In this chapter I shall describe the evolution of Bausch’s Creation process, by tracing a path in the development of the Tanztheater Wuppertal’s new methodology of manufacturing dance, and the new language of questing, of ‘be’ing (as opposed to making state-ments) which Bausch has developed.

I will treat of: the questions and their significance; the process they initiate; the role of feelings and intuition; set design; music; form; the significance of the reversal of the usual form-content process to that of content-form; the effect on the audience; its chronology (in time); and finally, how Bausch reaches towards society’s collective unconscious.

Some of the questions I shall endeavour to answer are: How does Pina Bausch make her na(rra)tion-less pieces? How does she turn form and content inside out? With what does she begin? With what material does she work?

The creation process takes approximately three months. It takes place in their rehearsal space, the old Lichtburg cinema in Wuppertal, or, in the case of the site-specific pieces Viktor (1986), Palermo Palermo (1989), Tanzabend 2, 1991, and Ein Trauerspiel (1994), in the city in question, Rome, Palermo, Madrid and Vienna respectively. There, the company work for approximately eight hours per day.

Like fellow theatre practitioner Peter Brook who below describes his approach to doing Shakespeare, Bausch’s approach to the cities/sites in question does not begin with a limited orientalist concept:

As in Anthropology, there are two schools. Certain researchers prefer to go into a far country knowing nothing about it, while others only leave with documentation and deep study. For me, with Shakespeare, the questions only become hard, strong, interesting when you’re inside them, you can approach Shakespeare without knowing anything outside.

Bausch is quite adamant that the initiation point for the creation of her pieces lies in questions, as opposed to improvisations. This distinction is significant, because questions evoke the sense of a scientific research more than improvisations. Questions have an investigative and interrogative, empirical and almost anthropological undertone.

Bausch’s unrhetorical questions initiate her work on the archaeology of the ordinary.

The O.E.D. gives the following definitions of question:

1. Sentence adapted by order of words, use of interrogative pronoun or stop, or other means, to elicit answer...

2. (Raising of) doubt about or objection to thing’s truth, credibility, advisability

3. Problem requiring solution, matter of concern depending on conditions of

4. seek information from study of

Latin quaestionem (quaerere seek, -TION)

By contrast the OED definition of improvise suggests an altogether different emphasis, away from pragmatic truth and scientific enquiry:

Compose, utter,(verse, music, etc.,or abs,) extempore; provide, get up...

This distinction is one that Bausch chooses to emphasise. Her questions elicit answers rather than superficial improvisations, they aim to ‘raise doubt about or objections to thing’s truth’, rather than to ‘utter or extempore’ (sic, O.E.D.). Bausch’s questions initiate a quest, a journey.

Quest:

1. Official inquiry or jury etc. making it (now only in vulg. crowners (sic)- , coroners inquest).

2. Seeking or thing sought by inquiry or search, esp. object of medieval knight’s pursuit.

3. (Of dogs etc.) search for game (often about); go (about) in search of something; (poet.) search for, seek out.

So, rather than starting with a fixed state-ment, like an imperial map, from the outside-in, Bausch herself describes the genesis and modus operandi of her pieces when she says:

Bausch begins by questioning her ‘self’:

This is what Bausch asks of her dancers, and eventually, in the performance, it is in turn what is asked of each individual audience member. What Bausch demands of herself, is equally demanded of the spectator. And it would seem that she is quite rigorous and merciless with herself. The spectator is a Mitreisender.

The questions initiate an exploratory journey, a quest to an unknown and unspecified destination, as eventually will be the case for the spectator, for the duration of the performance:

To initiate the creation of a new piece, Bausch comes to the rehearsal space, with a list of questions, ‘Stichworte’, or stimuli, that she herself has thought up, on her own. Every imaginative journey is prompted by a question. She reads the questions out, batches at a time, and the dancers write them down. Then her collaborators are left to their own devices and imagination to come up with their own response to Bausch’s stimuli/questions.

Bausch elaborates on the origin of these questions, and the voyage of creation they are designed to initiate:

Jean Laurent Sasportes considers that the questions can be grouped under two categories:

Here is an example of the questions themselves, in this case those provided in the programme of Viktor and Palermo Palermo, the process having developed from Blaubart (1977), Renate wandert aus (1977), and the Macbeth paraphrase (1978), through Arien (1979), Keuschheitslegende (1979), 1980 - ein Stück von Pina Bausch, Bandoneon (1980), Walzer (1982), Nelken (1982), Auf dem Gebirge hat man ein Geschrei gehört (1984), and Two Cigarettes in the Dark (1985).

