1.1.Available Literature on the Tanztheater Wuppertal.
 
 
 
 

The available published material to date on Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal falls into three categories.

First there is the writing ‘from the inside’, by erstwhile company dramaturg, Raimund Hoghe, which consists of diaristic journals, impressions and interviews, in programme notes (e.g. Viktor, Bandoneon - Für was kann Tango alles gut sein? (1981), and Pina Bausch, Tanztheatergeschichten (1986).

Second there are the descriptive critical commentaries which chronicle the work of the Tanztheater Wuppertal from the outside, including Pina Bausch - Wuppertal Dance Theatre, or on the Art of Training a Goldfish, (1985), by Norbert Servos and Hedwig Müller, accompanied by interviews with Pina Bausch by Jochen Schmidt, as well as Norbert Servos’ illuminating essay ‘Dance and Emancipation’, in which he draws parallels between the Tanztheater Wuppertal phenomenon and the theories of the sociologist Norbert Elias. This has been recently updated to Nur Du (1996) by Norbert Servos in pina bausch - wuppertaler tanztheater, oder die kunst einen goldfisch zu dressieren, (1996), which was written in close collaboration with Pina Bausch herself who selected the accompanying photographs.

Italian dance critic Leonetta Bentivoglio has contributed significantly to chronicling the development of Tanztheater Wuppertal in Tanztheater - dalla Danza Espressionista Pina Bausch (1982), Il Teatro di Pina Bausch (1992, first ed., 1985), and Pina Bausch, with Raphael de Gubernatis (1986). Bentivoglio has done many useful interviews with Pina Bausch, which appear in the accompanying programme notes to many of the pieces. The interviews and essays by her and de Gubernatis in Pina Bausch are particularly informative and enlightening.

Books like Tanz-Legenden (1984), by Hanrath and Winkels are compilations of short interviews and snippets on and with Pina Bausch and company members.

Thirdly, there are numerous picture - books, including Pina Bausch (1989) photographs by Guy Delahaye; Ensemble (1988), by Leonora Mau and Ronald Kaye; Setzt dich hin und lächle (1979), by Ulle Weiss with text by Ille Chamier; Detlev Erler’s Pina Bausch (1994), which is accompanied by Heiner Müller’s poetic piece on Pina Bausch ‘Blut ist im Schuh oder das Rätsel der Freiheit’; and most recently Maarten Vanden Abeele’s book of photographs, Pina Bausch (1996).

As well as the above books, which are wholly devoted to the subject of the Tanztheater Wuppertal, there are many useful reflective articles in journals, including ‘Musik als erinnerte Zeit’ by Kay Kirchmann in Tanzdrama, in which he puts forward his own theory that the dramaturgical principle of Pina Bausch’s work is musical, and Alice Schwarzer’s eyewitness account and impressions of the making of a piece in Warum gerade sie? (1989).

There are countless newspaper reviews of all performances available which gauge public reaction.

Academic analysis is limited to the analysis of Pina Bausch’s use of the fairytale, particularly focussing on Blaubart (1977), in Katya Monteiro’s doctoral dissertation ‘The Fairytale Revised’, for New York University in 1992, as well as Ana Sanchez-Colberg’s doctoral dissertation ‘German Tanztheater; Traditions and Contradictions’ (1991), for the Laban Centre in London which assesses Pina Bausch’s position in the canon of German Tanztheater, as evolved from Kurt Jooss and the Folkwangschule. Susanne Schlicher’s informative book Tanztheater (1987), and Jochen Schmidt’s Tanztheater in Deutschland (1992), fulfill a similar function.

This thesis contributes to the literature which treats of the phenomenon of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal in that it is the first extensive focussed analysis of their aesthetic. I undertake this by analysing four specific pieces as a paradigm which is representative of their Weltanschauung. I have transcribed these four pieces, Viktor, Palermo Palermo, Tanzabend 2, 1991, and Ein Trauerspiel, in order to render their work available for academic investigation. I have analysed these four pieces in the light of Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism, and Erich Fromm’s theories as they appear in The Fear of Freedom, To Have or To Be?, and The Art of Loving. This is the first pioneering step into close academic analysis of the elusive phenomenon which is the oeuvre of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal.

