Backstage at the Wuppertal Opera, Pina Bausch is making preparations for the final performance of Iphigenie auf Tauris, a revival of her 1974 dance-opera based on the Gluck opera. A little earlier she has given the company a point-by-point critique of the previous night's performance. "Mostly I tell them what was not right," she says gently. "I sit in the auditorium every night. I make many notes."
Now, as they file past Bausch's willowy, almost sepulchral figure in the corridor, the dancers seem somewhat bashful and apologetic, though one or two give playful military salutes. With an astounding range of physiques, types, sizes, personalities, ages, it's immediately obvious that this is not a typical troupe of flawless ballet drones. The angular, imposing figure of the Brazilian Ruth Amarante, who plays Iphigenie, is in striking contrast to the tiny birdlike Asian dancer, Na Young Kim. And, despite the incandescence of their performances, Beatrice Libonati, Nazareth Panadero and Bausch veteran Dominique Mercy - all well into their 40s - have reached an age when they would have long since been put out to pasture by more conventional companies.
As they take up positions for Iphigenie, which dates from Bausch's more traditionally balletic early period, the choreographer breaks into a radiant smile: "Each of them is such an individual personality," she says proudly. "It is difficult for them to dance in a piece like Iphigenie. I love everybody in the company so much and everyone is so special, that I wanted to find something different for each one to do. It is necessary to see what they can do in the other works, where everyone is just themselves."
One of the seminal performance figures of the 20th century, Bausch is a choreographer who has expanded the possibilities of modern dance, opening up the genre to snatches of dialogue, stage visions and chaotic intrusions from everyday life. Her influence is evident not only in those such as William Forsythe and Maguy Marin, who have consciously followed her lead, but in practically every corner of the dance world where overtly theatrical elements have simply been absorbed into the idiom: "She has basically re-invented dance," says William Forsythe. "She is one of the greatest innovators of the past 50 years. Pina needs to examine the world this way. She is a category of dance unto herself. Dance-theatre didn't really exist before she invented it."
Meticulously unstructured and freeform, the works themselves lack any of the usual, reassuring reference points such as plot, character, even coherent meaning. Invariably dressed in evening wear of the 1930s, the dancers appear on stage, tell simple, often mundane stories, engage in childish games and exaggerated courting rituals, fling themselves on the ground, scream, whoop, giggle, growl and cry. The males seem to spend a disproportionate amount of time in drag, while the females tend to occupy grotesque, overblown caricatures of female sexuality. Accompanying music can range from German folk songs to Stravinsky to PJ Harvey.
Yet, from this improvised chaos, beauty bubbles to the surface - the serene, semi-naked accordion player who roams through Carnations (1982); or the poignant scene in Legend Of Chastity, first performed in 1979, when a lone figure tells the story of a goldfish trained to live on land that almost drowns when returned to the water. Bausch's themes are positively Strindbergian: loss, loneliness, grief, death, leave-taking and the tortuous relations between the sexes. But there is also wicked humour too, in the fluttery bourrées of 1986's Viktor performed with a bloody hunk of meat protruding from the dancer's pointe shoes, or in the mermaids' swimming lesson of Masurca Fogo, which opens this week at Sadler's Wells.
Much of this material is carefully distilled from the dancers' own experiences, using Bausch's famous question-and-answer approach: "Pina asks questions," says Jo Ann Endicott, who has been with the company for almost 30 years. "Sometimes it's just a word or a sentence. Each of the dancers has time to think, then gets up and shows Pina his or her answer, either danced, spoken, alone, with partner, with props with everyone, whatever. Pina looks at it all, takes notes, thinks about it." Famously, Bausch refuses to discuss the work explicitly and in rehearsals never reveals its underlying themes or possible future direction: "Even the dancers have no idea," Endicott claims. "It's like a real big secret existing inside her - waiting, simmering, exploding."
Given the difficult and disorienting nature of the work, critical reaction has not always been enthusiastic: "Silly, empty, stupid, self-indulgent, self-congratulatory," railed Clive Barnes, theatre critic of the New York Times. New Yorker dance critic Arlene Croce dismissed the work as the "pornography of pain" and Bausch herself as "an entrepreneuse who fill theatres with projections of her self-pity".