Bausch’s seemingly benign questions, or koans, implicitly disturb the status quo world of people living inauthentic lives, doing what society ‘supposes’ its adherents should do. The perennial life-lie is the target. The questions initiate an affective, transitive, precarious and balance threatening chain reaction. They are an attempt to start from zero, to reassess from very first principles.

Bausch’s quest can be said to be into the archaeology of the unquestioned uninterrogated ordinary, where first principles are re-assessed. It uncovers, without coming back to categorise or tidy up, initiating a reproof which is inchoate, unfinished, open, and to be continued in the spectator’s mind. There is neither comforting closure nor conclusion offered. There are no answers at the back of the programme. The questions are all the spectator is offered.

So we can see that the source itself is a questing one, an interrogative questioning one. Unafraid of inadequacy, it is the opposite of orientalist Fascist didacticism and pedantry. Bausch emphasises the collaborative aspect of their work:

I have asked hundreds of questions. The dancers have answered them, tried something out... If they understand the question, then they know what’s what. They know what I’m looking for. But part of the problem is that many of the questions don’t produce anything. They don’t get you anywhere. Not that I think I’m incapable on my own. We’re all incapable sometimes. It doesn’t just depend on me.

The collaboration does not end with the dancers. The different threads of set design, music and costumes develop alongside, with, and out of this initial collaboration (see below).

Pina Bausch describes how these questions are applied in the creation process of her Tanztheater pieces:

...they (the dancers), all get asked. They all answer. They all show us something - and that takes up an awful lot of time. But I have always allowed an awful lot of time for that, because normally we were only able to use a fraction of what they came up with. Each of them does, say, ten things and in the end I’m interested in maybe only two. But then we’ve looked at everything.

...recently somebody said, "That was the one hundred and twenty-first question"

...each time it’s a different question. This time everybody in the company described Christmas dinner, the things they normally eat. Yesterday I asked if anyone had ever been so frightened they’d messed their pants and when was the first time they’d felt they were a man or a woman. Good questions but they don’t lead us anywhere. Sometimes I think I’ve got really good questions, but they lead nowhere. And then sometimes I ask a similar kind of question in a totally different way, until in the end I’ve changed it completely - and then sometimes I get there a roundabout way.

Even the very movement choreography itself finds its genesis in these questions on which every element of the production is contingent.

...The steps always come from somewhere else - never from the legs. The movements are always worked out in between times. And gradually we build up short dance sequences which we memorise. I used to get scared and panic and so I would start off with a movement and avoid the questions. Nowadays I start off with the questions.

Even one and a half weeks before the premiere, pieces are still fluid, open and unfinished.

In their own creation process, Bausch gives the dancers time, and leaves them largely to their own devices:

Erstwhile company member and collaborator Finola Cronin describes the creation process from a dancer’s point of view:

Gradually she begins to find out what kind of emphasis she wants. She never tells you clearly, you never know just where she’s going or what she wants. You have to trust her completely, which is difficult - going with her, wanting to be there but not knowing where you’re going to, or what it is, or where she is in her mind. And she becomes totally engulfed - the whole world encompasses this new piece, everything she sees somehow gets drawn into it.

Writer Alice Schwarzer describes her observation of the process of making a piece:

The catalystic questions serve to stimulate their imagination, and they take time to explore its resonances in their own sphere of experience: movements, funny experiences the question sparks off, props and costumes it inspires. The questions are catalysts to their creativity, as they look within for answers. Then the ‘replies’ for these unrhetorical questions which interrogate their individuality are demonstrated one by one. For example:

They show their embryonic responses to Pina Bausch, who watches quietly and takes notes:

From a plethora of wacky and original answers, the essence of ‘the piece’ must eventually be distilled, as in a scientific process:

From one such day of intensive work, five minutes of the eventual three and a half hour piece is created. The process is slow and labour-intensive.

This is the tedious and labour-intensive process which replaces the ‘script’ in Tanztheater. Its specificity and individuality comes from the fact that its origins lay in the wellsprings of authentic human experience.

This interrogation process facilitates the distillation of authentic human experience, i.e. the authentic experience of the dancers. They are the raw material, Bausch’s paints. Their particular talent lies in their ability to be authentic, purely their own colour, themselves - so the result is not ‘brown’.

