I love my dancers: Interviews

Re-inventing Ballet: Motion, Politics and Working Methods An Interview with William Forsythe Franziska Aigner and Uri Turkenich

We would like to begin by asking you about your first years in Germany. You moved to Stuttgart from New York in 1973. What were your impressions when you moved to Stuttgart?

In some way, I had always thought I might come to Europe. My grandfather is Austrian and I had this fantasy of coming to Europe. I had the idea in my head that Europe was more arts-aware, whatever that might mean. When I moved to Germany in 1973, my arrival in Stuttgart coincided more or less with that of Claus Peymann and Achim Freyer, some of the leading people in German theatre at the time. Stuttgart was a hotbed for theatre then, it was off the charts. They disassembled everything, the stage itself was no longer important, things migrated all over the theater. Their theatre was highly politicized and everyone seemed to have a political agenda. I had the impression, whether it was true or not, that the subventioned houses in Germany were there not to preserve things, but rather to further the definition of what they might be. And that influenced my worldview. I understood that it was perhaps an obligation, as a member of society, to further define the conditions under which we all operated with each other. I thought that if I didn’t do that, I would come under some critique, actually. People were very ferocious, they were adamant about their politics and discussions in the theatre canteen were anything but benign.

What were they talking about?

It was political discussions, generally “gesellschaftskritisch�. I got sat down and heavily schooled, a fastlane course in Marxism and God forbid I should veer from it. I had other ideas, but they just looked at me with horror if I wanted to do anything except something that was focused on their particular kind of critique.

How did you relate to this politicized artistic practice?

It was difficult as I was working in a situation not of my own design. I became resident choreographer at the Stuttgart Ballet in 1976, after dancing in the company first. The directors of the company would ask me to make a piece for four soloists and 16 women, for instance. And I was like, ok, I’ll make it. It was about learning how to just do work at first. So on the one hand, there was a lot of pressure to do straightforward ballet pieces, and on the other hand I was confronted with all these politicized theatre makers. I worked with Hans Werner Henze, an outspoken communist, and the English playwright Edward Bond on Orpheus (Orpheus – A Story in Six Scenes, 1979) for a commission. I was asked to choreograph a ballet; but how would one do a Marxist ballet? It was stressful but interesting. I also collaborated with the set designer Axel Manthey on a number of pieces. I’d help design the set and he would also direct and choreograph. Everything began to get mixed up, nothing was stable. I think what I took away from it all was that the real political work was that of the work place, it wasn’t the product. That seemed a much more viable form of immersion in political reality. Looking back at it today, it was definitely a situation that induced a certain kind of reflection that I think would not have entered my mind or become my practice had I not moved to Europe. There is no way I would have made the work I made, or worked the way I did, had I remained in the New York ballet environment.

What were you working on in your first choreographies for the Stuttgart Ballet?

Well, I enjoyed moving, I always enjoyed motion. Movement and sensation of motion. I often say to dancers that, for the dancer, dancing doesn’t look like anything, it feels like something. I was focusing on the extended sensations of balletic torque and moving things off centre, basically working with gravity and torsion, both of which became politicised. The conservative press would say that my work was violent, and I said, well it’s not violent, it’s just fast. I think in the ballet world, though, people were also relieved to see something else.

What was happening in dance in New York at that time that was interesting to you?

A group of New York choreographers were doing interesting dance theater pieces at the time. It was a kind of art performance theatre, perhaps further than Merce Cunningham in theatrical orientation, undermining what we thought held content together. For traditional dancing, a stage is a safe place, full of regulations. Clear the floor, we’re going to dance! And people like Paul Sanasardo seemed to have taken a different approach. He made a piece around 1971, I think, with a huge telephone pole on stage, perfectly balanced. And that thing swung around and the performers had to deal with it. Pina Bausch had been in America and was familiar with the work of Sanasardo and Rudy Perez, all these people who were really pushing the envelope. Later, Pina Bausch took that approach and littered the stage with dangerous things, slippery things or impossible things. In her collaboration with Rolf Borzik, the two of them took that to a new limit. Look at painting from that time, in which artists were trying to rethink the surface. I think the stage is also a surface that people have to rethink.

When you began choreographing in Stuttgart, you were mainly asked to do commissions, choreographing and reinterpreting existent canonical works like Orpheus and Eurydice, for instance.

What propelled you away from the canonical stories and roles of ballet?

I began with commissions and they were all neo-classical. However, even then I was criticised for being too modern in some respects. But look at what was happening in the visual arts, look at what was happening in literature, cinema! It was the time of Fassbinder, Schlöndorff and others. All these people were making work at the time, it was amazing. And God forbid you should go back, take one step back.

You felt like an idiot. In a way, there was a lot of pressure. However, working in theatres, the same house could be very supportive of revolutionary gestures in the theatre department, while, concerning ballet, only so much was tolerated. They brought Claus Peyman as the theatre director to Stuttgart and I was working for the ballet company in the same house and they were like, ahem, no, you went too far, it’s too radical. And I was like, um, ok. Pina was independent quite early, so she could go her own way. Even though she was in a Stadttheater, she managed to do her own thing.

It seems that Pina Bausch as well as Susanne Linke and Reinhild Hoffman distanced themselves from classical roles out of an intuitive emancipatory gesture. They couldn't identify with the female roles that were available to them. Can you relate to this feeling of not identifying with the roles and stories available to you in ballet?

The women's movement was huge at the time, so much happened around the year ’68. Susan Sontag, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and so on and so forth. You were bombarded with it from every angle, and as a young person, you assumed that it was where the world was going, so you went along with it. It presented itself to you if you were in theatre, if you were an artist. I love Kathy Acker, she was a huge influence for me. And I looked at that and thought, oh, I'm an idiot, I need to get my ass in gear. All those people, they were very inspiring. Pina was a great inspiration, too. There was a kind of wreckage, people were stranded constantly in Pina's work. They were stranded in the most banal way. Jean Baudrillard says that against the banal version of the fatal we must find the fatal version of the banal. That's what Pina Bausch accomplished. She was able, like all great artists, to recontextualize the most common experience, to make the understructure terrifying.

The understructure?

Yes, the psycho-social understructure. I remember looking at Blaubart (Bluebeard – While Listening To A Taped Recording Of Bela Bartok’s “Duke Bluebeard´s Castle”, 1977) and wishing I wasn't a man. I felt so ashamed of behaviors that were stereotypically manly, they were ridiculous. In this piece, Jan Minařík was posing in front of a doll and it was so creepy. I laid in my hotel bed in Wuppertal after the performance and didn't sleep the entire night. I thought to myself, oh, ok, I need to rethink. I knew that I was a ballet choreographer and I said to myself that that's ok. It was about questioning how to participate in the Big Conversation, irrelevant of what medium within one was practising.

When you saw Blaubart, were you able to detect that something had changed in the way that Pina Bausch was working in the studio?

No, I didn't know that. I only found out much later that she was working with questions. It was not something that was talked about, or that I read about. You have to realise that these kind of working methods, like those of Pina Bausch or Rainer Werner Fassbinder, came out of a general social milieu or social situation. We were not allowing ourselves to be teleological. I would say that was the biggest thing. There had been Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a few years later came this political “Umbruch” of ’68. I think that the idea of a straight line began to collapse, even the desire for a straight line was abdicated. In my case, I just said ok, there's only methodologies and the only thing that's new is methodologies. I thought that rather than keeping one methodology and looking for exchangeable subjects, I would try to make methodologies themselves my real subject.

Do you think that shifting the focus of your artistic practice towards methods of work was a necessary step for you in order to be able to continue working within the practice of ballet?

Well, I continued working with an idea about space and dynamics particular to ballet. We applied different methodologies to the original balletic subject, never knowing where we would end up. Then I abandoned that strategy for a long time. I haven't done that for 10 or 12 years … simply because that was very difficult to… Well, I couldn't do it anymore. But it led me to thinking about taxonomies and inventing a language for what we do. It became a very abstract project in order to make it more available to others. If we can get categorical descriptions down to simpler level, they are more likely to be diversely communicative, they can be more easily shared. Abstraction in the process, like the improvisation technologies CD-ROM (Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye, CD-ROM 1999) was a means for shifting the hierarchies in the studio, making the working method and practices generally available. It was a way of making everyone equal, as it were, to some degree at least.

At the same time, we tried to find a way towards an equitable descriptive language as well, by talking about what is actually happening, trying to encapsulate perception in a language that is contaminated as little as possible with the subjectivity of taste. We were trying to communicate about sensations and not what it looks like. How could we find a language between us that was politically neutral and psychologically neutral so that people felt they had a place to talk? The rehearsal studio is a political space, defined through our everyday behaviors. What were the problems that were being talked about in a larger way in society? Workers, goods, commodities, distribution, etc. All these things got applied on a local level. I wasn't about to go into politics, but I could perform a political experiment locally.

Can you retrace when this shift in political focus from product to process occurred in your work?

I couldn't fully do it until I took over Ballet Frankfurt in 1984. Before that, I could involve people in the process, but as of 1984 I could also pay people for their extra work. There were a number of ballets where people were paid for their contribution in the sense of profit sharing and they were listed as coauthors.

When did you start working with improvisation, both on stage and as a working method?

I already started doing ballet improvisation in 1979 because of Hilda Koch. We premiered Love Songs (1979) at a gala in Munich. The piece was structured around a series of pop songs by Aretha Franklin and Dionne Warwick. We had made the piece in a very short time, and during the performance, Hilda Koch jumped ahead in the choreography and finished in the middle of the song. But as a confident and great performer, she made up her mind to keep dancing “in the style” of the piece. And I thought that it was much better than what I suggested she should do. So Hilda Koch is to blame for all this.

What did you see in Hilda Koch's improvisation that was so interesting?

The relationship to time. You're not looking at a goal, you're trying to become a listener. And so the performance becomes less about displaying and more about listening. About listening on every level.

Did working with improvisation inform your studio practice?

Over the years, Ballet Frankfurt became something like a 16 th century workshop. Everyone was working on the work, everyone was having their own ideas about the work’s proposals, and part of that came from the idea that it made sense in terms of equality in the workplace. I also felt that if it was expected of me to dance the work’s material out on my own body for the dancers, then wouldn’t it make sense for dancers to acquire choreographic skills, a knowledge that enabled them to have the authority residing in their own bodies? In a way, my goal became to teach everyone how to teach themselves to become autonomous. I assume that no one in the company, back then or now, really needs me. I'd like to assume that I have helped them achieve that condition for themselves. I would like to think that they are their own resource, that they are enough on their own, they don't need a “leader”. I like to think that I was a composition teacher rather than the one making or arranging the movements to be performed by dancers.

Can you tell us about Gänge (1983)? How did you work on this piece and how was it received?

