The Emancipation of Dance: Pina Bausch and the Wuppertal Dance Theatre

Abstract

When Pina Bausch took over the direction of the Wuppertal Dance Theatre in the 1973/74 season , she introduced a caesura in the stagnating development of the German ballet scene. Her works moved more and more away from the perception of dance held by classical ballet, and from modem dance; they created a mixed form composed of modes of genuine dance and theatre, modes that were given a new use under the term "dance theatre." In this regard, the production of the Wuppertal Dance Theatre cannot be seen in isolation as an aesthetically avant-garde phenomenon. Its historical beginnings reach back to the development of German expressive dance in the 1920' S and '30'S. It is in this tradition that Pina Bausch, with her training at the Folkwang Institute in Essen, should be regarded. Other factors also enter in the discussion: demands for an organic code of movement, for mimetically stated expression in the sense of the Expressionist expressive dance movement, as opposed to the ideal of autonomous technique in classical ballet; and the impulses of surrealism. Different developments in the theatre recently, by Bob Wilson, for instance, or by Dario Fo or Heiner Muller, also shape dance. It is a question of new didactics based on Brecht. The motto "Theatre of Experience" ("Theater der Erfahrung") emphasizes the way in which the works of the Wuppertal Dance Theatre are to be regarded. This in turn determines the emancipatory significance of Pina Bausch for the whole artistic genre: emancipation of dance to its own modes.

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