The most ferociously negative reaction came from citizens of the German city of Wuppertal, where Bausch and her company have been based since 1973, who, right up to the early 80s, viewed Bausch as an avant-garde anti-Christ: "They would bang the doors and leave," remembers dancer Meryl Tankard. "Sometimes they would throw oranges at us when we were trying to dance. Once a man got up on stage and took a bucket of water I had as a prop and tried to throw it over one of the other dancers who was repeating a poem over and over. But she ducked and the water went all over the audience."
This was more than compensated for by the luminaries who began making pilgrimages to Wuppertal, among them those who became avid Bausch supporters - Susan Sontag, Robert Wilson, Peter Brook, Robert Lepage. "Pina's accomplishment is enormous," says her friend, the American choreographer Paul Sanasardo, "and it is amazing that she has managed to do it all in Wuppertal. I mean, who ever heard of Wuppertal before Pina, except as some little industrial city in Germany? It's hard to believe she pulled that together away from the traditional metropolitan centres of London or New York."
Even more intriguing is the fact that all of this has been achieved by a woman who is, at least on the surface, shy and reticent. Dressed invariably in dark tones, always sucking on a Camel cigarette or draining a cup of coffee, Bausch speaks in a low, halting, gentle voice. Tankard recalls: "When I first came to Wuppertal, I spoke absolutely no German, but I did notice that there there was one word she kept saying again and again: ' vielleicht .' And I thought this must be a word that meant a lot to her whole approach. So I asked one of the others what it meant, and it turned out that ' vielleicht ' was the German for 'maybe'." However, this fragile-looking woman controls almost every aspect of the Wuppertal Tanztheater: "No decision is made without her involvement, from the temperature of the heating system to the colours we use on the poster," says Matthias Schmiegelt, the company manager.
During the process of creating a new piece, she is engulfed in a miasma of uncertainty and self-doubt: "The anguish that she goes through is enormous," says her partner Ronald Kay, who lives with her in a modest Wuppertal apartment not far from the theatre. "She comes home like a heap of ashes. I have learned to look at it from a distance. To be absolutely outside of it is the only way I can help."
But these insecurities are always tempered by Bausch's ferocious determination, which pushes her to demand miracles from herself and her dancers: "She works in the rehearsal room from 10 in the morning, and rehearsals don't end till late in the evening," continues Kay. "She comes home at about 10 at night, we eat, and then she sits there till two or three o'clock getting an idea of what it was all about, what can be kept, what are the little jewels of the piece. And then she gets up at seven, sometimes even earlier, to prepare. She always manages to keep the same intensity."
Philippine Bausch was born on July 27 1940, in the small German town of Solingen, not far from Wuppertal, the third child of August Bausch, proprietor of a small hotel and restaurant, and his wife Anita. Pina's brother, Roland, and sister, also Anita, were both almost a decade older, and her parents were often absorbed by the family business, which meant that the young girl was often left alone to amuse herself: "My parents didn't have so much time for me," Pina remembers, "so I was always around the restaurant very late. You have no family life. I was always up till midnight or one o' clock, or sitting under a table somewhere."
From a very young age, Bausch was constantly dancing, and her aptitude soon came to the attention of performers from the local Solingen theatre: "People from the chorus came sometimes to eat in the restaurant," Bausch recalls, "and they saw me always hopping about and doing handstands. So they took me to the children's ballet. All the children had to lie on their stomachs and put their legs behind their heads. And it was so easy for me to do that the teacher said: ' Du bist ein schlangenmensch ', which means something like 'You are a snake-person or a contortionist'. I thought that it was fantastic to be like that and afterwards always wanted to go back."
At 14, she a won a place at the Folkwang Ballet in Essen, which was run by the renowned German choreographer Kurt Jooss, one of the founding fathers of German Expressionist dance or ausdrucks- tanz , which combined movement, music, and dramatic elements. Consequently, Essen exposed Bausch to a variety of artistic disciplines: "At this time at the Folkwang, all the arts were together," she says. "It was not just the performing arts like music or acting or mime or dance, but there were also painters, sculptors, designers, photographer. If you just went to a little ballet school, the experience would have been entirely different."