I initially made the first act of Gänge with and for the Nederlands Dans Theatre in 1983. Klaus Zehelein, who worked as a dramaturg in Frankfurt offered me the position at Ballet Frankfurt after having seen the first act of Gänge. When I moved to Frankfurt, I experienced this other burst of political impetus.

Zehelein had been one of Adorno's favourite students, so he was real Frankfurt-school. Then, there was Hans Neuenfels and that crowd doing major Regie-Theater in the opera and perhaps again my worldview was upended by Einar Schleef. I was reading a lot of French philosophy at that point, mainly Roland Barthes and Jean-Luc Nancy, trying to get to the point where a practice and the performance of a practice would be it's own description and not something extra. So Gänge was working towards a nonobject object, or a non-performance performance. Gänge was a description of ballet, a ballet describing itself.

In words?

And also in images. There was a woman standing in 5th position in the middle of the stage and she was saying, “From this position, I cannot cook spaghetti. From this position, I cannot pick up the kids. From this position, I cannot do the shopping.” What was important in these descriptions was the thing that it was not. In the third act, the “ballerina” would come on stage and say, “I come in, I lie down, and the room turns around me 32 times,” which of course was a reference to the famous 32 fouettés of the ballerina. We tried to describe, but from the inside. I worked with questions, too, not even knowing about Pina's questions.

What kind of questions were you working with?

People were asked to describe what they thought. One question was, “What is the most important position on stage?” And one of the performers answered, “Where I am.” It was about understanding your environment and understanding the meaning of where you were in space. The stage is not a hypothetical space, it's a real space. Theater is not hypothetical. By shifting the focus to a description of the environment, the performers become agents who are able to negotiate the moment of the performance by themselves. I tried to entertain the idea of seeing people not as instruments, but as agents.

How was your work received by the audience in Frankfurt in the beginning?

In the beginning, there were about 60 people in the audience and 30 were booing and 30 cheering. We had to stop performances because people were yelling so much. At one point, I had to come on stage to talk to the audience. I never heard such an aggressive sound in my life, and it was directed at me! It was very impressive to have that many people screaming at you. I stopped them and said, "Kommt, das ist nur ein Ballett!" (“Come on, it's only a ballet!”), which provoked them even more. It was really crazy! I felt shaky. I mean, it's not nice to have a thousand people screaming aggressively at you. Only recently had it sort of all come together. It had not been easy for quite some time!

But you insisted and persisted in doing your work?

Over time, people change, the whole thing changes. What was once called an abomination is called a classic now. I think the London Times called In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated (1987) aerobics from hell.

Now it's considered part of the canon of dance history. So what am I to say? Marcel Duchamp says in his lectures on art that posterity is the only thing that finally determines the condition of the work. He said, it's all art, some good, some bad. In Frankfurt, it took four or five years to get an audience that wanted to see what we were doing.

Did these reactions affect your work?

No, that can't be important. The reaction means something, but what it means is something else than what you hear. Actually, I've never changed a piece because of a critique or reaction. If you go down that road, it's a very slippery slope. It means that you're not interested in your own work.

Was there a similar sense of conflict between artists and audiences concerning theatre or opera in Frankfurt, or was that something particular to dance and ballet?

Klaus Zehelein and myself were discussing this at the time. We couldn't figure it out. Regie-Theater was out there doing God knows what with opera, but maybe because it was still beautifully conducted and sung, there were only complaints about scenography and costumes. In our case, the whole concept of ballet was put into question. There was nothing more to hold onto.

William Forsythe has been active in the field of choreography for over 45 years. His work is acknowledged for re-orienting the practice of ballet from its identification with classical repertoire to a dynamic 21st century art form. Forsythe's deep interest in the fundamental principles of organization has led him to produce a wide range of projects, including Installations, Films, and Web-based knowledge creation.

Abstract William Forsythe spoke to us about being a spectator of Pina Bausch’s work and about the German Stadttheater landscape of the 1970s and 80s, as well as about the development of his particular way of working in relation to the issues and concerns he found himself surrounded in.

Keywords New York, Stuttgart Ballet, Ballet Frankfurt, political theatre, the sensation of movement, from product to process, improvisation.

Dancing and Germany

Choreographing

in

Post-War

An Interview with Reinhild Hoffmann Franziska Aigner, Uri Turkenich and Jasna Layes Vinovrski

We would like to begin by asking you about your first engagement in 1970 as a dancer and performer for Hans Kresnik. Could you tell us about the dance and theatre scene in Bremen and your experience as a young dancer having just graduated from FolkwangHochschule Essen?

At the time, the theatre coming out of Bremen was some of the most interesting in Germany. Kurt Hübner was a very brave artistic director who invited young directors as well as the influential head of stage design Wilfried Minks to develop their work there. The notion of the “Bremer Stil” emerged.

Among the young directors were names like Peter Stein, Peter Zadek, Michael Grüber, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, all of whom shaped the German theatre landscape. A classical Ballet with a romantic repertoire would not have fit in with their work, so Kurt Hübner found out about the young Hans Kresnik, who was doing his first choreographic tryouts in Cologne, and invited him to Bremen in order to complement the theatre department with a choreographer who likewise was dealing with contemporary topics and issues.

How was it for you to work with Kresnik? Did you have an affinity for Kresnik’s Marxist political ideology?

When I auditioned in 1970, there actually wasn’t any position open. But I wanted to dance and to work with Hans Kresnik in that theatre, and so Kresnik offered an internship, to me as well as to another dancer, for 50 DM per month. We both took the internship. I worked every day in the theatre canteen after rehearsals to earn money to live on and to get free food, but I had the same rehearsal schedule as everyone else. The actors saw me in the canteen working after rehearsals and eventually went to the director Kurt Hübner; after a half a year, through their initiative, Hübner offered a contract, which I split with the other intern dancer. At the beginning of the

next season, Kresnik offered this contract as a full position to me.

Concerning the political views of Kresnik’s work, his theatrical pieces were always very radical. I was too young and inexperienced to judge his political approach. I accepted it as his choreographic form, which challenged me as a young dancer and performer. But there was a group of female actors who were reading Marx and Engels in their free time and I joined them because I wanted to be more informed in general.

I imagine that the idea behind mitspracherecht was about a relation of equality between the actor and the director in the sense that they are able talk on the same level.

Mitsprachrerecht wasn’t about the equality between actors and directors, but about the actors, who, at that time being influenced by the student revolution, were questioning the contents of their work more. Out of this, directors and dramaturges began offering them more background (secondary) literature, and through that, the performers got more involved in the process.

Kresnik worked in dialogue with dramaturges and authors as well. But in the rehearsals, he worked very much from his own energy and images. We as dancers had to follow his intuition.

Did you feel this change in working methods already at FolkwangHochschule under Kurt Jooss?

No. Jooss was a director of the school and we respected him as the master.

Also in FTS [Folkwang Tanz Studio], the company of Kurt Jooss, he was the choreographer and he transmitted his work to the dancers.

Had you already started to choreograph during your time at the Folkwangschule Essen?

As part of our four-year education, we had a class called “Composition”. In the first two years, we were given tasks; and the final two years, we could choose our own themes. We had to show our work each semester and we got feedback from the teachers, especially from Jooss. Some of this work was shown at the school presentations. It was Kurt Jooss’ idea that every student, independent of their professional aims, should learn to understand the process of creating. This was how I was able to discover very early on that I had affinity for choreography and a strength in this field.

The reason why I quit my contract after three years as a dancer in Bremen was that I wanted to continue exploring my affinity for choreography work. I went back to the school, and there, Susanne Linke was already trying out her first choreographies. She asked me if I would dance for her, and so, besides dancing for her, I was also trying my own first choreographies out as well.

Hans Zöllig, the director of the school at that time, after he saw the results of our choreographic work and its successful resonance with the outside, offered us the leadership of FTS. The company no longer existed since Kurt Jooss retired, and Pina Bausch followed as the leader, till she got the offer to go to the theatre Wuppertal.

When you started making your own work in Folkwang Tanzstudio, what were the topics and themes that you were occupied with?

One of my early works, Solo mit Sofa (Solo with Sofa, 1976), is both a dance and a performance piece. There is a concrete sofa and Iʼm tied with the material of the sofa cover, spread out into a long corridor, which measures my distance to the sofa by the length of the material. The limitation is the challenge in this piece. I followed this interest later on in my other solo works, using other materials as well, such as wood or stones. Or in the piece Vier (Four, 1992), I use four stone sidewalk tiles. Each stone tile measures 30x30cm, and together they create a 60x60cm square, which determines the space for the dance, which lasts 30 minutes. During this time, I donʼt allow myself to leave this space. The combination of dance and performance was my interest in my solo works.

In group works, I was interested in interpreting new music, or else I would choose a theme, such as Icarus – the myth about the wish to fly.

Could you tell us about Arno Wüstenhöfer, who asked you and Gerhard Bohner to direct the dance company in Bremen together after he left Wuppertal?

After having been the artistic director of Wuppertal, Arno Wüstenhöfer took over the theatre in Bremen in 1978. Wüstenhöfer came to see our work in Folkwang Tanzstudio and asked me, after seeing my work, if I would be interested in taking over the dance company in Bremen together with Gerhard Bohner. We both agreed and started directing the company together. We made our work separately from one another, each of us doing full-evening pieces.

Gerhard asked me to dance in his pieces and I very much appreciated the

chance to dance for him. After three years, Wüstenhöfer wanted to keep only one director and decided on me. I was the person he had discovered, just as with Pina Bausch before. He was very proud to have made the discovery of two young female choreographers.

How did the audience react to your work in Bremen?

It was difficult at the beginning. Like always with a new form that an audience is not used to, it takes time for them to get familiar with it.

Therefore, we would oftentimes after performances invite the audience to discuss the work. By way of this dialogue, we were able to develop their interest. After a while, they began telling us they’d gone to see the same performance more than once. My work is more based on visual aspects and metaphors, which allowed for the spectatorsʼ different interpretations and inspired them to discuss the pieces among their friends for hours after seeing them.

Can you tell us a bit more about Wüstenhöferʼs approach to curating performing arts, and modern dance in particular?

He had a certain idealism, which you need in order to be a good artistic director. He understood what it was like to make work as a choreographer and to direct a company. We need time to develop a completely new creation, and he offered that time to us. But he was very careful and made sure of one’s artistic ability before he would engage them in his theatre. It was very different from today, where you have to be successful immediately.

Could you tell us about how you worked with the company of dancers in Bremen? Before, you told us that you gradually gave them more freedom. What did you mean by that?

I always chose the subject and wrote for myself a kind of libretto or structure before starting to work with the dancers. The subject, of course, I had to make sure was be able to be expressed through body language. From piece to piece, I encouraged the dancers to engage their creativity. This process needed time, for them to trust their artistic abilities. Over the course of their growing artistic consciousness, I could offer them more freedom. Through the tasks I gave to them, relating to the theme we worked on, they could give their own answers by creating small choreographic elements. In this way, they got, through their mind and body, engaged in the theme. This way, we all experienced how far-reaching the theme actually was.

