Book Review by Arnd Weseman, TANZ Magazine, 8/2015
eBook
PINA BAUSCH
Memorabilia about the great lady of German Tanztheater is shooting through the book market price ceiling. Publisher Peter Lang proudly demands $478.79 on Amazon for Deirdre Mulrooney’s 2002 dissertation, “Orientalism, Orientation, and the Nomadic Work of Pina Bausch”. Therefore, we are singing the praises of this new ebook version, which costs only $40.
Mulrooney who lately wrote about Irish modern dance pioneer Erina Brady in TANZ MAGAZINE (April 2015) considers Pina Bausch through the lens of Edward Said’s famous theory “Orientalism” in which the “enlightened” West mystifies the Orient, – a thorny issue that comes up in Pina Bausch’s oeuvre, when she brings her collaborators traveling to places like Turky, India, or Korea in order to create choreography, in an attempt to get beyond cliche, sprinkling the Wuppertal longing for the Orient with a bit of a feel-good factor.
Mulrooney however examines Bausch’s early work in order to identify an entirely different aspect of her work. How else, Mulrooney asks, if not by Bausch’s criticism of interpretation, can one understand the company’s widespread success in Asia?
Thus, their aesthetic means, as well as their use of humor, overturn and undermine the clichés of Western superiority and rationalism. According to Mulrooney’s thesis, Pina Bausch takes advantage of the the postwar Stunde Null moment, to create a dance that side-steps Western categories, reaching beyond national and even colonial parameters.
By Arnd Wesemann, Editor, TANZ Magazine, August 2015
Deirdre Mulrooney, <Orientalism,
Orientation, and the Nomadic
Work of Pina Bausch>, Grand Canal
Publishing via Kindle June 2015
ebook published by Grand Canal Publishing, Dublin, June 2015. Paperback published by Peter Lang GmbH, Frankfurt, 2002
I finally got around to translating this review of my ebook on Pina Bausch, by Arnd Weseman, editor of TANZ Magazine! Please feel free to buy the book from me directly, so that all proceeds go to the author (me). Just email me at deir@indigo.ie and I will organise it 🙂