Following her graduation from the Folkwang in 1958, Bausch won a scholarship from the German academic exchange service to continue her dance studies at the Juilliard School in New York. For a teenager who had barely ventured outside Westphalia, it was a daunting adventure. "I was just 18 when I stepped on that ship," she recalls now, shaking her head in disbelief, "I couldn't speak any English." Choreographer Donya Feuer, who took Bausch under her wing and became a life-long friend, remembers a young woman somewhat intimidated by New York: "She was very shy and cried a lot," says Feuer. "Everything was so foreign to her. We would have to walk her to the subway every evening until she felt secure. But once we saw what a gifted person she was, we did everything we could so she could be at ease."
Once in the rehearsal room, Bausch's timidity melted away, and her grace and radiance as a dancer immediately impressed her Juilliard teachers, who included Graham disciples Louis Horst and Mary Hinkson, as well as Jose Limon and Antony Tudor, who made her a member of the Metropolitan Opera Ballet company. She also worked with Paul Taylor at the New American Ballet.
However, it was in the 19th-Street studio of Feuer and another budding progressive choreographer named Paul Sanasardo that Bausch did her most interesting work. In 1961, they collaborated on a piece called Phases Of Madness, a series of consecutive solos danced to a score by Edgar Varèse, and later on a second evening-length ballet entitled In View Of God. Sanasardo, who had also seen Bausch dance at the Met and at Juilliard, remembers her magnetic quality in these pieces: "Pina had a great gift," he says, "She was an extremely beautiful dancer. Tudor had staged this piece at Juilliard in which Pina danced a section called 500 Arabesques, and she did it on point and it was wonderful. She had great flexibility. She was very lyrical and she also had a tremendous intensity."
As the collaboration blossomed into friendship, in the autumn of 1961 Bausch practically moved into the enormous loft that Feuer and Sanasardo rented above the studio. Almost immediately, however, it became apparent that she was not well: "Pina became extraordinarily thin,"says Sanasardo. "We were very concerned because we had great difficulty getting her to eat. It was confusing because we were all young and Pina didn't speak very much English. We were not sure if something was bothering her. And when we tried to talk to her, she would just say 'No, I'm fine, I'm fine'." In the end, Sanasardo and Feuer called on the help of Lucas Hoving, a dancer with the Jose Limon company and former teacher of Bausch's at Essen, who organised Bausch's safe passage back to Germany.
Bausch herself has never spoken about this probable eating disorder or to what degree it may have influenced themes of gender identity in her work, so exact details of its causes, course or consequences remain obscure. On her return to Germany she joined Kurt Jooss's new Folkwang Ballet in Essen and appears to have been well enough to dance the role of Caroline in Antony Tudor's Jardin aux Lilas when he visited Essen in 1962. But she was still uncomfortably thin, and her condition soon drew the attention of Jooss himself: "She was so thin that she had no strength," remembers Jean Cebron, who was a teacher at Folkwang at the time. "She lost a little control and she didn't look good really. So Kurt Jooss said that either she put on some weight or get out of the company. After that, she seems to have got better quite quickly."
Once recovered, Bausch established herself as one of the principal soloists while assisting Jooss on many of the pieces. On Jooss's departure at the end of the decade, Bausch took over as artistic director of what had become known as the Folkwang Tanzstudio, and began choreographing pieces of her own: Fragment in 1968 to the music of Béla Bartók, and Im Wind der Zeit in 1969, and in 1971, Actionen für Tänzer. "I never thought of being a choreographer," she says. "The only reason I made those pieces was because I wanted to express myself differently and I wanted to dance." Even in these early works, Bausch was already breaking away from Jooss and ausdruckstanz, and forging her own heretic style: "I didn't want to imitate anybody," she says. "Any movement I knew, I didn't want to use."
In 1973, Bausch was offered the post of director of the Ballett der Wupperthaler Buhnen. At first Bausch was reluctant - Wuppertal was grey and provincial and its inhabitants renowned for their conservative tastes: "Here, there was only a classical tradition," she says. But she was ultimately seduced by the immense potential of building up her own company as well as assurances of total artistic freedom, and began conscripting core members.