Reinhild Hoffmann belongs to the pioneer generation of German Tanztheater. She received her education at the Folkwang-Hochschule Essen under the direction of Kurt Jooss. Her performances, choreographed first at Bremer Theater (1978–1986) and then at Schauspielhaus Bochum (1986– 1995), are widely shown internationally and have won many prizes. Since 1995, Reinhild Hoffmann has been working as a freelance choreographer and director.

Abstract Reinhild Hoffmann spoke to us about the slow shift in the dance studio towards equal mitspracherecht (German for, literally, “the right to speak with”) of the dancer and author. She furthermore offered an insight into her own working method and her collaboration with Arno Wüstenhöfer, who offered choreographic directorships to Pina Bausch in Wuppertal and later to Hoffmann in Bremen.

Keywords Folkwangschule and Folkwang Tanzstudio Essen, Bremer Stil, Mitspracherecht (Engl.: literally, “the right to speak with”), Peter Stein, interdisciplinary influences, choreographic tasks and scores.

At Work with Pina Bausch: Friendship and Love An Interview with Raimund Hoghe

Franziska Aigner and Uri Turkenich

You asked me to speak about the 70s in Germany. I was writing for newspapers at the time. In the beginning, I didn’t write about dance, but about visual art and theater. I was interested in how so-called “real life” could be given a form in art. I was interested in theater at the time. I very much liked the work of Peter Zadek, who was the head of the Schauspielhaus Bochum, Peter Stein from the Berliner Schaubühne, Klaus Michael Grüber, George Tabori, Augusto Fernandes and many more. German theater was interesting, especially when you compare it to theater today. It was more radical, more far-reaching, very strong works with very different styles. Peter Zadek was working with the best actors in Germany; he was also the one who invited Pina Bausch to create a performance in Bochum. She made a piece for actors, dancers and one singer about Macbeth, with the very long title: Er nimmt sie an der Hand und führt sie in das Schloss, die anderen folgen [He Takes Her by the Hand and Leads Her into the Castle, the Others Follow ..., 1978]. Something new started in the 70s. It wasn’t just Pina Bausch.

But I didn’t only write about art; I worked for the newspaper Die Zeit and I was interested in people’s stories. I discovered that a portrait of one life can reflect a lot of other lives as well. There was a great Jewish poet living in Düsseldorf – Rose Ausländer – who was born in Bucovina, and I wrote texts about her work. Through her, I visited a home for elderly Jewish people in Düsseldorf and talked to some of them and wrote about them. All of this was very important to me. I wrote about social minorities in the late 60s and during the 70s, when people were coming out. People came out from the corners, the outcasts, homeless people, disabled people, gay people. I wrote about prostitutes, cleaning women, very different kinds of people. In the 80s, I wrote many articles about people who were HIV positive.

What do you think changed in the 70s so that all of these people could come out?

There was a lot of pressure in Germany after WWII, there were many things that people didn’t talk about. Within families, they didn't talk about sexuality and parents didn't talk about their roles in what happened during the war.

Yes – they just didn’t talk. It’s difficult to understand now, but people didn’t talk. Some people didn’t know who their parents were, whether your father was your real father. No one talked about it. They simply couldn’t say anything. They didn’t talk about the Holocaust either. At some point, this television mini-series – Holocaust (1978) – was shown on German television, and people started talking about the Third Reich and Jewish people. It was a Hollywood thing, but it touched people. Things slowly started to come out into the open during the 60s. But this development happened slower perhaps in Germany than in some other countries. Even nowadays, on German television, for instance, you only see people with disabilities or different skin color in certain roles. This may be something else, but I don’t see why the person reading the news can’t be sitting in a wheelchair or having some other disability. Why is it that this is still not possible in Germany? It was stronger in the past than today – you didn’t see people with disabilities on the streets, they stayed at home, you never saw them. Now at least you see them once in a while. They came out. They present themselves more. But acceptance by the rest of society is changing very slowly.

What was the position of the German government in the 70s regarding what happened during the war?

There were still a lot of Nazis in the German government after the war. But not just people in the government continued in the same positions as before the war, so did popular actors from the Third Reich. History classes in schools never reached up to Third Reich times; they stopped long before.

Which artists made interesting work for you at the time?

There were so many. For example, the early works of Werner Herzog Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle [The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, 1974], Wim Wenders’ Alice in den Städten [Alice in the Cities, 1974]. Everything from Rainer Werner Fassbinder. I also liked the American film Nashville (1975) by Robert Altman, because you couldn’t see the line between documentary and fiction.

How were these works received at the time?

People thought that it was very strong work. But I wasn’t speaking to people about this too much. I was more for myself, alone. I was always a bit on the outside, because of my body. I am part of a minority. In my writing, I could express many things or make contact. I was working full time for the newspaper, I wrote all these portraits. I didn’t have so much time and I didn’t have so many friends. It was through the work with Pina, the theater work, that I became more open. There were many people in the company and you spend so much time together.

You say that your life changed through being in the company, what was different there?

The way of working together and the diversity of the people, their different backgrounds, different nationalities, different bodies and so on.

How did people feel about your portraits?

People felt that they had something in common with the portraits. I put a lot of energy into the people I wrote about, to understand how they thought. I wanted to do a portrait of them where they could say, “Yes, that's me”, not something that was far from reality. For example, I wrote about an old prostitute here in Düsseldorf; and normally, people didn’t have much contact with someone like her. So to discover that she was a human being, too, that maybe some things about her were not so remote. It is important to remember the history of people in different social groups, what happened to them and what can happen nowadays.

Were you politically active in the 70s?

I was not in a political party. I felt like an outsider. In the 60s, people with disabilities started to form groups like all the rest, but I never participated. In Germany, the view regarding a different body like mine still held connotations of the Third Reich.

Nowadays as well?

Yes, nowadays. In reviews about my performances from German newspapers, they write incorrect things about my body. They write that I suffer from dwarfism. And I have to respond that this is incorrect. They don't have words for me. I don't have any explanation why this is so different in Germany, why people on the street react so differently to me and my body than in Belgium or France. When I did my first solo Meinwärts [Meinwärts, 1994] about and with the music of the Jewish tenor Joseph Schmidt, I read many reviews about him. The Nazi papers always wrote that he was so small and ugly – and a Jew. How did you get to know Pina Bausch?

It was in the 70s that Pina started making her work and, as everyone now knows, it was very difficult for her in Wuppertal. The audience didn't like her work and neither did Klaus Revermann, the person responsible for culture in Wuppertal. It was very hard. She was not using the orchestra of the theatre, and that was a problem. Not many people came to see her work; sometimes there were only 50 audience members in the opera house. But the director of the Wuppertaler Bühnen, Arno Wüstenhöfer, who had engaged Pina, was always behind her and protected her. What I remember and what is important to remember is that he gave her the possibility to work for several years despite small audience numbers, when people were not behind her and only some critics liked her work. She was developing her work for five or six years without having any big success in the city. I don’t think this would be possible today. No director would give a young choreographer a chance to work in a big house only for a small audience. Today, your work needs to be immediately successful in order to get support.

The first piece that I saw from Pina was Blaubart [Bluebeard – While Listening to a Taped Recording of Bela Bartok´s “Duke Bluebeard´s Castle”, 1977] and I liked it very much. I interviewed her and wrote about her for the magazine Theater Heute. Later, this text became the first chapter of my book about Pina. She liked what I wrote, and when I was visiting her rehearsals she asked me if I wanted to write about the creation of Keuschheitslegende [Legend of Chastity, 1979] for the program booklet in Wuppertal. The thing with Pina is that she didn't want to explain anything – she didn't want you to read in the program what the piece was about. It was more about finding a way to express things, the process of creating something that people could follow. She wanted people to find the meaning by themselves. The text about Keuschheitslegende later also became part of the book.

And then, in 1980, her partner and set-designer Rolf Borzik died. They had developed the work together, and in the beginning she always said that without him she couldn't have done it. He supported her a lot. With his death, our relation became very strong. She asked me to speak and to write something for his funeral and this was special. I didn't know them for a long time, but she said that he had liked my writing very much. She never asked me to become her dramaturge; this was never the case. It was something that came about slowly; I didn't think about it at first. It happened because of our personal relations. I was interested in her work and she was interested in my writing. I wanted to support her on her journey, to give her courage to do what she wanted to do. To be behind her if she had doubts. We liked the same things, so there weren't discussions about that. And she didn't discuss with the dancers.

So what did you discuss about?

We never discussed things.

You never discussed things?

No. She didn't discuss much in general.

Why? She was shy in a way, and she didn't have an education in the classical sense. She didn't go to high school. She had this feeling that she didn't know enough. Her family had a restaurant in Solingen – she didn't grow up with literature or music.

So what were you doing?

I wanted to support her. Sometimes I brought her coffee. She was a very sensitive person, not always strong, she had lots of doubts. I was someone who followed the rehearsals. Sometimes, she’d say that something was not so good, and I’d say “Oh no, look at this. It's very interesting from the outside.” I had this outside view, because I didn’t live in Wuppertal, and I continued with my writing work. Later, I could help to combine things, putting scenes together, making connections between different scenes or bringing a piece of music or a text. But there was never a discussion. Maybe she’d ask, “What do you think about this?”, but it was never a discussion.

She didn’t want to speak much in the beginning. She didn't like to give interviews. It was like a friendship, she was like a sister. It was a very strong period. Some people, now, say that they were the only ones going to the restaurant with her after rehearsals, but there were several people who did that. People are trying to create a legend around her, and I'm not interested in that. In the beginning, everyone was from the same generation, Pina and the dancers; but later, she was 40 or more years older than the dancers. Of course, she was already a legend by then. Far away in the sky. I'm not the only one saying that it was another Pina, another person, in the beginning.

Ahnen [Ahnen, 1987] was the last piece I did with her. It was a very radical work. Outside Wuppertal it was shown only in Paris, never went on a big tour.

But it opened a lot of doors, and after this, things changed.

What did she do in Ahnen?

The previous creation was called Viktor [Viktor, 1986]; it was made in Rome.

She was working for the first time outside of Wuppertal and something was breaking out. She was opening up to the world, to other cultures, other music. This is very strong in Ahnen as well.

Under what circumstances did you stop working for her?

It did not happen one day all at once. After our last collaboration, the film Die Klage der Kaiserin (1990), Pina took a break and was going back to old pieces like Orpheus und Eurydike [Orpheus and Eurydice, 1975] and Iphigenie auf Tauris [Iphigenia in Tauris, 1973]. There was no work for a dramaturge because the work was already done. At the same time, some very strong dancers left the company. After 10 years with her, it was a good moment to look for my own work.

Could you describe how Pina Bausch worked, for example, on the piece 1980 [1980 – A Piece by Pina Bausch, 1980]? She would come to the rehearsal space . . . and then?