Writer and erstwhile company dramaturg Raimund Hoghe relates his observation of Bausch’s work-method:

As the dancers are allowed the time and space in which they are encouraged to come up with their own original material, which may then be incorporated into the ensuing piece, so the process relies on precise work with thoughts and feelings, in the present moment. Anchored firmly in the present moment, it is at antipodes to what Homi Bhabha refers to as the ‘belatedness of narration’. As Bausch describes it herself:

This makes the creation process the most open, alive, and creative part of their innovative work, as well as the most vulnerable:

It’s the actual making of the pieces that makes us want to do them; and of course it’s the development stage which is the important stage, up to the point where one says, "Okay, that’s it. That’s what you want to show them".

Original and longtime company member Dominique Mercy echoes Bausch’s sentiment:

One cannot speak of the phenomenon of Bausch’s oeuvre without mentioning its ‘Einmaligkeit’. There is neither video nor script of the pieces available to the public. The dancers handwrite their respective ‘roles’ and when they leave, hand them over to the company so they can be learned by the new dancer who inherits the role. To recreate the pieces, video and metronome are employed in an attempt to maintain the exact and precise timing and spacing of the original productions.

The productions are impossible to appropriate in their entirety. My texts of the four city pieces are exemplary of this. They are Bausch’s initiatory questions, answered by the dancers, filtered through Bausch’s selection, staged in Peter Pabst’s set design, and music selection with the help of Mathias Burkert, seen (repeatedly) through my eyes, as described and transcribed as far as possible (with the help of company members who kindly gave me their texts and music sources). A full transcription is, however, impossible, because each night different parts of the piece resonate more strongly, or activate the spectator’s feelings in a different way. Its sheer ‘overwhelmingness’ and subjectivity makes it fully impenetrable. It does not succumb/surrender/yield to total appropriation.

Also, the work of the Tanztheater Wuppertal itself is as time-specific as Bausch herself is. The imprint of Bausch herself and her idiosyncracies is so pervasive, that it precludes her work’s endurance past her own lifespan:

Maybe I feel I’m (laughs)... the talisman... If I weren’t allowed to sit in in the performance I’d feel I were no longer a part of it; I would feel offended. It’s all part and parcel - the piece, the company and myself. I simply have to be there. The others are on stage - I’m there watching as always; somehow I feel its my performance too.

No-one can carry on from Pina Bausch. Someone of course could carry on doing their own work, in the method that she has developed (this legacy is already a huge phenomenon in the performance world), but no-one will ever be able to create Bausch’s works again. Bausch’s oeuvre is einmalig, in that it exists only in the here and now.

Paradoxically, Bausch describes the sense of eternality and circularity of time as embodied in her pieces:

In diesen Stücken hat der Tanz etwas Endloses. Ja, die Tänze sind darin wie Rosenkränze (lacht). Das ist etwas Unaufhörliches, immer-weiter-Gehendes. Es kommt immer wieder jemand Neues. Aber ich könnte es auch wiederholen und von vorne anfangen. Da ist ein Bogen, ein Kreis darin.

...Weil immer alles im Jetzt spielt und die Zeit fließt, sowie die Leute im Ensemble wechseln. Es ist alles unendlich.

Bausch elaborates on the protagonistic role of ‘feelings’ and intuition in her work and its creation and selection criterion:

Despite this emphasis on ‘feelings’, the methodology is not at all maudlin: ‘awareness of concrete obstacles and concrete steps, exactness without vulgarity, precision but not pedantry’, here begins the work of Pina Bausch.

The work and work methods of the Tanztheater Wuppertal display a penchant for (as opposed to fear of) uncertainty, feelings, and the tentative:

Häufig tauchen in ihren Sätzen Formulierungen auf wie "Vielleicht", "Ich weiss nicht", oder "ich habe das Gefühl". An einer Stelle sagt sie: "Ich finde das schon wichtig, daß man Gefühle bejaht, Gefühle die man gar nicht einordnen kann unbedingt. Aber daß man das bejaht, so ein Gefühl, das man vielleicht gar nicht ganz genau definieren kann, höchstens umschreiben kann - ohne daß man jetzt sagen muß, das war so.

It is in this hybrid and inbetween world of feelings and intuition that the Tanztheater Wuppertal has set up its home.

The duration of the creation process is the one sensitive time when the door to the public is closed in order to give the creators space and freedom to let their imagination take over, uninhibited.

Even though it is not, as far as Bausch describes here, a question of indulgently spewing out feelings:‘Es kommt nicht darauf an, daß jemand seine Gefühle auskotzt’.