1.2.das Rätsel der Freiheit

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes the work of art manageable, comfortable.

The work of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal has an overwhelming capacity to make its spectators nervous, because it invites the audience to experience what Erich Fromm would call ‘real freedom’, dislodged from the ‘inherited dominative mode’. Instead of providing supine, manageable or comfortable theatrical representations through narrative, it unsettles the viewer. Its thorny exterior resists reductive interpretation with briars, with barbed wire. Bausch’s contemporary Heiner Müller has described her work as a thorn in the eye, its physicality prohibiting publishable ‘meaning’:

Im Theater der Pina Bausch ist das Bild ein Dorn im Auge, die Körper schreiben einen Text, der sich der Publikation verweigert, dem Gefängnis der Bedeutung.
 
 
 
 

Bausch’s oeuvre is designed to accommodate a multiplicity of equally plausible interpretations. It refuses, by virtue of its genesis, inchoateness, frustrating plot-less form and emotionally harsh content, to fall prey to the zeal of appropriative interpreters. Paradoxically, it is simultaneously open to many interpretations, and impermeable. It cannot be reduced to one meaning. The new methodology and consequent language of theatre which Bausch has developed throughout her theatrical career is translucent. Certainly Nietzsche’s provocative assertion:

finds its physical manifestation in the Tanztheater Wuppertal experience.

The work of Pina Bausch prohibits an approach of appropriative interpretation. Instead it invites and accommodates individual original thought. Bausch has developed a new aesthetic form, dance-theatre, which deliberately eludes categorisation that is superimposed from the Outside-In. It is neither conventional ‘theatre’, nor conventional ‘dance’ as we know it, but an organic and ambivalent hybrid that lies somewhere in between. It is liminal, and can be almost seen as a ritual activity, in Grotowski’s sense of ritual:

The ritual is a moment of great intensity; provoked intensity; life then becomes rhythmic. Performer knows to link body impulsion to sonority (the stream of life should be articulated in forms). The witnesses then enter into intense states because, as they say, they have felt a presence. And this is owing to Performer (sic), who is a bridge between the witness and something. In this sense, Performer is pontifex, a maker of bridges.
 
 
 
 

1.3.It is a Ritual Requiem to a Civilisation.

My thesis is that Bausch’s work itself is a carnivalistic ritual of post-war urban decay and of its society as a whole. It is, in itself, practically a ritual Rite of Spring. The effigy of Old Winter (the Prussian mentality of unquestioning obedience, which facilitated the atrocities of World War Two), is metaphorically burnt in their performances. It is located at the cusp of the transition in a whole civilisation’s ‘Structure of Feeling’:

As firm and definite as ‘structure’ suggests, yet based in the deepest and least tangible elements of experience.
 
 
 
 

Bausch’s work is within these ‘deepest and least tangible elements of experience’ where it is encouraging the development of a new structure of feeling. It embodies a transformation, a new way of seeing ourselves and our world. In Bausch’s work, what we are taking part in is the renovation of perception, and the making of new conventions.

In attending her work, we are a party to a requiem for a civilisation, (the civilisation in which ‘freedom’ is provided by predetermined narratives), the Spenglerian Decline of the West. Death, winter, deadliness, are the protagonists on Bausch’s stage.

1.4.Getting Beyond The Fascinating Funeral Pyre.

But does Bausch go too far in her repetitive and

shocking threnody by not making enough room for renewal, regeneration, and rebirth?