She would come in, sit down at her table and say, for example, “What does spring mean for you?” All of the dancers would answer, either in words, or by doing an action or a dance, and she would write it down. Then she would say, “Thank you!” and move on to the next question, “To fight for something.” It would go on like this for weeks. After three or four weeks, she would return to some of the answers she liked and ask whether she could see some answers again. Some people could remember very well what they had done, and these people later would have bigger parts in the pieces.

Some people did great things in rehearsals, but couldn't remember well what they had done. There was a lot of material, and Pina put it together. There was no discussion about whether things fit together. This was the process and she didn't discuss it.

Did she have the ideas for the set with grass and the different scenes before the studio rehearsals started?

No, no. It all came during the rehearsals. It's not that she came in with a concept. Before the piece 1980, Pina and Rolf Borzik had worked with water and earth; he wanted all natural elements on stage. There was a very strong feeling in 1980, after the death of Rolf, to remember him and to say goodbye. There is one scene with Judy Garland singing Over the Rainbow. I had this record, which I gave to Pina. I found this mixture very interesting, first it is the young Judy singing and later it is the old Judy Garland.

So, during the rehearsals, you’d say that it would be nice, for example, to have the Judy Garland song in such and such scene?

No, no. In the rehearsals, she’d know what she was looking for and she’d ask the questions. She didn't ask me questions, but sometimes I could feel what she was looking for. And then I’d bring in the thing that she was looking for.

For Viktor, I brought in a text from Georg Büchner. The text fit very well, so it ended up in the piece. But it was not part of a concept. It fit in with something that she was wanting to express, a personal thing.

So you said, "I think this text would fit in with the piece"?

No, I never said this. I liked the text and said that it would maybe be interesting. She tried it, and asked, "Who do you think could read the text?"

Then she gave it to one or two people and they tried it out. One dancer was there from the beginning, Jan Minařík. He was more involved sometimes. He would offer more comments. I was there to help her do what she wanted to do. Sometimes I could feel what she was looking for. It is the same as when you know someone well and think a certain movie might be nice for them, or that a certain book could be interesting. And you cannot really explain why. It was a friendship, and she never wanted to be pushed. She was very scared that someone would try to push her or explain to her in what direction she had to go. I can understand this very well. She was like a sister, and we wanted something very similar. After rehearsals, we’d go to the restaurant and she’d continue to work in the restaurant. She always took her notes with her after rehearsal, to look at some things or think about what to do the next day. All of this after a rehearsal, often in a small Greek restaurant. There were only two or three restaurants around the Lichtburg [editor’s note: The rehearsal space of Tanztheater Wuppertal is located in a building called Lichtburg in Barmen, Wuppertal], so it was always the same. She sometimes asked, "Did you like it?", but I was never there to say, "This was good and this is not good", because she was the director, she knew what she wanted. I didn’t have to tell her. I liked that she never thought about the audience or about how to please the audience.

She wanted herself to like it?

She wanted to like it, so she made what she wanted to see. She came to see every performance. Some theater directors would suffer a lot if they had to see all of their performances. Pina wanted to do something that she could watch, after some years as well. I also came to watch all of the performances. I liked it. You see how the audience is different every night.

Her later pieces changed towards being something “easier” for the audience.

When they showed Bandoneon [Bandoneon, 1980] last year in Paris, however, people went out of the theater screaming again.

Why? Because they were used to the later pieces. They came to see women in evening dresses, long hair, beautiful colors and big projections. Bandoneon was of a different kind and quite rough. The audience is still shocked now.

How did you feel when you saw Pina's pieces for the first time?

I was very touched. Sometimes I cried. And the presence of the dancers was very strong. The pieces were connected to their lives, their experiences. To see these human feelings so clearly onstage. They were not played emotions. It was very direct.

Do you think that this was something that wasn’t there before?

Pina was the only one for me that showed emotions on stage so strongly.

Emotional reactions. Reinhild Hoffman, who was more successful in Germany than Pina for some time, worked with very strong images, very strong set designs. It was strong work, but not on this emotional level. With Pina, you had this strong image, but also the emotions. And this is special for me. The combination of both the art form and the emotions. She wanted the personal to gain a form, an art form. She said that it's not enough to express emotions, you also need a form.

What is the form?

It's not only a personal story – you need to find the point, where something can be shared. We all have emotions, feelings, desires. Everyone is born by a mother, for instance. Some things are similar. Pina was able to find things and talk in a way that people from all over the world could understand, something that they hadn't necessarily experienced themselves.

So form means that a lot of people have access to it?

It’s not a question of access. It’s important that it's not only a personal story.

I also did this in my writing. The person represents themselves, but also other people. For example, one of my favorite stories was about a cleaning woman; and what she said was true for many women who are in the same social group. It could be waitresses, cleaning women or shopkeepers. This one woman, she spoke to and about all these other women.

Is it possible that Pina was the first choreographer to ask her dancers to talk about themselves in dance? Do you think that at this time, people also wanted to talk more about themselves?

No, I don't, but you never know. What I liked about Pina's system with the questions was that she didn't judge. She asked questions and she wrote down the answers without judging, and this is exceptional. When I work with people, I don't ask questions like Pina did, I am watching people, maybe because of being a journalist. Pina also watched people, but she also had these questions, so many questions. Seen from today’s standpoint, some of them are no longer interesting for me. Questions about one’s first kiss for instance, or what your parents or grandparents did.

How would you want Pina to be remembered?

I know that people write a lot about Pina, and it's very far from the person I knew. They create an image of her as a legend; this legend is far away from reality. This is not just in Pina's case, but with many others as well. But I knew Pina personally, and I can see what they are doing. They create an image of her like Mother Theresa. Maybe people need this; some people might need to have this. But it’s simpler. She did what she wanted to do and she did it with amazing dancers. She had very different periods in her work, so I cannot say that one thing is her. The 80s are very different from the 2000s. But she did very strong work. Even after 30 years, it's still strong.

Raimund Hoghe was born in Wuppertal. Formerly a writer for the newspaper Die Zeit, he was a long-time dramaturge for Pina Bausch at Tanztheater Wuppertal. In 1992, he began collaborating with the artist Luca Giacomo Schulte, who continues to work with him today. Hoghe’s performances have toured the world and have met with acclaim, receiving awards such as the Prix de la Critique in 2006.

Abstract Raimund Hoghe spoke to us about his work as a writer, articulating and giving form to the political and artistic climate of Germany from the 1960s onwards. Having worked with Pina Bausch as one of the first dramaturges of dance, he recalled the development of their friendship and working relation.

Keywords Post-war Germany, silence, dramaturgy, working process, form, friendship.

New Beginnings after the War: Precision and Mental Freedom in Dance and Choreography An Interview with Susanne Linke Franziska Aigner and Uri Turkenich

Could you tell us about your studies at the Folkwangschule Essen?

I started my studies at the Folkwangschule in 1967. At that time, Germany was pretty blank. A completely different situation. Everything’s changed a lot since then. The different federal states of Germany were completely separated. The overall situation was, that if one was studying in Berlin at the Mary Wigman school like me, one didn’t know anything at all of what was going on in dance in the rest of Germany. It was unknown.

Mary Wigman was fantastic, she was spiritual, very special. In her teaching, she focused on the entire body: one ought to do everything with the entire body. Body, soul, spirit, no separation or isolation. Mary Wigman taught us that being on stage is something dangerous, something special, not just technique. But after three years of studying with Mary Wigman in Berlin, I felt that I needed more technique, I was missing the information of classical ballet. I had heard from somewhere that a former student of Laban’s called Kurt Jooss was working and teaching in a place called Folkwangschule Essen.

But like I said, we didn’t know anything about him or his work. I only knew that he was a former Laban student, a colleague of Mary Wigman.

I moved to Essen in 1967. The school was housed in this old monastery complex, very beautiful, but slightly run down and I realized rather quickly the difference in spirit. In Essen, the focus was on technique, classical ballet was taken very seriously. It was hard for me, I was already 23 years old.

Everything seemed overly technical to me. During my studies there, I experienced a lot of frustration and did not have a lot of fun. But I survived, and due to Kurt Jooss, who himself was a German modern dancer, there were a few very good modern dance teachers. Hans Züllig, who taught JoossLeeder technique, Jean Cébron and Pina Bausch, these were the important modern dance teachers to me. Initially, I wanted to stay at the Folkwangschule for only one year, but I ended up staying for a total of 35 years in Essen.

Could you describe to us more in detail what was different in Germany back then, compared to nowadays?

Germany was stuffy, philistine. I didn’t like it. This has of course, to do with everything that happened during the Third Reich. We didn’t know back then what had happened yet. Even the word Holocaust didn’t exist yet. And then there was this veil of silence, which somehow, yes, I don’t know... It was my generation, the generation of ’68, that started to ask the older generation what actually fucking happened during the Nazi times. A lot of intelligent young people began to ask their parents about the past. We had to learn to look closely, to look back honestly and start talking about what happened.

I first realized the gravity of the recent past at the time during my first year at the Wigman school. It was only then that I had my first conscious encounter with a Jewish person, Carry Rick from Canada. And I said to myself, ah ok, so he is a Jew. I had never seen a Jew before, this was my first conscious encounter. It was then that I asked myself, where had they all gone! So naive – we were completely naive politically. Soon after, I had a second shock at a party at the Folkwangschule. There was a student called Alicia Goldfarb from Argentina, we got along very well and are still friends to this day. During this party, we started talking about our grandparents. Alicia, who was usually very outspoken, had turned completely silent. So I asked her about her grandparents, and she answered, “Gassed!” At a later point, she told me how shocked she was at the reaction of some of the other students at the party. For me, the party was over at that very instant. And she was relieved, that I had felt that way.

I would like to ask you if this emerging political consciousness that you spoke about influenced your dancing. Did dance offer you a way to address and further this consciousness?

Not in terms of politics – but in terms of honesty, yes. The kind of honesty that touches all the way down. The themes addressed in dance until then were concerned with the glories of mankind. As a female dancer, the roles available to you were either the whore, the angel, the saint… or then the Greek goddesses, with figures like Electra and the like. Even during German Ausdruckstanz, it was still all about Electra, Medea, etc. We left behind these stereotypical role-models and said, “What the fuck?” I didn’t have any children; how was I going to embody such a character? All of these constructs from the leaders of the educated middle-class. We didn’t want to have anything to do with it. We wanted to try out new themes. In this respect, Pina Bausch was magnificent; she focused on the small things and found inspiration in everyday events and relations between people. Pina was the master when it came to relationships. This was not my main topic; I focused, rather, on the banality of everyday life and labor, as in Im Bade wannen (Im Bade wannen, 1980). Something like this had never been subject-matter for dance. No one had done anything like this before. In Frauenballett (Frauenballett, 1981), I worked with the banal monotony of work, of cleaning materials. It was women, who worked at the front of breaking open old roles and patterns. There was Reinhild Hoffmann, of course, but also Rosamund Gilmore in the south of Germany, Heidrun Vielhauer and many others. But also Hans Kresnik shook things up as well.