It is, however, a very sensitive process, in which ‘man muß ganz wach, empfindsam und sensibel sein’. Bausch and her collaborators/performers are at their most uncertain, vulnerable, unsure and open during this stage of the creation process. They are encouraged to ‘dare to think in all directions’, not to censor themselves, but to ‘just do what you thought of doing’, in an uninhibited fashion, as in brainstorming or automatic writing. "It’s about giving" says ex-company member, Finola Cronin. In the same way the audience have to ‘give’, to open them ‘selves’, to attend fully, which is no simple undertaking.

Cliché reactions are inadequate, and indeed precluded. For this intense process the freedom and space to make mistakes is a prerequisite because the work pushes them to their personal and private limits.

They each have their own method of dealing with the intensity of the interrogatory creation process, Nazareth Panadero for example appproaches it with ‘simplicity’:

Insofar as Bausch’s performers/collaborators give so much of them’selves’ to this creation process, the question arises as to whether it could be compared to an Artaudian burning at the stake? What they are reaching towards is comparable to what Grotowski calls ‘essence’:

Essence: etymologically, it’s a question of being, of be-ing. Essence interests me because in it nothing is sociological. It is what you did not receive from others, what did not come from outside, what is not learned. For example, conscience is something which belongs to essence; it is different from the moral code which just belongs to society.

Bausch herself says she is trying to understand and to touch on what is essential:

...je sais que très peu de personnes sont capables de provoquer intentionnellement de telles situations dans le but d’être conduites à se dépasser elles-mêmes. C’est un suprême art. Je ne crois pas chercher à mettre les gens à nu pour les dépouiller, mais en revanche, pour montrer quelque chose de différent, pour les comprendre et toucher à l’essentiel....Et aussi de cette parenté étroite entre celui qui est sur scène et celui qui regarde; c’est vraisemblablement le spectateur qui se dépouille davantage et qui prend conscience qui concrétise des choses que moi-même je ne réalisais pas.

So in fact maybe it is the spectator who is burned at the stake, instead of the performer or director!

Neither, however, is the creation process totally opaque to the spectator, and shrouded in mystery. It can be glimpsed by the general public through a few interviews, the writings of erstwhile company dramaturg Raimund Hoghe, and in the performances themselves, in which it is sometimes implicitly demonstrated, through descriptions given by the dancers.

The translucent process is demystified, and can be gleaned in Nelken, and Walzer (as described above), for example when the dancers say:

‘And then Pina said...’,

and show what she said, and what they did to create the piece being watched, thus rendering the mysterious origins of this script-less work translucent instead of opaque.

The possibility of freedom, i.e. of making space for firstly the dancers, and then, through the performance, what Artaud would call ‘the fire of the event’, for the individual spectators to explore their ‘selves’, unimpeded by the inherited dominative mode, is thus created. While the spectators are ‘free’, the characters depicted on stage however are anything but free.

Adorno expands the possibility of freedom by prescribing a:

form of expression whose opacity, obscurity, and deviousness - the absence of ‘the full transparency of its logical genesis, move away from the dominant system, enacting in its ‘inadequacy’ a measure of liberation.

In its obscurity and deviousness the genesis of the Tanztheater Wuppertal pieces brings about a subversive smuggling of sorts:

In an intellectual hierarchy which constantly makes everyone answerable, unanswerability alone can call the hierarchy directly by its name.

Unanswerability eludes name-calling, and naming as maiming, as does Bausch. Unanswerability is an image, a movement, a sound. It is dynamic, and ephemeral.

Raimund Hoghe, erstwhile dramaturg of the Tanztheater Wuppertal, describes the translucent process from the inside in his writings on and with the company:

The collaborators are neither intellectualised nor set into any theoretical framework. The work is in essence non-teleological, unfinished, until it reaches the spectator’s mind’s eye where it seeks closure, a conclusion. That is not to say, however, that closure is always found there where it is sought.

It is contingent on the composition and reservoire of experience in the group of collaborators at any one time.

In the sensitive creation process, which begins with concrete questions by Bausch of her dancers, sometimes quoted in the programmes, Bausch is wary of words and the ‘anonymous authority’ they often harbour like the wooden horse of Troy.

Taking Hitler’s assertion that ‘words are the memory of mankind’, into consideration, one can appreciate Bausch’s wariness of them.

She uses words cautiously so as not to inhibit the imagination of the dancers, or close possibilities:

Anything one said was suddenly... well you were so pinned down...

Then, all of a sudden, you would say something and hope that the other person would pick up the clue because what I meant was something else...