It could be said that Bausch gets carried away with the ritual burning, like the ritual burning which Iphigenia is condemned to in Tauris. Seen in this light, unlike Iphigenia however, Bausch does not escape her ‘duties’ as high priestess of the ritual sacrifice by stealing away with her long lost brother and his companion by sea. All-engrossed in the deathly ritual of burning the sacrifice, perhaps at the expense of allowing those participants in the ritual (i.e. the spectator) to regain the identity lost through the act of participation, Bausch’s work, in this scenario, rarely gets beyond the fascinating funeral pyre of things old.

While the old forms are exposed and set alight in the ‘fire of the event’, and the orientalist mentality is laid bare, there is little indication of the rebirth of spring. Unlike Dionysos, who dies and is born again, Bausch’s ritual seems to be stuck in the death stage.

I can only infer that in its form, Bausch’s work is a valiant attempt to transform and sharpen perception, to become aware of the many ways of seeing - even within oneself - and to realise that the individual is ultimately responsible for his or her own actions.

Paradoxically it is a requiem to a civilisation and an incitement to a recovery of our senses, embracing both inchoate life, and death, simultaneously.

1.5.Experiencing More Immediately What We Have.

The very modus operandi of Tanztheater Wuppertal performances, based as they are in the deepest and least tangible areas of experience, communicated through a slippery new and unfamiliar nettle form, eludes the appropriative interpreters very successfully.

Ideally it is possible to elude the interpreters in another way, by making works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be... just what it is.
 
 
 
 

The unmediated emotional power unleashed by their work of organised chaos is harsh, because while its laughter and originality seduces the audience, amid laughter and delight, the blows are delivered:

T.S. Eliot wasn’t far wrong when he said that the main problem of the dramatist today was to keep his audience amused; and that while they were laughing their heads off, you could be up to any bloody thing behind their backs - and it was what you were doing behind their bloody backs that made your play great.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Sontag describes interpretation as ‘the revenge of the intellect upon art’ , and even more, she suggests that interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon the world.

To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of "meanings". It is to turn "the" world into "this" world...
 
 
 
 

While the Tanztheater Wuppertal oeuvre resists reductive appropriative ‘interpretation’:

a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain "rules" of interpretation... reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling
 
 
 
 

its work on the archaeology of the ordinary helps the spectator to ‘again experience more immediately what we have.’

Untranslateable and ungraspable in its relentless momentum, Bausch’s pieces portend sensuous immediacy.

What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.
 
 
 
 

The Western consumer has experienced a steady loss of sharpness in sensory experience. Sontag’s sentiment on this predominant ‘structure of feeling’, is as follows:

All the conditions of material life - its material plenitude,its sheer crowdedness, - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.
 
 
 
 

Bausch’s unleashing of immediate emotional power, free of the mediation of narrative is an antidote to this, and an introduction of a new ‘structure of feeling’.

1.6.Getting to ‘the Truth’.

The rediscovery of our own senses (as opposed to those superimposed in the inherent dominative mode), of our own original thought and emotion for which there is no common denominator is the desired result of this transitive theatre. Turned in the north-south axis (in Heiner Müller’s sense, see below), against the public however, the spectator is often perplexed by the terrifying ‘freedom’ presented to him/her by the Tanztheater Wuppertal.

Nach dem Theater ohne Text, von Zadek’s "Hamlet" bis zu Stein’s "Orestie", um nur zwei goldene Kälber zu nennen, vor denen einem das Hören in glücklichen Augenblicken vergeht, eine neue Sprache des Theaters. Nach Grübers groß gescheitertem Versuch, mit einem mittelmäßigen Epochenstück das Theater in die Nord-Süd-Achse zu drehn, gegen ein Publikum, das auf den Schweißgeruch der Abendunterhaltung nicht verzichten wollte, ein andres Theater der Freiheit. Daß eine Sphinx uns anblickt, wenn wir der Freiheit ins Gesicht sehn, sollte uns nicht wundern.
 