Her first production in Wuppertal was a strange little piece called Fritz, that was so eccentric and outlandish that even now she balks at reviving it: "There was hardly any music. It was like a suffocating atmosphere," says Jo Ann Endicott, who danced the role of the daughter in the piece. "It choked the audience it was so overpowering and strong, and nobody at the time was used to her style. There were weird characters and Pina herself played this huge grandmother who sat for most of the time in a chair, and then suddenly arose, big and pale and imposing."
After a reaction that spanned disbelief and open hostility, when the sparsely attended performances were interrupted by the jeers of outraged spectators, Bausch wisely retreated for her next pieces, the "dance-operas" Iphigenie auf Tauris and Orpheus und Eurydike (1975), both straightforward and overwhelming pieces of pure, diaphanous choreography. The culmination of Bausch's experiment in conventionality came with Frühlingsopfer, or Spring Opera, a movement triptych based on Stravinsky which climaxed with the classic Bausch version of The Rite Of Spring. In the piece, Bausch transformed the original narrative into a dark, ritualistic battle of the sexes in which sacrifice is symbolised by a red dress. Performed on a layer of topsoil, the dancers seem to write the incantatory movements into the dirt, panting audibly throughout.
After a version of the Seven Deadly Sins, the Brecht/Weill opera, which boasted a very precisely choreographed gang-rape scene, Bausch began work in 1977 on Blaubart - Bluebeard - a milestone in the development of her work. Voraciously inclusive of elements from opera to mime to regular straight theatre, Bluebeard was the first to fully realise Bausch's cross-genre ideal of dance-theatre, and largely replaces a "balletic" vocabulary with simple, repetitive everyday movements.
The dancers groan and scream or simply babble phrases from the arias that Bluebeard plays on a tape-recorder tethered to him like a leg iron. At the very onset Bluebeard brutally, almost casually rapes his wife and then repeatedly shoves her head into his crotch in a deeply disturbing scene of ritual humiliation: "It is not that I wanted to confront people," Bausch protests. "The misunderstanding is not that I love violence, it was quite the opposite. I was terrified of violence, but I wanted to understand the person doing the violence. That was the exploration."
By now, Bausch was beginning to formulate the question-and-answer format that would become the basis of her subsequent work. However, there were those among the company who found that the gruelling new approach left them battered and emotionally brutalised. In the period after Bluebeard, which produced Come Dance With Me, an exploration of sexual conflict loosely structured around traditional German folk songs, and the "dance operetta" Renate wandert aus, a deconstruction of gender stereotypes, the company was on the verge of meltdown: "At one stage I went on strike with one of the other dancers," says Jo Ann Endicott, "She was just asking us to do these amazing, weird, strange, brutal, sick kinds of things. On stage it all felt so naked and exposed, and I think it was just having an effect on us." Meryl Tankard, who joined the company in 1978, was also taken aback by the extent of Bausch's demands: "In one rehearsal, all the men in the company had to do six ways of groping you and kissing you and it was just like being raped. I was very disciplined and I would do as I was told. But I finally broke down crying."
To escape this increasingly tense atmosphere, Bausch briefly relocated, along with a select group of dancers, to the Schauspielhaus in nearby Bochum, for her next work, an adaptation of Macbeth entitled He Takes Her By the Hand and Leads Her into the Castle, the Others Follow. In a piece that seems fixated on childhood squabbles over the toys littering the stage, only a few motifs survive from Shakespeare's play. Bausch again chose a small group of dancers for the classic Café Müller, a starkly beautiful and unflinching 45-minute piece, in which the dancers hurtle through a stage littered with chairs. As they approach, the chairs are scrambled out of the way by an anonymous figure, while Bausch herself, dancing for the first time since 1973-74, slams herself against a wall.
After the claustrophobic intimacy of Café Müller, Bausch moved directly afterwards into a wide-open fin-de-siècle expanse for Kontakthof (Contact Yard), a riotous full-company work that satirised the courting rituals of the ballroom. The decade ended with two pieces that were particularly striking for the spectacular visual effects employed: Arias, in which the sodden dancers splash and gurgle their way through an onstage pool inhabited by a wallowing hippopotamus; and Legend Of Chastity, in which the performers scoot around in armchairs on castors while life-size alligators crawl across the stage.