In the context of their work, words, already ideologically charged orientalisms, are a resistent medium. They are things to be bypassed, mistrusted, got around somehow. Bausch elaborates:

Anything I said was just an aid to making myself understood. Sometimes it’s just an idea or a thought... I suddenly get the feeling that if I talk about it too much that I’ve dirtied it already. I can’t say why that is. And then I always have this feeling that I must protect it. I must talk round it so that it remains untouched, at least to begin with. Basically I want the group to use their imagination.

At the end of the interrogation phase Bausch is left with a residue of notes on all the replies to her questions. But the process does not end here.

The next step is to compose the plethora of answers to the questions into a ‘piece’. Here Bausch describes how she selects the answers to be joined together:

The criterion Bausch uses for knowing when things belong together, is: Bauch und viel Arbeit, das ist ein Gemisch aus beidem. Though this may seem vague and evasive, the selection process requires extraordinary lucidity and precision:

Bausch relies on her intuition, ‘that formless hunch’, and ‘feeling’, to determine which scenes belong together, which ones to keep, which ones to throw away:

What Stanislavski described as unpredictable ‘capricious feeling’ is the barometer.

The stage design in which the answers play out, in four dimensions (including time), develops organically along with the rest of the inchoate piece. It is another one of many examples of the porous receptivity and openness which is characteristic of Bausch’s work.

In Bandoneon (1980), for example, during rehearsals shortly before the premiere, Assistant Stage Managers began to clear props off the stage before the rehearsal was finished. Instead of becoming irate at this unexpected inconvenience, Bausch picked up the thread, this image, and weaved the blundering into the piece, as an integral part. This is the sense of spontaneity and openness which has taken them to create pieces in Rome, Palermo, Madrid, Vienna, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong, and to experiment in a different medium, film, with Die Klage der Kaiserin in 1991.

The location/site/set is never clearly defined, nor limited to one definition. In Viktor the stage design calls up a grave to the eyes, or an archaeological dig; Tanzabend 2 is strewn with snow, and it snows; Gulf War images of body bags along with vibrant images from around the world are projected onto this ‘blank screen’; Palermo Palermo is the metaphoric wall which collapses into rubble; Ein Trauerspiel resembles a gravelly island and a waterfall.

The stage design is undefined at the outset of the creation process, and develops organically into a poetic inscape with the rest of the piece:

What is created is a metaphoric ‘other’ place. It is a context-less space they have created to accommodate their new invention, the narration-less and hybrid language of dance-theatre.

The accompanying music develops with and from the answers to the questions, with the help of Mathias Burkert, the musical collaborator. Here Bausch describes how the music is selected and composed/blended into the answer material:

Authenticity: die unverbrauchte Echtheit der Musiknummern, says Bausch, is the main criterion in her choice of music.

Bausch’s pieces evidence not just an occupation with scored music, but a democratic inclusion of all sounds as musical: a dancer breathing into a microphone, eating crackers (Viktor), the human heartbeat (Nelken), silence, the simple sound of footsteps, rain, crickets in the field rubbing their wings against their thighs(Palermo Palermo), the dancers themselves gasping from uncamouflaged physical exertion (le Sacre du Printemps)... etc. What this inclusiveness displays is a sensitivity to all the sounds of the world. These natural uncontrived sounds are equally part of the musical score.

According to Bausch and company members, the themes stay the same. These (static) themes are allowed to emerge through a diverse, democratic, and all-embracing selection of music and sounds.

The repertoire of the Tanztheater Wuppertal evidences a linear progression from homogenous musical and staging principles to an overwhelming heterogeneity and aesthetic interdependence between the cacophany of different music styles and the parallel collage of diverse kinds and styles of staging principles.

At the company’s outset, serious ‘E’ music was predominant. Pieces with an inbuilt ‘narrative’, or dramaturgical score included: Stravinsky’s le Sacre du Printemps, Bartok’s Herzog Blaubart’s Burg,(though broken up in Krapp-like fashion during performance), Gluck’s Iphigenie auf Tauride and Orpheus und Eurydike, Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas in Café Müller, and Brecht/Weill songs in the first half of Seven Deadly Sins.

Similarly, in keeping to a large extent with the traditional (despite outrageous innovations which sent audiences running out of the theatre at the time of its inception, described in chapter 1), was the movement vocabulary in Iphigénie and le Sacre du Printemps which are unmistakeably in the Folkwang tradition, and that of the Seven Deadly Sins which is in the tradition of American modern dance. These pieces were ‘danced’, in the traditional sense of that word, and the later prominent scenic, game, and speech elements, as well as the pedestrianisation of movement, were absent.