 
 
 

In true naturalistic fashion, Bausch provocatively exposes the ambiguous and ambivalent ‘life-lie’. Dainty ballet pointes are revealed to be disguising bloody feet. The classical smiling-faced ballet dancers’ whose toes are bleeding in their pointe shoes, are revealed to be in excruciating dissimulated pain. Their surface smiles are superimposed from the outside-in. The narrative supplied by classical ballet, a paradigm for all steamrolling plot-based narrative, is depicted on Bausch’s tableau as a coercive one that is out of touch with real immediate experience and feeling, as seen here in Viktor :
 
 
 
 

38. DAS IST KALBFLEISCH. 38.

(A few waves like this), and then as Christiania/Silvia, barefoot and in a diaphanous flowery knee length dress charges on to the centre stage apron we are distracted (again) from the dispersal of the bum trios off the stage.

VEAL FLOP DANCE.

Her fury draws us immediately into her activity. She slams down the chair she has brought on with her. She holds out a piece of lean meat between her two hands to the audience. She shows it to all sides, as Dominique did with the bag in the auction, and proclaims:

4.(cont’d).SHOVELLING. 4.

We can hear the earth falling

38.(to centre upstage, and gets up on her points, the pink flesh of the meat bulging with her own pale flesh in the daintily packaged pumps.

Melodramatically, exaggerated, she launches into her (Swan Lake) fluttering to the left. Fluttering to the right. It is a parody of course.

There is something hilarious and pathetic about her slightly hunched over frumpy body stance. Through the loose transparent dress.

Her arms, like wings, are unleashed with cliché big "dráma".

Floppy bodied like a rag doll.

Her hair falls, unkempt about her face and does not disguise the enormous effort demanded (drained) from her to execute this classical dance.

But she faithfully goes through the motions. Cliché.

Her real feeling is somewhere else, in the meat protruding from the shoes perhaps, in the unkempt hair, in the effort at selling herself performing, forced unfelt entertainment.

That perhaps is where her feeling has flown to.

That in-between.

4.(cont’d).SHOVELLING. 4.

Meanwhile Jan is shovelling in the dirt, on upstage dirt wall. Juxtaposition, metaphor.

38.(cont’d).DAS IST KALBFLEISCH/PATHÉTIQUE. 38.

Funny, flopped over, arms, head, points, round, diagonal,arms figure of 8, backcentrestage, stops on points, looks to her public, arms head exaggerated.

This solo continues for quite some time, simultaneously hilarious and pathetic, that uncomfortable Bausch texture.

In the abyss. Suddenly unheralded she falls on the flat of her feet and stomps off the stage. Downstage right.
 
 
 
 

The spectator is made to confront ‘Truth’, with a capital ‘T’. Bausch goes to the site of life’s cruel conflicts, albeit conflict without benign plot, drama without plot-driven narrative.

‘Blut ist im Schuh, oder das Rätsel der Freiheit’: the riddle/puzzle/enigma/mystery of ‘true’ freedom. This double edged sword and paradox as manifest in the Tanztheater Wuppertal embodies an alternative theatre of freedom. Form and content are turned inside out. The orientalist paradigm becomes exposed in content instead of dissimulated in form, and the form metamorphosises into something dynamic, opaque and open, demanding an orientation which resists reductive interpretation in the traditional and static sense. Like a squash ball, the spectator must position him or herself for it, move, ‘get under it’, and return it.

The tone of Bausch’s work however is one of despair instead of hope (and freedom as we know it). The freedom depicted is scary and unfamiliar because it is the freedom of the anti-fairytale.

1.7.Is it Geographically Specific?

It is not surprising that the dark shadow of the experience of the horrors of the nation-narration, intensified as it was in Germany, should come under investigation in German Dance Theatre. The German situation is what propelled Bausch to put out her apocalyptic vision, and made dealing with this paradigm more urgent, more expedient, more necessary to negotiate than elsewhere. The catalyst for Bausch’s work is specifically the horrors of the holocaust and the concretisation of the psychology of nazism, including the authoritarian character, and the automaton.