None of these quirky, vivid tableaux would have been possible without the Dutch-born set and costume designer Rolf Borzik, who had forged the visual style of the Tanztheater right from its inception. Her romantic as well as professional partner, Borzik had been crucial in supporting Bausch through the frequent crises of creativity and had insulated her against the hostility of the Wuppertal audiences. So, it was cruel that just as the company was beginning to gain international recognition, Borzik was diagnosed with leukemia: "Very few people knew at first," says dancer Lutz Forster. "People in the company only got to know on a south-east Asian tour when he got too sick to continue and Pina had to stay with him."
Borzik's death in January 1980 was a huge blow to Bausch, and threw the whole future of the company into doubt: "I was so scared I wouldn't be able to continue," she says. "It was so important for me to do a piece right away, so that I wouldn't even have the chance to worry." The result, simply entitled 1980 - A Piece By Pina Bausch, is a wistful elegy that deals primarily with nostalgia and childhood games. Company members attribute the strangely upbeat tone to the desire to "distract ourselves from what had happened".
Bausch's personal life seems to have rebounded with equal rapidity. While touring Chile in summer 1980, she met a Chilean poet and professor of aesthetics and literature at the University of Chile named Ronald Kay: "Rolf Borzik died in January, and I met her at the end of July," says Kay, "so you can imagine that it was a very hard time for her. Borzik and Pina lived together, he was the stage designer of the company and his collaboration was essential to what became the Tanztheater. She lost a companion and a co-worker. In that sense she was a widow twice over."
Kay and Bausch met at a reception in the German embassy, there was an immediate affinity, and a relationship soon followed. "I met Pina without having seen any of her work,"says Kay, "I didn't even know who she was. But we began talking and we continued talking and we are still talking." The two got together in 1981 and shortly afterwards Bausch gave birth to her only child, Rolf-Salomen, named after Borzik.
Since 1980, Bausch's work has grown steadily more joyous and celebratory, in particular the plaintive, comic Danzon, created in 1995 around a Cuban dance and featuring Bausch onstage for the first time in over a decade; and Viktor, an ode to the city of Rome, which was seen at Sadler's Wells in 1999. Some put this development in her work down to the birth of her son, though Bausch herself attributes it more to the infusion of youth that has come from the younger members of her company.
And while critics regularly objected to the darkness and violence in the works, many now mourn the passing of that era: "There was a time when everybody lived and worked together and everything grew out of that," says ex-company member Marika Aoyama. "Now Pina needs her own taxi and her own hotel suite. And I think she more than deserves that, but it does change the complexion of things. And the new members of the company are much cooler. They don't get involved the way that we used to." On the other hand one of the original members, Dominique Mercy, feels that what has happened has been a necessary evolution: "You cannot expect a company that has been alive for so many years to stay the same. It has just continued to grow."
One thing that hasn't changed is Bausch's lacerating self-doubt. As the company prepares to occupy Sadler's Wells with Masurca Fogo, she is creating a new piece, under her usual working title of A Work By Pina Bausch. "It is very difficult," she whispers. "At this point, I don't know anything, I just can hope. I feel my way and try not to be afraid. It is not just that the dancers don't know where we are going, it is that I don't know where we are going also. It is not just that they have to trust me, I have to trust myself too."
Philippine Bausch
Born: July 27 1940, Solingen, Germany.
Education: 1955-58 Folkwang School, Essen; 1959-62 Juilliard School of Music, New York.
Relationships: 1973-80 Rolf Borzik; '80-present Ronald Kay (one son, Rolf-Salomen, '81).
Works include: 1968 Fragment; '69 Im Wind der Zeit; '70 Nachnul; '71 Aktionen für Tänzer; '74 Fritz; Iphigenie auf Tauris; Ich Bring Dich Um Die Ecke; '75 Orpheus und Eurydike; Frühlingsopfer; '76 The Seven Deadly Sins; '77 Bluebeard; Come, Dance With Me; Renate wandert aus; '78 Takes Her By The Hand And Leads Her Into The Castle, The Others Follow; Café Müller; Kontakthof; '79 Arien; Legend Of Chastity; '80 A Piece By Pina Bausch; Bandoneon; '82 Walzer; Carnations; '85 Two Cigarettes In The Dark; '86 Viktor; '87 Ahnen; '89 Palermo, Palermo; '95 Danzon; '98 Masurca Fogo; Wiesenland 2000