Then into the limelight again came the cacophonic collage pieces, picking up the thread left aside after the heterogeneous music choices in Fritz, Ich bring Dich um die Ecke (in which the dancers themselves sang, as they also did in the Seven Deadly Sins)and Komm Tanz mit mir. Interestingly, during the creation of Komm tanz mit mir, Bausch gave her musical collaborator Mathias Burkert a collection of 10 world (folk)song books, for transcription, which would feature largely in their as yet unborn works.

In the kaleidescopic Tanztheater pieces, ‘E’ music like the Gigli songs in Arien, or Schubert’s Der Tot und das Mädchen in Nelken, were irreverently collaged with ‘trivial musik’, nostalgic hits from the 20’s to the 50’s, tango music etc. What evolved was a heterogeneous Shakespearian mixing of ‘high’ and ‘low’ music, e.g., of: Beethoven and the Comedian Harmonists; Nino Rota and Japanese punk music; Sibelius and Mancini; Sicilian Folkmusic, Francis Lai, and Elizabethan Tafelmusik.

The characteristic employment of nostalgic music in this phase was part of a phase in Bausch’s work in which she focussed largely on individual personal/private memories, especially her own, and that of her dancers, with astounding truth and authenticity that is often embarassing to watch. In the programme note for these pieces the audience are offered baby pictures of the dancers with their families, on holidays, at Christmas-time, with little ‘cute’ sentences in their own handwriting.

A shift from this emphasis to the more global and universal followed. The new emphasis on journeys, cities, travelling, also evident in a shift in the programme note content, away from the personal histories/biographies of the dancers, is parallelled in the choice of music which now warmly embraces ethnic, wauking, folkloric, and even Shamanic music.

Now to turn to the four pieces which this dissertation is directly concerned with, the site-specific city pieces, Viktor, Palermo Palermo, Tanzabend 2, and Ein Trauerspiel.

For the following information, including the list of music for each of the four pieces in the annex, I am indebted to the generous help of Pina Bausch’s musical collaborator, Mathias Burkert, of whom she says:

Not only does Burkert play piano for the company’s daily dance class (classical and modern), he also compiles and collects music for the the pieces: ‘a big research’, he asserts.

This includes transcribing songs from books of the 100 Folksongs of the world, searching in archives, in particular those of the cities concerned in the site-specific pieces, and contacts throughout the world who understand what it is they are looking for, musically.

Typical of their osmotic ‘collection methods’, and its contingency on contact with people, is the following incident: a friend of Burkert’s attended a rare conference of Northern people in Norway, and from the front row recorded the singing of a shaman. It was the first time this shaman had ever stood before a microphone. The recording was sent to Mathias, and this powerful and authentic piece of music came to be incorporated into the fabric of the Vienna piece, Ein Trauerspiel.

During the creation process, members of the ensemble bring along pieces of music and instruments they have come across. If they correspond to what Bausch is looking for, and fit in with the material offered by the group in response to the questions, they will be incorporated into the finished piece, organically.

In this manner Urs Kaufmann brought along the Fascist march Viktor, after which the 1985 Rome piece is named (in characteristic Bauschian antithetical fashion).

Likewise, Quincella Swynigan contributed the simple African instrument on which is played in Palermo Palermo.

Similarly, Dulce Pessoa, erstwhile Brasilian member of the group, brought along a samba record by Rjoas Gilberto from her personal collection, and from it The Girl from Ipanema is used in Tanzabend 2, 1991.

Another source of music is often simply the people they encounter in their environs, for example the osmotic incorporation of an aria from an old man in Wuppertal who used to be an opera singer.

In the same manner as the question-answer method of constructing the content of the pieces, the music content is equally an open, human, people-based work as much as an aspect of scientific research. This is the aesthetic of the Tanztheater Wuppertal.

They are after authenticity: working scenes, wauking songs, groups of women singing, like the Aioama, working together, softening leather with their teeth, bleaching clothes, working in the rice fields. Mathias Burkert describes it as: ‘the real life, what we have lost here in Germany’.

In fact these methods are not unlike those of Bela Bartok, whose score they use for Blaubart. Bartok was known to travel around the rural areas of Hungary and Czecheslovakia, recording the peasant’s songs, thereby not only preserving them, but also incorporating their earthy tones into his own compositions.