This entire generation was very important. The dance in East Germany at the time was called Tanztheater as well but it was a fully narrative dance, not comparable to what was going on in the West. The doctrine of classical ballet was much stronger there; they were better educated and seemingly didn’t dare to do silly things. But sometimes inspiration comes from a corner you never expected it to. It can arise from something very small, out of the dirt, out of protest.

Were you aware then that your interest in making the private public and exhibiting and problematizing the daily work of women overlapped with the cornerstones of the feminist movement at the time?

No, it just developed like that. Today’s youth is much better informed about history. They work more cerebrally, from their head. If one would ask Pina Bausch, she’d never want to say anything. It was sheer feelings, intuitions.

I’d read a lot and knew a lot because of my family, but I realized that it was of no importance when it came to creating good choreography. You have to forget all your cerebral knowledge. You can lie with description. Anything can potentially be explained. This is what we’d learned from what happened during the Third Reich. When people lose their insides, their intuition, their modesty, it gets dangerous.

What did it mean to decide for a life as a dancer and choreographer in the 1960s?

I never asked myself these wonderful questions. I only wanted to dance. This had nothing to do with reason. It was pure passion. There were many rational dancers, ones who decided to join a Stadttheater after graduating from the Folkwangschule. But all of them became unhappy.

What did you hear from your colleagues who had joined Stadttheater, why they were unhappy?

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The choreographies were just, oh God, oh God... and about the mental state of the choreographers at the time, one could only roll one’s eyes. As for what I did like, I liked Maurice Béjart and a few others. When Pina asked me if I wanted to join Folkwang Tanzstudio (FTS) after I finished my studies, I thought I was dreaming. FTS was a semi-professional group located in the same monastery as the Folkwangschule; it was something in between a school and a company. In 1968, Pina Bausch took over the direction of the group from Kurt Jooss and I joined two years later. Pina brought new wind into the group, she was looking for certain types.

Certain types?

She was looking for types who didn’t need to be that well trained in classical ballet, but possessed strong personalities. FTS was the only possibility for me. I didn’t like anything else going on in Germany at the time. It was my only chance. I worked with Pina for three years, together with 10 other dancers. She chose people from all over the world, some with strong ballet technique, others with no dance training at all.

How did you rehearse?

Pina choreographed all the movement material, and it was fantastic. She was a wonderful dancer, with her soft, tall and long body, but extremely skinny, anorexic. Onstage in the Folkwang-Aula, you could see every single one of her ribs. But her presence onstage was stunning, she had a very special aura. It wasn’t easy to work with her. She was always depressed and worked very hard and long hours with her gentle force. We rehearsed and worked and worked but barely performed. Very modest. We were desperate, nobody was interested in what we were doing, it was not easy. We wanted to get out of there sometimes. It was unhealthy. But there was no management, no producer taking care of organizing performances. That didn’t exist back then.

Every rehearsal day started with technique class, mostly classical. Then rehearsal until 2pm. After a short break for lunch, we continued rehearsing until 6pm. And sometimes we took a slightly longer lunch break and continued rehearsing from 6pm until 10pm. Rehearsal schedules changed constantly, one only found out about the schedule on the same day.

Later, when Pina Bausch started questioning her dancers, it seemed to be so much about transporting one’s life and life experiences outside of dance into the studio...

Pina learned a lot with time. It is a long process. Such a development takes years. Precision, coming from the inside, takes time. To be able to transfer your ideas and movement to others, to the point that dancers can convey it, might take years. And on top of that, Pina always dealt with these huge negative topics like “the end of the world”, “after zero”, etc.

Do you know why she was so interested in these dark topics?

German angst. She belongs to the 1940 generation. They were born during the war. I was born in 1944, just after the war. It’s difficult to imagine the horrors and the difficulty of this time from our perspective now. The angst has to do with the Nazi times. Afterwards, no one knew anymore why one was scared or what one was scared of, just that one was scared.

How did you get invited to the few performances outside of Essen?

Kurt Jooss still had a good reputation. We performed in Holland once, once in London, and then Mannheim, a few times Berlin and then Stuttgart. We performed Aktionen für Tänzer (Actions for Dancers, 1971) in Stuttgart, yes...

For this piece, Pina was talking to a friend of mine and myself one day, sitting on a bench in the inner courtyard of the Folkwang monastery. She wanted to make a piece on the idea of the apocalypse set to the music of Günther Becker. We started brainstorming together, everything had to be ugly. My friend and me liked the idea very much and told her that we would join. The performance turned out to be extremely abstruse; we were lying on the ground like ants, then a corpse in bed, constant orgasms... We went to Stuttgart to perform the piece at the Noverre-Gesellschaft. After the performance, silence... We were completely segregated. But we also saw the other pieces, all of which were classical ballet and found them equally terrible. There was no acceptance between the worlds, but absolute separation.

Was this at the same time a case of gender conflict, a confrontation between the young, female modern choreographers and the male ballet choreographers?

Yes, the moderns were women. But this seemed obvious to us and wasn’t singled out as a topic. We didn’t think in this way. We worked, we toiled and struggled, Pina, Reinhild and later myself. From one piece to the next. We didn’t think politically in this way.

Could you live from your work?

There was very little money at FTS. Later, I won prizes with my pieces and prizes meant both attention and money. When Pina left to Wuppertal in 1973, Reinhild Hoffmann and myself were offered the chance to choreograph and direct FTS for 600 DM per month. We both wanted to work creatively. One wasn’t asked and didn’t ask about hours spent working, only whether the piece was finished.

When Pina started posing questions to her dancers towards the end of the 70s, did you see this method at work with other choreographers at the time?

Later, during my time in Bremen, I also started using questions. But I continued to provide all the movement material myself and I never pushed it as far as Pina did. I think other choreographers started using the question method themselves at a later point as well. I remember reading about Orpheus (Orpheus – a story in six scenes, 1979) from William Forsythe in Stuttgart. He said back then that Pina was an important inspiration for him.

He was one of the first ballet choreographers to have a similar kind of mental freedom. Later, I saw the premiere of Gänge (Gänge, 1983), his first piece for the Frankfurt Ballet. It was an amazing piece, a combination of Tanztheater and ballet, but not at all like Pina, completely different. Many people use this kind of question method nowadays. But the difference lies in the spirit, your spirit. Everything has to be brought together somehow, bundled through your perspective. And this particularity of perspective is not at stake with every choreographer. Many choreographers are not used to giving a subtext to their dancers.

Do you think that this subtext is related to the strict working ethic that you spoke about before? Do you think that working to the point of physical exhaustion participated in the creation of the particular artistic image for Pina Bausch?

Nobody wants to work hard, myself and Pina included. But hard work happens automatically due to precision. Precision is of most importance.

Finding out what you want to say, and which way, automatically turns into hard work. The precision of the idea needs to become the precision of the body. It needs to enter the movement – sometimes even without having to say anything, which is even better. Intuition is another possibility for osmosis.

When did you start doing your own choreographies?

In the Wigman school, creation was the most important part of the education. But the education at the Folkwangschule was so exhausting that I couldn't work in the evenings. The only chance for me to work was from 7 to 9 in the morning. Folkwangschule was not as strict about creation and creativity as the Wigman schoo was.

What do you mean not as strict?

You need a very good teacher who has a good eye. For me, the teachers at the Folkwangschule were not so strong, because after Mary Wigman... She was able to bring out the personality of everyone. She saw something special in everyone and helped bring it out.

So at the Folkwangschule, the focus was on technique rather than on creativity and choreography?

Yes, somehow, yes. Even though I made one piece called Mono (Mono, 1970) during my last year as a student. There were very good reactions to the piece and Pina asked me about performing it with FTS. Afterwards, I continued making more pieces.

Susanne Linke unifies the heritage of German pre-war Ausdruckstanz with contemporary German dance theatre and has had a decisive influence on Germany's choreographic landscape. She trained as a dancer under Mary Wigman in Berlin before studying at the Folkwangshule in Essen. From 1970 to 1973, she worked as a dancer in the Folkwang Tanzstudio directed by Pina Bausch, going on to direct the studio herself until the summer of 1985. In the early 1990s, she was an artist-in-residence at the Hebbel-Theatre in Berlin.

From 1994 to 2000, she was director of dance theatre at Theater Bremen and continues to choreograph freelance today. Since 2015, she has been the artistic director of the dance department at Theater Trier.

Abstract Susanne Linke spoke to us about the state of dance in post-war Germany, her experiences of dancing for Pina Bausch at Folkwang Tanzstudio and her generation’s intuitive emancipatory gesture of abandoning classical roles and themes.

Keywords Folkwangschule, Folkwang Tanzstudio Essen, silence after the war, new roles, working methods, precision, inspiration and creativity.

At Work with Pina Bausch An Interview with Dominique Mercy

Franziska Aigner and Uri Turkenich

How did you get to know Pina Bausch?

In the summer of 1972, I got invited by the Puerto Rican American dancer and choreographer Manuel Alum to participate in a summer academy in Saratoga. Manuel had taught at the Ballet théâtre Contemporain in Amiens, where I was working at the time. It was the summer and I was on holidays from the ballet company and had never been to the United States before.

Saratoga is this wealthy little town in New York State and we were housed in beautiful villas. I shared a place together with Manuel Alum, Malou Airaudo, who had moved from France to New York to work with Manuel, and Pina Bausch, who had been invited by Paul Sanasardo himself. The two knew each other from the years that Pina had spent studying in New York. So we were living together for one summer, but at that time Pina didn’t speak any French and I didn’t speak any German yet, and so we were sort of trying to make the best of it with our English. Pina was teaching technique classes, understudying one of her pieces and performing a solo herself. In her classes, she was teaching a mixture of Laban and Jooss-Leeder techniques and her way of moving was a big discovery for me. I liked it very much. Until then, I had mostly taken ballet classes.

What was special about her classes?

I immediately felt very confident and at home in her class, there was such a sensitivity in the movement, I loved it. And then I saw Nach Null [After Zero, 1970], the piece she was understudying and her solo. I found it all incredibly fascinating and she was just like, you know...

I remember talking to Manuel about how much I liked Pina’s classes and her work. And he said that what Pina was doing was not modern, because, for them, modern was Graham. I don’t know whether it was because Pina came from Europe, or because of her being influenced by Rudolf von Laban rather than Martha Graham. I could never really understand why Pina was not considered by them to be modern.

Did you see any performances during your stay?

When I was in New York, I got to know the work of Antony Tudor. Manuel Alum had already been talking to me about his work, and once, when we were walking in Central Park, he pointed out a tall man with a bald head and told me that it was Tudor. Tudor was also a big influence on Pina when she was studying at The Julliard School. I had never seen work like his before. He used ballet language, but in a way I didn’t know it could be used. It was pure ballet, and while it was touching and beautiful, there was at the same time something “realistic” in the work. It portrayed human beings and their feelings, but not in a traditional, romantic way. It seemed more concrete than what I had seen before.