In a similar fashion, Beckett wrote, that having seen the horrors of war time in France, the Irish Red Cross volunteers there were forced to negotiate the harsh reality which they were insulated from in the eddies of Ireland.

The harsh vision Bausch shows of man’s inhumanity to man, and the corollary, the incitement to original thought (that hint at inchoate spring in the world), is nonetheless a universally applicable paradigm, which transcends nationality.

One of the final images of Die Klage der Kaiserin (The Lament of the Empress) is a woman in traffic asleep at the wheel of her car. Eyes closed. Asleep. Driving.

This is comparable to Didi’s resolution to wake from his own dream to the sufferings of the world.

"Was I sleeping while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? "... he goes on to consider a wider possibility:

"At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on."

While Bausch’s work breaks the reverie, there is no hint of Spring in the stagnant air.

There is only a dismal, hopeless, repetitive automaton reality.

Like Beckett’s work, ‘It is an indictment of all "isms", religious, colonial, political - which use the illusion of a perfect future to turn men and women away from suffering in the present’. Bausch’s threnody is a keening, a grieving, a lament for the world.

Bausch’s work is not a blotch on the silence, it is the silence amplified, turned up full blast. She is a kindred spirit with our Samuel Beckett whose territory lies:

in that noman’s land (sic) where the soul experiences raw exposure to what Beckett elsewhere called "the suffering of being.
 
 
 
 

If we cast a cursory glance around the contemporary globe at the pervasive nation-narration paradigm which is the subject of this lament on a global scale, in Northern Ireland, Palestine/Israel, Rwanda/Zaire and the Hutus/ Tuttis conflict, or Bosnian/Serb/Croats in the former Yugoslavia, Bausch’s universal keening appears not entirely unjustified.

1.8.Bausch’s Site-Specific Pieces as Paradigms of the Tanztheater Wuppertal Aesthetic.
 
 
 
 

I propose to investigate how Bausch negotiates the cities Rome, Palermo, Madrid, and Vienna in the respective site-based pieces, and to use this as a paradigm which is representative of the Tanztheater Wuppertal aesthetic as a whole. If indeed as Raymond Williams says, all that is lived and made by a community is related, I propose to show how Bausch’s work is related to the ‘structure of feeling’ in the era of post-war urban decay - a structure of feeling which, though concentrated in Germany, has global permutations.

The Tanztheater Wuppertal provides an explosion under that ubiquitous Western inherited dominative mode, the ‘having’ mentality mode of appropriation. That orientalist mindset as portrayed by Bausch’s company of international dancers, includes on the one hand the appropriative interpretation of places through imperialistic colonisation, and on the other hand (more immediately apparent in the site-based pieces), mere conventional representation. Instead of stultifying appropriation and representation of the site as object, the site-based pieces involve and dynamically negotiate. They provide a paradigm for unregimented subjectivity.

Dance Theatre in its overriding aesthetic prohibits appropriation, re-awakens sleeping senses. It restlessly resists being pinned down. It is international, a free spirit.

I shall illustrate how instead of starting with orientalist (explained in the following chapter), militaristic orders, the genesis of this open work is in questions, and I shall treat of the implications of casting aside both script, and plot.

The Tanztheater Wuppertal’s implicit ‘commentary’ on the specific sites in question, is unique in that it is not one. It is neither plot-based nor representative. It is instead an alive negotiation of these cities.

If cities are indeed ‘the hearth of civilisation’, then examining how Bausch interprets the urban sites, in that she does not appropriate, objectify, and represent, but negotiates, the cities of Rome in Viktor (1985), Palermo, in Palermo Palermo (1989); Madrid, in Tanzabend 2, 1991; and Vienna, in Ein Trauerspiel (1994), is revelatory of the Tanztheater attitude to civilisation itself.

