORK PLAYS A KEY
She also appeared in Pedro Almodóvar’s Talk To Her. The Spanish director used
PART IN AN ALMODÓVAR FILM TOO
Bausch and her company’s performance of the ballet Café Müller to frame the narrative and communicate the ambivalence that the protagonists feel.
ST. VINCENT
9 SHE INFLUENCED DAVID BOWIE AND Bausch’s inl uence transcends the dance world. David Bowie had her in mind when designing his elaborate and expansive Glass Spider Tour in 1987. Ethereal avant-pop chanteuse St. Vincent also admitted that the choreography on her recent tour, and subsequent Saturday Night Live performance, were heavily inl uenced by Bausch’s work. She said: ‘There’s some choreography that I’m doing in my show – and when I say choreography, I mean basically me bastardising Pina Bausch.’
10 SHE BROUGHT A ‘HIPPO’ ON Bausch often kept her cards close to her chest when talking to the press.
STAGE
As a result, numerous stories about her circulated, ranging from the fantastical to farcical. Among the most bizarre was that she brought a live hippo onstage during the run of Arien in New York in 1985. In fact, it wasn’t a live hippo: just two men in a hippo costume. Sweet Mambo, Playhouse, 473 2000, 23—25 Aug, 7.30pm, £10–£32.