The whole summer was a huge and wonderful shock for me. I learned and experienced so many things, everything there was different, not only the dance experience... It was an important time for me on a personal level.

There was something in the air that I had never felt in France, where I was dancing in a ballet company, a repertory company. It was a conventional sort of company and I was completely involved in it. It was my life then. I think I didn’t really understand what was going on outside of the dance world. May ’68 was very strong in Paris and in the whole of France as well, of course, but I was already a dancer by that time. I was so involved in dance and my life in the theater.

What happened after you came back from Saratoga?

When I came back to Europe, I knew that the company, which in the meantime had moved to Angers, was no longer the place where I wanted to be. It was neither the place I wanted to be, nor was it the work I wanted to do. I was feeling the impact of the experience that I had gone through with Pina and with Manuel and with all those people around. So I said I would resign after the season. Pina had asked me already in Saratoga if I wanted to work with her. She said that she might have a project, but everything seemed very open. So back in France, I had no idea what was going to happen, just that I knew I didn’t want to continue working for the company in Angers. And after a while, I received a letter from Pina in which she asked me whether I would still like to work with her. She was about to take over the company in Wuppertal. The encounter we’d had over the summer had been so important for me, I didn’t know at the time what it was or what it would become. But for me it was clear – I wanted to work with her.

How was your arrival in Wuppertal? Could you tell us a little about the first pieces you were working on together?

I think we were 23 or 24 dancers at the beginning, most of whom had worked with Pina in Folkwang Tanzstudio or somewhere else. Jan Minařík was the only dancer who had stayed from the old company. We were from all over the world, a few of us not speaking even one word of German yet. We started to work together immediately and slowly got to know each other. During the process of Fritz [Fritz, 1974], the first piece we made, I had a strong cough.

So we made a solo for me, where at one point I start coughing and then the whole group starts coughing and we played with this. It was an incredible experience for me to realize that there are no borders as long as it makes sense somehow. I think that’s the strongest and most beautiful thing I went through with Pina, this space for experimentation. When I was working for other choreographers before, I’d always found a way to express myself.

Dance has always been a way of being for me. But I have to admit that, when working with Pina, I had this strong feeling that everything is possible, that you can do everything.

Why did you leave the company after two years?

Both Malou and I left in 1975 to go to Paris. After a while, we started to make work together with some friends who we knew from New York and Saratoga.

There were five of us and we called ourselves “La main”. It was difficult at first. We were a young company, but we started to have performances here and there. Paris can be very difficult though, it can be a hard city. During a guest performance of Tanztheater Wuppertal at Theatre de la Ville in Paris, Pina came to see one of our performances in the suburbs of Paris. I think the year was 1977. We decided we wanted to come back to Wuppertal. We were four dancers, and Elena Pikon was our babysitter. Malou and I had gotten our daughter in the meantime. Pina said that the four of us should come back to work with her. After a while she liked Elena so much that she invited her to join the company as well, and we found ourselves looking for a new babysitter.

Do you remember when Pina started asking you questions in rehearsals for the first time?

I think the first time that Pina started asking questions more directly was for Blaubart [Bluebeard – While Listening to a Taped Recording of Bela Bartok’s “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle”, 1977], but it’s difficult to say for me since I was mostly away until 1978. I joined Bluebeard as a guest, but by then, she already had another approach. I think it was also due to the hard time she had with the company then.

Do you remember the circumstances of the conflict?

Well, there were disagreements about the way of working. I think that some people didn’t understand what Pina was looking for. She was demanding a lot, sometimes very personal things. Even if she did not ask the dancers questions yet, she was already searching and looking for things, sometimes very intimate things. The difference from later was that we didn’t look for these things in the frame of asking and answering. So in 1976, due to the difficult circumstances, Pina decided to work in the studio of Jan Minařík and asked that only the ones who wanted to work with her should come there.

And after a while, people came back – and they could. It was a difficult time for everybody.

Could you tell us about the first piece you participated in where Pina asked you questions?

When we did the project in Bochum Er nimmt sie an der Hand und führt sie in das Schloss, die Anderen folgen [He Takes Her by the Hand and Leads Her into The Castle, the Others Follow…, 1978], there were only four dancers, the others were opera singers, actors and one baker. It was just Jan Minařík, Jo Ann Endicott, Viviennne Newport and I from the company. Since Pina was working with people who had less movement experience, she started asking questions, working with text. In the beginning, the questions were very simple, like “six different ways to be angry”, or “six different ways to say good morning”.

Much later, she said that she started asking these questions because, on the one hand, things she didn’t prepare or expect were often more interesting than what she was trying to prepare or fix, and on the other hand, she realized that each one of us had something special. That’s why she slowly got away from making pieces with main roles. She was trying to make space for everybody to be in the piece. She started to work with a white page and started asking us questions.

Could you describe to us your experience of working with other choreographers, as you did in Bordeaux? How did these working processes differ from working with Pina?

Of course, it’s different with each choreographer, but most of the people I worked with seemed to come to the studio with some ideas and ask whether you could try a phrase or do something in a particular way. From there, it’s up to the relation between you, the dancer and him or her, the choreographer. Sometimes you get a chance to give a little bit more of your ideas, sometimes not. In the beginning, Pina would also come with a movement phrase, while at the same time she was interested in getting something from us, too. When we worked on Iphigenie auf Tauris [Iphigenia in Tauris, 1973] or Orpheus und Eurydike [Orpheus and Eurydice, 1975], we were all intervening with one another, provoking one another, it was a sharable process. Later, when she’d already started asking questions, she still kept doing phrases for a while, teaching us movements or little phrases of movements, gestures. But eventually, she started provoking us with questions about movement and didn't teach us any movements anymore.

Then she would only intervene with the overall construction, the composition, somehow.

Do you remember the first time that you performed your own dance material? Do you remember the piece and the circumstances of making that piece?

The first dance that I did all by myself was for Ahnen [Ahnen, 1987]. In Ahnen, I found some movements from one of Pina’s questions, which I constructed a solo with, together with the material she had provided. And then she took it as it was. My dance was a little piece within the piece of Pina’s. We all put a piece of us in the piece of Pina’s, but the piece was always Pina’s. It's her eyes, her sensibility, her predictions, her way of feeling, seeing, her genius about construction and timing. That's all hers.

Could you describe to us how the process of making and constructing a dance would come about when using the question and answer method as a way of producing movement material?

She would ask questions about movements and we would answer. Our answers would be filmed while she also took notes. We made notes, too. And at one point, she would ask each of us individually to watch the movement material together, to make a selection from what we answered. While watching, she would comment on what we were looking at and make the selection. She would give slight guidelines, like go more in one direction or the other, or ask whether this one thing was really necessary. That was the first step. After doing this selection with her, she’d say, “Ok, now you can start doing something.” So most of us would start to construct little phrases.

These were filmed again, looked at again and she would intervene again and say something was too long maybe. But she was still leaving us a big amount of freedom. Sometimes I kept things she didn't like, because I felt that it was necessary that they be there.

When did Pina start filming during rehearsals? What did you do before you had videos?

That's a very interesting question, but I don't remember how we dealt with this before we had video. I know that she filmed every performance from the very beginning. But it’s a very practical tool, in fact, because after a while you sort of forget the movements you’ve done – then you can always go back to the video. To be able to start making a dance, I had to start by learning my own movement from video again. And my problem was that I was never able to start working on a little phrase after Pina had done the selection of movement. I just couldn’t start working on these little phrases and show them to her as I went along.

Why? I first had to find something that made me enter into the dance. To call it a dance, I first needed to find something took hold of me and made me move.

And until I found that, I couldn’t start constructing and putting things together. So it always took me quite a while before I knew what I wanted to do. And Pina kept asking me if I was ready yet. She wanted to see what I was working on. Sometimes the piece was starting to get finished and I still couldn’t show her anything. But when I showed her, I always thought that it was finished, that it was the way it was supposed to be.

This entry that you're speaking about, did Pina help you find it?

No. That was my entry. I had to find something that would help me start composing a little dance phrase. And Pina gave me complete freedom about this, she never... I remember one dance I did for the co-production with Hong Kong, Der Fensterputzer [The Window Washer, 1997]. I remember that I showed her the dance and that she told me that I stayed in one place for too long in the beginning. And I said yes, that's what it's about, that's what I want. In the performance, my dance comes back a second time, and when it comes back I leave out this very beginning which she thought was too much in one place. But she understood what I wanted and needed. Another process, which was very important for me and which made me go somewhere else, was Nur Du [Only You, 1996], the co-production we did with the University of California. After I showed her the dance I did, there were no comments for three to four days, maybe longer. When she finally called me, she asked what I had wanted to do. It felt as though she had pulled the floor out from under my feet. In a few words, she told me that I should do something else, because what I did was not going to work. It was a big shock for me, I have to admit. In the end, it was good, because it made me look more specifically for what I wanted to do. But for about a week, I was completely destroyed, I couldn't do anything. Later, towards the end of the process, – we were working onstage already – I started to try things backstage during rehearsals. And finally, after rehearsal one day, I said, “Ok, I will show you what I did.” I didn't want anybody else to be there. There was just one of my friends and Jan Minařík, who, because he was working very closely with Pina and the person responsible for the music, put on a piece of music. Afterwards, there was again no comment, just a big embrace and tears. And the dance stayed like this and finished the piece.

Was there a clear distinction in the rehearsal period between the time for making material and the time when Pina would then put it all together?

There was the material-creation period and then the moment where Pina started to construct, but everybody continued to make more material during this time as well anyhow. Pina always said that our job wasn’t finished just because she started to construct things. We could still propose different answers and were always welcome to do something, to show something new.

Sometimes she would ask another question or put the same question differently. Often she would eventually say, “I don't know, but there is nothing…” It was a little bit depressing to hear that there was nothing there for her with which to do a piece. In the end, of course, it became a piece of three to four hours, with this “little” amount of material.

Concerning the selection process, could you follow or understand why she would choose one thing over another?

Sometimes yes, but more often no. The first selection, in a way, related to what we had been proposing. And sometimes you thought, well, that wasn’t so bad, but she’s not gonna to take it, she’s gonna take some little “fart” I did somewhere in the corner, something that you were almost ashamed of. I think it always took me a really long time to understand what was going on, what the piece was going to be. But, in a way, I think that this was one of the big richnesses of Pina’s work, this sort of innocence and freedom. She never wanted to explain what she did or what her questions meant. If you asked for clarifications about questions, when it got too complicated, she would ask you to do what you understood at first. It was never about interpretation. She would take things the way they were and react to them with her own sensibility.