Through this paradigm, I shall endeavour to illustrate their innovative aesthetic, and the paradoxical relationship between content and form in Bausch’s work which in true postwar fashion abandons the fairytale, plot-based linear narrative, and with them the nation-narration. The inherited dominative mode sneaks its way into society’s mindset through such invisible conventions as Aristotelian plot-based form which, ultimately, provides access to ‘reality’, or ‘meaning’.

As regards my own approach to this research, my starting point is in accord with Sontag’s assertion:

The aim of commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
 
 
 
 

I shall endeavour to show ‘how it is what it is’, by describing the context in which Bausch’s work arose, i.e. geographically of German soil, its historical Zeitpunkt in post Stunde Null Germany, the Kurt Jooss/Folkwangschule aesthetic lineage which culminates in Bausch; and how the work is made, in Chapter Four, ‘The Quest-ioning Method’, on process.

‘That it is what it is’, can be seen in the scripts of the four pieces Viktor, Palermo Palermo, Ein Trauerspiel, and Tanzabend 2, 1991, which I transcribed myself after many repeated viewings of the pieces, both in rehearsal and performance. They are my working scripts, from which I draw examples to illustrate my arguement throughout the thesis, as well as the initiatory questions, ‘Stichworte’ when provided in the programme (e.g. for Palermo Palermo, and Viktor). All references to music are in italics, to distinguish it from the rest of the script, as well as the inclusion of a separate music list for each piece, as related to me by musical collaborator of the Tanztheater Wuppertal, Mathias Burkert. Quotations from the pieces which are in a foreign language are also in italics. I transcribed the spoken pieces in the language that I heard them performed (there are footnoted exceptions, when the performers gave me their text in English to make it easier for me!) either English, French, or German. The footnotes are often conversational in tone, making connections between different pieces, or making other miscellaneous points that I have noticed. An outline of the scenes proceeds each script, and for Viktor I provide a ‘running order’, of the scenes which illustrates the repetitious and circular structure that is characteristic of Pina Bausch’s dance theatre pieces.

I have filled gaps in the scripts (pieces I could not entirely capture as a viewer), with performance texts that were very kindly given to me by the performers themselves, and I have left other gaps, indicated with a ‘?’, almost as a hommage to the deliberate inappropriability of this type of work.

I have viewed these four pieces many times, in re-creation from performance video, rehearsal, as well as in performance. Thanks to the kind co-operation of Pina Bausch, Mathias Burkert, and many other company members I have managed to transcribe what I would consider the closest approximation to a ‘script’ possible. However at the end of the day I am a spectator. This is what I saw. What any other member of the audience sees is necessarily different, expressed here most eloquently by Pina Bausch herself:

‘There is no such thing as a communal response. Each person in the public is part of a piece, and has their own relationship to it’, comparing it to the sensation of being the first person to open the door on a fresh snowfall: ‘YOU feel it. It cannot be shared. And this is very important’.

Thus, the fact that there is no official script available to their work is an inextricable part of their aesthetic, which I elaborate on further in the body of the thesis, to avoid the kind of ‘single-stranded thinking’ evoked by Bausch below:

She shuns unequivocal interpretations... ‘Take, for instance Renate Wandert aus (Renate Emigrates). There you have those men that put the girls somewhere and then embrace them. You can think lots of things about it - not only that there is a man that simply grabs a woman, carries her away and then embraces her. You can think that a man wants a situation where a girl behaves herself quietly. You can see it like this or like that. It just depends on the way you watch. But the single- stranded thinking that they interpret into it simply isn’t right.’ Because ‘You can always watch the other way’.
 
 
 
 

These transcriptions are to be read with the above example to the forefront of the reader’s awareness.

Instead of endeavouring, reductively, to spell out "what it means", I aim to show that it is a catalystic stimulus to awake original thought in the spectator, (even though it does not ultimately complete the ritual transition it initiates).
 
 
 
 

In chapter two, ‘Departing From Orientalism’, I shall offer a brief definition of orientalism, and how it applies to the work of Pina Bausch.
 