With regard to the criterion with which the music is selected, Bausch again re-iterates her reliance on feeling, authenticity, and correspondance to the present moment which is often inclusive of a large repertoire of different voices:

The search for form, unorthodoxly, is the last step in the process, rather than the first:

Raimund Hoghe elaborates on this final stage in the process, the search for a form, which has nothing to do with adhering to established convention:

26. November 1980.

Rather than being arbitrarily imposed from the outside like a Hollywood script package, the form must be authentic and connected with its present moment. It must correspond to the original material unearthed by Bausch in the ‘interrogation’ phase.

The content comes first. The content dictates the form. This is a concrete example of how their work grows from the inside-outwards. It is at antipodes with the orientalist aesthetic, in which form comes first, and determines content. The dynamic of orientalism is applied from the outside-in, content is contingent on form. Bausch’s work, on the other hand, as I have demonstrated, is orientative and develops, accordingly, from the inside-outwards.

It is the process and search for form which corresponds with the present moment which concerns Bausch:

The eventual organic form, which emerges organically from the material, can be said to be musical. In fact the main dramaturgical principle of their work, instead of being based on narrative, can be seen to come from the musical score, and can be read like a musial score. This is essentially what prevents appropriation of content by the spectator.

Susanne Schlicher rightly describes Bausch’s music as a mesmerising subliminal Seductress: die Musik als Verführerin, spielt mit unserer Verführbarkeit. The sound design, as well as the overall rhythm of the piece, serves a very manipulative function, because its effect on the spectator is subliminal.

Hans Züllig, original member of Ballets Jooss, one of Pina Bausch’s teachers and ballet master for the company until his death in November 1993, described her work as:

and asserted:

Like a score with repeating motifs, phrases and themes, Bausch’s dramaturgical structure resists retelling linear time, in favour of staging subliminal structure which works on the subconscious. The dramaturgical structure is musical and clandestine, and thus evokes psychological instead of linear time.

Kay Kirchmann asserts that rather than being composed arbitrarily, the form of Bausch’s kaleidescopic collage dance theatre pieces conform to strict aesthetic principles, namely, that of musical composition. The very principle of staging is a musical one, where music is conceived of as an instrument of time, of memory.

In this light, Pina Bausch can be seen as a composer, whose modus operandi is the utilisation of repetition as the hidden musical structure of time. As Dietmar Kamper asserts:

The dramaturgical principle could be seen as one of repetition, themes, motifs, like that of a score, which are threads weaved in and out of the piece in a circular pattern rather than in one of linear progressive narrative. Progression in the linear/causal sense is nowhere evident in her work.

Beim Anhören einer Tonbandaufnahme von Bela Bartok’s Oper "Herzog Blaubart’s Burg" is an example of this principle. The taperecorder, manipulator of time, is the centre stage protagonist, and Blaubart (the other protagonist) has the ambivalent status of simultaneous master of time, and its victim.

On his observation/examination of the form of Bausch’s apparently formless pieces, Kay Kirchmann asserts that each performer functions as a musical note, as well as the set, props, and the music itself:

Bausch’s pieces can only be experienced in the fleeting present moment (einmaligkeit) of performance, and then in grasping and inadequate retrospect. Tanztheater Wuppertal productions must be discovered individually (as Pina Bausch herself asserts ‘The things we discover for ourselves are the most important’) by exercising the memory muscle of the spectator, much in the same way as Grotowski describes it here:

Each time I discover something, I have the feeling it is what I recall. Discoveries are behind us and we must journey back to reach them... With the breakthrough - as in the return of an exile - can one touch something which is no longer linked to origins but - if I dare say it - to the origin? I believe so. Does essence stay in the background of the memory? I don’t know at all. When I work close to essence, I have the impression that memory actualises. When essence is activated, it is as if very strong potentialities are activated. The reminiscence is perhaps one of these potentialities.

The oeuvre of the Tanztheater Wuppertal has been described as Erinnerungsarbeit, for all concerned: the dancers, the audience, Pina Bausch herself. The first movement towards putting work on memory centre-stage was evident in the 1974 childhood memory piece, Fritz. Simultaneously a sense of transitoriness, unstoppable elapsed time, and the elusiveness of the unrepeatable present moment permeates all aspects of Bausch’s paradoxical work:

Kirchmann draws parallels between Pina Bausch’s aesthetic of duration and Henri Bergson’s space-time concept of:

The subliminal musical themes also echo this obsessive preoccupation with the past and the transitory nature of the present moment. ‘Nostalgic’ music, from the 1920’s to the 1950’s, easy listening music, ‘ernst’-music, crackling records, individual memories: e.g. Bausch’s own memories, or those of company members: e.g. her father’s picture in Bandoneon, Rolf Borzik in 1980, a piece by Pina Bausch, etc. proliferate. The choreographer’s own biographical background figures hugely in the work, of which she says:

It can be said to be the collective unconscious that Bausch’s microcosmic questioning is reaching towards.