The beauty of what is happening onstage sometimes occurs because the one performing doesn't really know completely what he or she is talking about, or who she or he is at that moment. I think this is one of the richnesses of Pina’s work, this sort of naiveté and innocence. If you start to know too much or say too much, you start to kill something at the same time.

How exactly does this occur, this shift from proposing an answer to a concrete question to this form of innocence that you are talking about?

It is complex, because when you propose an answer, you don't do it in a context. There is no context at first, because Pina will create the context later. What comes before and what comes after influences what you do inasmuch as you influence what comes before and after. Since she wouldn't comment on what we did most of the time, I had a certain idea about what I was doing and why I did it. But she might have a completely different idea as to why she took it. In a way, she worked with what she thought it was and we worked with our ideas and feelings around the same material. Sometimes you discovered her thoughts and ideas about your material. And this was actually when it became complex, because you now knew what she was thinking, so it made you change. I’m not sure though if we always discovered what Pina was thinking.

How does this innocence relate to a practice of performing? How do you care for this innocence in a performance that you repeat 50 times or more?

This is the very paradoxical thing. Sometimes Pina asked us to do something again or wear something again that we’d thought were only preliminary solutions. But for her, she wanted to see it exactly the way we did it the first time. She often said that those little moments had to endure the repetitiveness, the fact of seeing and doing it again and again and again. She watched every performance from the auditorium and what we were doing onstage had to reach her, in one way or another, every night. If it didn't work after seeing it 10 times, she would eventually take it out of the piece. This is this paradox, animating this aspect of freedom and freshness, on the one hand, with her very accurate sense of precision on the other.

When you were proposing answers to her questions, do you think that you proposed things that you thought would be ok to repeat?

Yes. I recognized the feeling that I wouldn't want to do something sometimes, because I had done the same role already in other pieces, for instance. I wanted to move forward instead of showing myself in the same way over and over again.

How did Pina choose the people she wanted to work with? You were saying earlier on that, in a way, she “fell in love” with your babysitter Elena, and so invited her to join the company as well.

I think she had a special connection to each one of us. Some pieces in the repertoire, however, require a certain technical level, or things like that.

That's why she started doing auditions for Das Frühlingsopfer [Rite of Spring, 1975]. In this piece, the dancers need to be able to perform a demanding choreography and make it look good. At the same time, she was meticulous in her corrections and feedback. People have to be able to endure this precision as well. In the end, however, I think she was always looking for something other than technique. She had to feel that something could happen between this person, the work and her. Sometimes it didn't work, and that’s ok, too. It's life. But she had a connection with all of us somehow. I think between the two of us, there was friendship, or maybe something that I don't know exactly what it was, maybe sisterhood. It's important what you do onstage, what you are. I don't know. Pina and I never talked about this, we never had the feeling that we had to speak too much. We believed that we understood each other. I think we did most of the time.

Dominique Mercy received his education in classical ballet in France.

During a stay in the United States in 1972, he met Pina Bausch, who invited him to join her in Germany, where she was to found the dance company Tanztheater Wuppertal in 1973. He became one of the most famous European contemporary dancers, was made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2001, and he received a Bessie Award in 2002 for his performance in Masurca Fogo [Masurca Fogo, 1998] and the Légion d'Honneur in 2013.

Abstract Dominique Mercy first met Pina Bausch in the United States at a summer academy organized by the choreographer Paul Sanasardo. Telling his experience of the New York dance scene and how he perceived it as differing from both living as well as dancing in Europe, he moves on to provide a detailed account of the development of Pina Bausch’s questioning method.

Keywords Paul Sanasardo, Saratoga, New York, beginnings at Tanztheater Wuppertal, questions and methods in the studio, performing onstage, friendship.

Beginnings at Tanztheater Relevance, Form and Love

Wuppertal:

On

An Interview with Vivienne Newport Franziska Aigner and Uri Turkenich

We would like to begin by asking you about your dance education in England. What were you interested in and why did you decide to move to Germany?

I was interested in Modern dance, but I was never interested in technique and becoming a technical dancer. Ever. I went to a school in London called the Rambert School. It was the opposite of the Royal Ballet in a way, because the Royal Ballet had the cream of the cream of possible future classical dancers and Rambert got a bunch of... It was still a ballet school, but it got the weirdos, the characters. In my time in London, everybody was training as a classical dancer. The first contemporary dance school, called The Place, opened just after my study years in London. I would have probably wanted to go there, but it was too late for me. If you wanted work in dance in England, there were about two and half companies. The Royal Ballet, London Festival Ballet and a couple of obscure things. Germany, on the other hand, had lots of work. There was an Opera house with a dance company in every other town. That’s why you went to Germany. We all travelled to Germany to audition.

You said Modern dance before, what was Modern dance for you at the time?

It was dance that was relevant for me. No fairytales basically. I am saying this now in retrospect, because at the time, I just... Gene Kelly! I loved the idea of movement and theatre. I am much more a theatrical dancer than a dancer-dancer. I was an acting dancer as opposed to a movement dancer.

Could you explain the difference to us?

I suppose it has to do with expressing something. This is light years away from what Pina Bausch later came to do. I didn’t know anything about it then.

But I did know that there must be a way of expressing where you don’t have to run around in tutus. I knew that there must be something like that. It’s

about being confronted with things that make you feel alive, that make you think. And this could be spoken or pictures. I wasn’t into mime.

So you travelled to Germany and auditioned for a number of dance companies?

Yes, but I only did around three auditions. Then the money ran out and I had to go home. Later, I heard from a friend of mine with whom I had studied in London that Folkwang Tanzstudio, run by Pina Bausch in Essen, might have an opening for a dancer. I didn’t tell anybody about it and went there for the weekend. I could only stay for the weekend, which was my luck in a way, because Pina could never make up her mind. She always kept people for weeks, asking them to do another class. But I couldn’t do that, I had to go back to England. And she took me. I was at Folkwang Tanzstudio for about one year before Pina went to Wuppertal. Most of us went with her, some didn’t.

What are your memories from your time in Essen at Folkwang Tanzstudio?

I was living in this tiny little room that Susanne Linke, who was living upstairs, rented to me. Living in Germany was difficult in the beginning. I was very young and I didn’t speak any German yet. At the time people, would really size me up, they would somehow know that I was a foreigner and I didn’t even look that different... Germany was sort of insecure at the time, but that died out after a few years.

What do you mean with insecure?

It wasn’t long after the war when I showed up in ’71. There was this culture of silence. Sons and daughters born after the war didn’t know anything about their parents and grandparents. The parents didn’t want to talk about what had happened during the war. Regardless of what they had done or even whether they had done anything, they just didn’t talk about it. There was always this huge elephant in the room. And it didn’t start being dealt with until ’78 or ’79. It was only then that they started speaking about the past, but the damage had been done. We had ’68, we had the barricades in the streets, we started to have the RAF with Baader and Meinhof, etc. We all have our theories about it. At the same time, by the 80s, Germany was one of the richest countries in Europe again. I didn’t know that back then, but I did know that I got paid a bit more than in London. I was kind of rich for my standards. Then I followed Pina from Essen to Wuppertal in 1973 and I had a contract and all... I had a lower income than some of the other dancers because I was just a beginner. But relative to England, I was paid very well.

Could you feel the effects of ’68 when you arrived to Germany?

Oh yes! There were a lot of things going on. The 70s were the time of eatpray-love; it was all sex, drugs and rock ’n roll. It was good times for us British because we didn’t have Vietnam. America had Vietnam, but the British just had sex, drugs and rock ’n roll. And the Germans were always a bit... It was happening in Germany as well. Although it seems that sex, drugs and rock ’n roll only applied to students in Germany. It wasn’t a sort of general young people thing like it was in England. It was more of an elite thing.

Concerning theatre and dance, the idea that you can show things on a theatre stage that are direct as opposed to being wrapped up in pretty colors and things – this kind of direct aesthetics was very new. Pina had this artistic quality of being able to feel what was going on around her. And I mean feeling it and not analyzing it. Being able to put the feeling of it on stage. But what she put on stage were things that people were afraid of looking at.

Some people loved it and of course some people were frightened by it. At first, most people hated it, but by ’78, it was normal again. We were done with most of the audience walking out by then.

Do you remember what you thought about Pina’s work when you first came to Folkwang Tanzstudio?

I remember that Pina interviewed us all before we went to Wuppertal. We all had a talk with her. And I remember saying to her that the most important thing about her work for me was that it was relevant. I remember saying that. I found it relevant to what was going on. And later, she became possibly even more relevant.

What can you tell us about your time in Wuppertal?

Wuppertal is in the middle of the Ruhrgebiet, which is industry, industry, industry. It has its charm but it’s also quite hard. But it had an opera house and a theatre and it had a public. The public didn’t have an easy life, nobody had an easy life in that part of the world. It was a workers’ city and the people there weren’t really impressed with Pina’s work. The aesthetics were quite confronting. Nobody likes being confronted, especially with what you just left your home for. You should have seen them, how they were dressed up nicely and everything. It’s kind of understandable. You don‘t know that when you are on stage, you don’t know anything. But they got over it with time. They got used to it.

Could you tell us about how you worked in rehearsal during your time at Tanztheater Wuppertal?

During Iphigenie auf Tauris (Iphigenia in Tauris, 1973) or Orpheus und Eurydike (Orpheus and Eurydice, 1975), we started with a piece of music.

First, there was a piece of music and half a movement. But when we listened to the music once again together with people, there were suddenly 35 movements because the music tells you what to do. Pina was stunningly musical and very influenced by it. It was only later that she started from an idea and put the music to it afterwards. That’s a pretty different thing. By then, she was interested in the people she was working with and started working from them, from the way they moved. She loved the way they moved. But it never stopped being her art. That’s the most important thing. I think that by working with questions in the sense of asking us questions that we then each answered with movements, sentences and little dances, it became more about expressing things that had to do with us. By asking questions about us as both people and dancers, we started talking about us, how we were doing, in this world, on this planet, now. I think that was the move. And it’s very hard to say whether this was done consciously. Things changed again in the pieces after the 90s. There weren’t hardly any more big groups left at all by then. It became mostly solos and everybody working separately.

You participated in the piece Er nimmt sie an der Hand und führt sie in das Schloss, die Anderen folgen (He takes her by the hand and leads her into the castle, the others follow, 1978) based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth that Pina Bausch did in Bochum with both dancers from Tanztheater Wuppertal and actors from Schauspielhaus Bochum. This seems to be the pivotal piece in which Pina Bausch started to ask questions. Could you tell us about this production?

It was difficult. We drove back and forth between Wuppertal and Bochum every day. We had rehearsal in the morning and evening and I went to sleep on a sofa in the afternoon. Fortunately, there was all this furniture in the production, so there was somewhere to go to sleep on. After the evening rehearsals, we drove back to Wuppertal. The same thing every day. It was a bit hard, we didn’t have much of a private life.

