 |
| Pina Bausch |
.
Pina Bausch was German modern dance theatre performer and choreographer. Her pieces look mostly at emotions and risk taking when on stage. Her best known works are Café Muller in which the dancers run around the stage bouncing off walls tables and chairs and The Rite of Spring a thrilling piece in which the whole stage had to be covered in soil.
Bausch’s work has a deep emotional root to it which we have been looking at while learning about her in Devising 2. She will often ask her dancers quite personal questions about their life and then she uses the answers to create a dance. This created a deeper quality to the movement because they weren’t just dancing something that meant nothing to them.
In an interview with Valerie Lawson in 2002 she stated. "I loved to dance because I was scared to speak. When I was moving, I could feel.''
This shows a greater meaning to her dances and proves that she is creating work because it’s she’s creating something to make the dancers and the audience feel.We took part in a task where had to think of a song and then think of a memory that connects with that song. We then had to write it down and pass the piece of paper to another person to have them read it out.
I found it really strange to hear someone reading about my life and telling my story to the whole class. We then had to work with that partner and create a piece surrounding our stories to communicate them to the audience. I felt that the piece that I and my partner came up with was really well thought out and was set around her story. When we revised the piece we added things to accommodate more risks which made the piece better.
“Pina Bausch had already gone way beyond any previous concept of the ‘interpretation’ of any libretto. She did not ‘choreograph material’, but took instead individual elements of the plot as a point of departure for her own associations of wealth”.
She puts together her dances in a completely different way from any other choreographers of her time making herself one of the most innovative dance theatre choreographers of her time. We looked deeper into the ways her pieces are put together and although there doesn’t seem to be any linear order to her pieces they all seem to tell a story.
 |
| 'Cafe Muller' |
In Café Muller there is this one point where a coupe are stood looking at each other and then someone else comes and starts manipulating them into positions. The male one of the couple keeps picking up the woman and dropping her. This is all part of the way she works and risks that she takes with her dancers. You can see the physical strain of the dancers as they give everything to the movement and the pieces that they are in.
“Rite of Spring for instance returns to Stravinsky’s root of a pagan fertility ritual …”
 |
| 'Rite of Spring' |
In our final piece we looked at all of the techniques we had learnt about Bausch and turned it into an ensemble piece. We looked at the ritualistic feel of some of her pieces and thought about how we could adapt that for our piece. We focused a lot on one part of Rite of Spring in particular which is when the women seem to be choosing someone to take a red artefact up to the a man. We looked at the movement and the sounds they were making using, their own bodies, to layer with the music.
We started off by asking us about our worst nightmares and the way we reacting to them. One theme which was common in all of the pieces was the theme of death so we decided to go with this loosely for our piece. There was a point when we turned on one of the group members and gave them up as an offering to the ‘Angel of Death’. We showed this by throwing her up in the air and then running around the space as if offering her up.
I feel that we worked well together as a large group and used a lot of the techniques prominent in Bausch’s work. We learnt about taking risks and putting all of our effort emotionally and physically to create a highly polished innovative piece.
By Joshua Williams
Bibliography
CARTER, A. (1998) The Routledge dance studies reader. London, Routledge.
CLIMENHAGGA, R. (2009) Pina Bausch. New York, Routledge.
LAWSON, V. (Year) Pina: Queen of The Deep WWW. Available from: http://www.ballet.co.uk/magazines/yr_02/feb02/interview_bausch.htm [6/2/2012].
No comments:
Post a Comment