The German choreographer Pina Bausch has been attracting an inordinate amount of attention as one of the most original dance talents in the world today. Despite the dark, cruel content of much of her work, critics and public alike are responding to her ballets enthusiastically. Many people, however, find her creations deeply disturbing, not to say morally offensive.
Curiously or interestingly, depending on one's point of view, Bausch's work deals heavily in images of sexual cruelty and humiliation. Anyone who goes to the movies or watches television these days is no stranger to images of sex or domestic violence, of course, but hellish confrontations seem more vivid, somehow, when rendered live and in person.
A man and a woman exhaust themselves slamming one another into a wall in Bausch's Café Muller. Three men push a woman's mouth into a hideous smile as they molest her in Viktor. A woman strips off a man's clothing, then rouges his nipples and lights matches struck between his toes in 1980--A Piece by Pina Bausch. Kneeling between a man's legs, a woman repeatedly reaches up toward his face, only to be brusquely shoved back to the floor in a work with the unwieldy title Bluebeard--While Listening to a Tape Recording of Bela Bertok's Opera "Duke Bluebeard's Castle."
Confronted with live actors (who look much like you and me) performing these sadistic acts, sophisticated audiences are apt to shift uneasily in their seats. They're discovering something they thought they'd lost: the ability to be shocked.
Alienation and Despair
It is these powerful scenes conjuring alienation and its consequent despair that make Bausch, the principal exponent of Tanztheater (literally, dance theater), so intellectually controversial--and so commercially popular. It she teaching us something profound about human nature or just titillating us with soft-core (sometimes hard-core) pain?
Bausch can also be humorous, even if her humor is usually grim. As her company has visited North America over the course of five years (its first appearance was at the Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival in 1984), audiences have come to realize that Bausch has several sides to her personality.
Particularly in New York City, where the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) has presented Bausch on each visit, eager theatergoers have had the opportunity to sample a fair range of Bausch's work (eleven out of some twenty dances made to date). Last summer, her Tanztheater Wuppertal presented the U.S. premieres of Viktor and Nelken (Carnations) at BAM as part of the First New York International Festival of the Arts. At these performances demonstrated, you'll never leave a Bausch performance jauntily humming a tune, but chances are you'll still be thinking about what you saw the next day, and the next week, perhaps the next year. Love her or hate her, Pina Bausch is an artist who gets under your skin.
Unspeakable Violence
One of the reasons Bausch has gained such notoriety is the take-no-survivors nature of her performances. Her works are often long (1980 lasts four hours, and
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