During rehearsals, Pina asked us to come up with things like blowing our noses six times, or six times yes, six times no, etc. We would always write our answers down because we knew we were going to do them to music, first slowly and then half as quick again and then differently once more. We were looking for gestures and movements as opposed to feelings in this piece.

There’s a difference between when you say “give me three times being in love” and “six times yes”. The latter is not necessarily a feeling. You can do it with feelings, but it’s not necessarily a feeling. And it’s not about you. It’s not about what you think. It’s just about how you express.

At the end of the rehearsal process, we had this extraordinary repertoire of gestures that we performed crossing the stage in the famous diagonal. There was this other scene where Mechthild Großmann is sitting in the middle of the space on a chair looking forward. Vitus Zeplichal is running around doing

stuff, but she is ignoring him. One of the most profound statements that Pina ever made is reproach. And silence is the strongest form of reproach. During rehearsals, Pina said that this was a piece about men and women. It was Pina’s way of trying to get through to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. She was trying to take the essence out of the piece and put it in her own way. Unfortunately, the Shakespeare Society had been invited. That was a mistake. They just didn’t get it. How could they?

How did you approach the later questions, like “your first kiss”?

I think that if you are curious about human beings, these are the kind of questions you ask each other over a drink. Pina was just putting these questions in another context. So the questions themselves were not unusual.

Although answering questions like “your first kiss” in front of a large dance company of about 20 people you are not necessarily close to… But we got used to it. What was unusual was the form it took when it got onstage. The form it took when it reached the stage is the most important thing about it, you see. It was always a very strong form, it looked and felt good. The thing on it’s own is not really interesting unless it is in this frame.

What do you mean by form?

The set, the costumes, the composition. Part of the form is the music, though sometimes there wasn’t any. Colours, make up, costumes, expression, people together, or one alone. It’s all these things. Don’t forget the set! Until the 80s, most of the sets were done by Rolf Borzik. I think that partly the reason why Pina’s pieces were so successful was because German Opera and Theatre was experimenting with the idea of set design. It was set designers who were starting to direct plays, working with space and the spatiality of theatre. And the tremendous sets of Rolf Borzik accompanying Pina’s choreographies were the icing on the cake in a way.

Was Rolf Borzik involved in the artistic process?

Yes, he also did the costumes. Pina worked on the choreography and direction of the piece and Rolf was responsible for the visuals, if you like. He was the artist.

How were the relations amongst yourselves as dancers in the company?

We were 20 of us in the company, which is a lot. You make friendships with some and not with others… I was friends with Jo (Josephine Ann Endicott) and other English speakers like Colleen Finneran and Barry Wilkinson. But, in a way, it was always the work that came before friendships; we were conscious of the fact we were there for the work and not for the social life. So we could

have been closer than we actually were. But anyway, we were all love and peace; it was that time. You could not not be touched by what was going on in the world.

A universal thing about dancers is that they are actually very generous. With their time, their energy and their curiosity. If you can avoid the inner company dynamics that can sometimes be very damaging, you are left with a relationship to the choreographer and the fellow dancers that is mostly about trust. Dancers tend to be very generous people with their trust.

Dancers tend to love each other, they keep their friendships going. Some of us started loving each other now as opposed to then. But you know, with time we get a bit more mellow (laughs). It was lovely to see everyone again at Pina’s funeral. But it was also frightening, because I knew that I was quite probably not going to see them again.

This feeling of trust or love was still there after all those years?

Yes, of course – we are like a big family in a way. The Pina family… even though I used to say back then that the only thing we really had in common was the fact that we were onstage at same time.

Long after I had left Tanztheater Wuppertal, when I was working in San Francisco in 1996, the company came to Berkeley to perform. I stayed in the hotel with them for a few days and then travelled around California with Mechthild Großmann. The Pina family was there. It was nice. Even though it was mostly people who I hadn’t worked with. But, you know, we each had our special relation to Pina and to each other.

In the 70s, Pina once said that one of the main reasons to do anything is to be loved. She did strongly believe that. But the point is that she could also…

If you were loved by Pina, you got nice things to do. If you were not loved by Pina you got nothing to do. But the emotionality and jealousy resulting from this can be found in any theatre or dance company. That is not special to Pina. But there was something special in the relations amongst the company nevertheless. I’m thinking about this thing of going over the borders of either normality or pain thresholds, to make a point, to be able to express things, to get attention and be loved. The way we approached this was different to both performance art, where you would cut yourself in order to bleed, and theatre, with its fake knife and blood. We weren’t bleeding, because that would be going too far, but we did get bruised. And it looked hard and awful, because it was hard and awful. But it had a very strong effect and we were doing it for the effect. If it works and looks good in the sense that it has the effect you want it to have and doesn’t actually kill you, then you are alright.

But I think this was all part of feeling the borders. Going very close to the borders and even going over them. You don’t really know your border unless you’ve been to them. If you get a certain dynamics going amongst people trying to out do each other, the goal post gets pushed further and further.

We once had a task that was about melting into your surroundings and there was this big rubber mat on the floor. I thought that if I do it on that it would

not hurt because it’s a rubber mat. I just stood there and fell into the mat…

But it wasn’t soft at all, it was agony! But Pina understood that I couldn’t do it again. It looked good but it was too painful. But if it looks good and you can do it over and over again, Pina’ll take it.

Explain to us how exactly this worked. She asked you to melt into your surroundings and you brought the mat…?

Pina would pose a question into the space. Everybody thought about it a little and then, one by one, we would get up and do something, or not. If you couldn’t think of anything, you did not do anything. That day, the mat just happened to be there. And so I thought to just fall straight down. How could I be so wrong?

You said it was about getting attention. Whose attention were you speaking about?

Pina’s attention. When you are onstage, it’s the audience, of course, but in rehearsals it was about Pina. I think that’s what made it kind of… almost unhealthy. Suddenly you get this fixation, everything was for her. In the film Pina by Wim Wenders, Julie Shanahan at some point says “Pina was looking at me or watching me for 22 years. That’s longer than my parents.” And that’s the thing. You do it and she is watching you, looking at you and deciding if it’s good material for her piece or not. And it is up to you if you want to be part of that, because it’s her piece, it’s not your piece. Pina’s pieces will always be Pina’s pieces. It becomes your work the moment you go on stage and perform the piece. But in rehearsals, it’s all for her. That’s how it is.

How did this spirit of ’68 that you talked about before fit in with working in such a big institution as the Schauspiel Wuppertal?

That was the problem. The theatre as an institution was the establishment.

But I think our tendency was to pretend it wasn’t there. We couldn’t survive without the theatre, but the theatre was awful in a way. Even Arno Wüstenhöfer, the Generalintendant of the Wuppertaler Bühnen, who hired Pina in the first place and supported her more than anyone else, could not save us from having to do Operas. He could only save us from extinction (laughs). That’s all. I’m sure Pina would not have made it past her first contract in Wuppertal if it hadn‘t been for him.

Can you tell us why all of the dancers except for Jan Minarik wanted to leave after Fritz (1973), Pina’s first piece for Tanztheater Wuppertal?

Well I think most of them thought “Shit, this is not what I thought it was going to be.” You have to consider the times. Before Pina, the dance company was an Opera Ballet company. All of the dancers except Jan Minarik had either been fired or left by themselves upon Pina’s arrival. So Pina hired a bunch of new people, some of whom she did not know before. For some, I think it was simply not interesting artistically, others wanted more straightforward “dance”. In a way, there was a lot of sitting around in rehearsals. When 20 people are to answer a question, how many questions do you think we got done in one rehearsal? Not very many. We spent a lot of time not moving. So people left because they wanted to use all this time to move, otherwise the time was gone. You were not going to get it back. But Pina wanted to get somewhere that she herself didn’t yet know what it was going to be. She wanted to look for it. And she could only do that with people who went that way with her. Some did and some didn’t. Pina herself was never very good at firing her dancers. She was too kind for that, but she encouraged them to go if they wanted to.

How did Pina react to so many dancers leaving the company?

It gave her more determination. But there were also times when she was quite difficult and did not have a good relationship to anybody at all. But that helped in a way. It was so special then, it was so difficult and special. And it worked. If everything is easy sailing, be very suspicious of it. You need friction. It was all about finding the right thing to do, trying to make it work.

There are some directors and choreographers that seem to react, but actually they tend to presuppose what is going to happen to us. It is not only about what is happening to us, but where are we going. And I think Pina was one of these artists. It was never calculated or thought through. That’s just what happened when she worked. You see things.

Was there a point when you felt that things changed? That there was less friction both inside the company as well in relation to the audience? Was there a moment when you felt, ok, now she is happy with it?

Even if she was happy with it, she never said very much. But these things prove themselves; you get asked to perform more. I don’t think Pina changed that much over time. She went to the restaurant every night after rehearsals.

If you wanted to find her, you knew where she was. In the afternoon she was in one restaurant, and in the evening she was in another. For me, she didn’t change that much, except that the restaurants got better and that she got more tired and more secluded.

Could you feel Pina’s background and upbringing in post-war Germany playing itself out in the kinds of questions and concerns that formed her work?

I think she experienced things as a child that were not very pleasant. Not the family. She almost got attacked… She had to run for her life. This happens to many people. I experienced a similar situation. These are the things that stay with you, when you realise that you are running for your life. But at the same time, she was protected by people who saw something in her. The first was Kurt Joss. Pina was very privileged in the way that she was recognised by Kurt Joss from early on. She was virtually his daughter. Hans Zullig at the Folkswangschule also adored her. When Pina was studying at Julliard in the United States, Anthony Tudor made fun of her for being a “Kraut” by calling her Fritz. So it’s no wonder she made this piece called Fritz (1973), these things stayed with her. The joke in all this is that I got made fun of for being a Kraut even though I am English. So I know what it’s like. The things that happen to you in your normal life and in the beginning of your career make a big impact on you. But you can’t reduce it to that. She was an artist. A real born artist. The only thing that can stop her from making art is not being alive. All the things that happened to her surely had an influence, but they are not the cause of her art. They are not the beginnings, they were just there at the time.

Vivienne Newport (*1951, Bristol; †2015, Berlin) was part of the first generation of dancers of the newly established Tanztheater Wuppertal (1973). In 1981, she founded her own ensemble at Theater am Turm (TAT) in Frankfurt, which gained widespread recognition over the years. In 2004, she started working as a freelance choreographer and director. Vivienne Newport died in Berlin on April 27 at the age of 63 after a long illness.

Abstract Vivienne Newport spoke to us about the early choreographic works of Tanztheater Wuppertal under the direction of Pina Bausch, in which Newport participated as one of the seminal dancers. Furthermore, she spoke to us about the internal dynamic in the company and the particularity of Pina Bausch’s relations to the dancers.

Keywords Folkwang Tanzstudio Essen, beginnings at Tanztheater Wuppertal, ’68, relevance, questions, form.