 
 
 

In chapter three, ‘More Sight-Specific Than Site-Specific Nomadic Work’, I shall turn my focus to the site-specific common denominator of the four transcribed pieces (investigating to what extent they are ‘site-specific’), which serve as a paradigm for the Tanztheater Wuppertal aesthetic as a whole, and look at the significance of city as the hearth for civilisation, and the historical juncture of German post-holocaust urban decay.
 
 
 
 

Chapter four will treat of Bausch’s Stunde Null biography, and the extent to which it is intrinsic to her oeuvre.
 
 
 
 

In chapter five, ‘Chronicle of Journeys’, I look at each piece up until Walzer in the context of being a journey, as well as examining the development of Bausch’s methodology to what it is today.
 
 
 
 

Chapter six, ‘The Quest-ioning Method’, shall treat of the methodology employed by the Tanztheater Wuppertal, the actual process, ‘The Quest-ioning Method’, which is also a quest, a journey in itself.
 
 
 
 

In chapter seven, ‘Orientalism’, I shall treat of the many manifestations of society’s orientalist narratives, normally invisibly ubiquitous in form, which are transposed and exposed in content on Bausch’s tableau. Some of these narratives are the fairytale, the empty classical shell of ballet - all fossils disconnected from contemporary ‘structure of feeling’ or Zeitgeist.

I shall illustrate this further with examples of how the psychology of fascism in the sado-masochistic authoritarian character, and compulsive repetition in the automaton are exposed on the stage of the Tanztheater Wuppertal. As well as that I shall examine Bausch’s rendition of the inhibiting teacher-pupil/slave driver-slave paradigm, the marketing character, and the many futile escape routes from freedom on western society’s menu.
 
 
 
 

In chapter eight, ‘Orientation’, I shall treat of the subliminally transformative effect the new theatrical language they have developed has on the perception of the viewer. Here we are in a realm where: ‘it is the act and not the object of perception that matters’.

There is indeed a sniff of spring and rebirth in the implicit call to original thought in the spectator. This replaces the sort of interpretation which is: ‘a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain "rules" of interpretation’.

Keeping Sontag’s assertion in mind:

What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art. If excessive stress on content provokes the arrogance of interpretation, more extended and more thorough descriptions of form would silence. What is needed is a vocabulary - a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary - for forms.
 
 
 
 

Then I shall draw my conclusion from this close examination and calling into question of Bausch’s oeuvre. Has she developed a new theatrical language? What does it express? Does it have only novelty-value, or does it have the strength to endure?

Certainly, I think that there is plenty of room to develop a more life-affirming aesthetic, while benefiting from the innovative methodology developed by Bausch and her Tanztheater Wuppertal.

Is it time-specific?

Though orientalism has been burnt to a cinder in the crucible of the Tanztheater Wuppertal, and the soil is cleared for something new and regenerative, still Bausch persists in her ritualistic sacrifices like Iphigenia. Apparent nowhere is a bud of the new spring flower bursting through the soil.
 
 
 
 

The entire oeuvre can be seen as a wauking song which gives sound to human suffering in the present, like the Portuguese Fado songs. A large element of their threnodic work is about pure human endurance.

In order to endure, (like the singers of the wauking songs), this theatre company has to complete the perennial ritual and get into the rebirth of Spring.

How beneficial is it for the spectator to be robbed of identity and thrown into unmediated immediate experience?

And, finally, to what extent is the Bauschian spectator even more manipulated (because subliminally) by Bausch’s orchestrations than by more conventional plot-based narrative theatre?

The germ of hope, rebirth, or Spring in Bausch’s oeuvre lies in its affirmation of life-affirming feeling, much in the irreverent and unconventional style espoused here by e.e. cummings:

More of the above, which is the most benevolent invitation extended to the unsettled and disturbed spectator, and less of the thanatos aesthetic is what their work needs to endure beyond the liminal ritual activity between ‘structures of feeling’ in post-holocaust Germany, and in the post-holocaust world.