While early in the canon of the Tanztheater Wuppertal oeuvre, the emphasis was placed on the private moment of individual recollection, as in the childhood scenes, full of memories and games. More recently (musically in any case) it is more dispersed and the emphasis has shifted to the archaic, and the mythic: the collective unconscious.

That is the path from Keuscheitslegende to Palermo Palermo. Kirchmann says:

The fact that their work has moved out from the individual, personal memory arena into something approaching ‘the universal unconscious’ is evident in the musical content of the recent pieces, especially the four site-specific city pieces that are the subject of this enquiry.

Yet how can the collective unconscious be reached, without any recourse to narrative, the language of myth?

The increasing fascination with and utilisation of folklore, ethnic and folk music evident in Tanztheater Wuppertal productions opens another door to the collective unconscious and facilitates the international reception of Bausch’s international themes. This preoccupation is evident in the search for, and employment of authenticity, real music by real people, working in the fields: Wauking songs, songs sung by the toothless, crackling records, unpolished. In fact the more amateur the better because it is authentic. These are songs that came to people spontaneously as they toiled, that were borne out of no pretentiousness, but genuinely from life and its travails. These songs are of people connected with toil and the soil, instead of concrete blocks and concrete jungles. They are the universal Whitmanesque songs sung by individuals.

This shift echoes the aforementioned parallel switch from emphasis on individual memory (an established object of Bausch’s fascination), to a more global, universal memory of mankind, which would also parallel the increasing emphasis on anthropology in her pieces, especially that of Viktor, and, for example, the demonstration of the migratory pattern of birds (see below).

Bausch touches on the same themes as before: time, transitoriness, and the attempt to bring the past into the present. What has changed however is the wider organisation of memory-work, that first and foremost through music and as a musicality can function.

Also, Pina Bausch reclaimed her early narrative myth-based dance operas, Iphigenie auf Tauris, and Orpheus und Eurydike, into the repertoire, thus dealing in mythos concurrently with the musically ethnic/folkloric pieces like Palermo and Viktor, which deal through the deployment of ethnic songs and folklore, according to the above, with that elusive phenomenon, the ‘collective unconscious’.

This introduces a further level of repetition, which lies within what we have established as the hidden musical structure of time.

On the one hand, bringing the old pieces, for example the Dance Operas, back into the repertoire in an attempt to reconstruct the original staging and production, is a further component of their paradoxical battle against transience, and what is past: the Sisyphus-Kampf gegen die Vergänglichkeit. This constitutes a further dimension to the Erinnerungsarbeit which furnishes the dynamic of Bausch’s Tanztheater.

Equally, the spectator has only his or her memory to rely on, with which to recall the actual performance. Like life it has left no other trace behind, except perhaps the programme note, (Erinnerung ist Kompromiß).

Individual and collective memory is inextricably intertwined in Bausch’s work, and, indeed cannot be taken apart:

The unearthing creation process, based as it is on quest-ions instead of state-ments, empowers the dancers to be in a position to tell their own stories, as opposed to having a text written for them, like the Beckettian tramps, Vladimir and Estragon. As long-time company member Nazareth Panadero puts it:

This is the difference between starting with A SCRIPT, AND STARTING WITH QUESTIONS. However this demands that the performers must first of all ‘have thought’ - their own thought, that is. Nazareth Panadero elaborates:

Like the tramps, they must face, along eventually with the audience, ‘the bleakness of freedom’, as experience falls out of a context which is preprocessed and mediated by narrative.

They, brave, out of context, face the bleakness of a freedom from which modern society/civilisation provides numerous mechanisms of escape. Instead of being narrated/represented in the creation process, the dancers narrate/represent

themselves. Bausch’s work, in police-interrogation-like fashion, as Panadero described it, discards familiar mechanisms of ‘escape’ by subtracting familiar narratives and contexts. The interrogative questioning methodology which she has evolved with her company over a twenty year period throws overboard the tempting possibility of allowing others to do your thinking for you. It debunks the option of resigning will to a higher authority.

Declan Kiberd elaborates on Beckett’s tramps’ stain on the silence:

Freedom from ancient spiritual authorities will be meaningful only if the character is capable of actual thought. Too often what he calls "freedom " is actually and only the freedom to be like everybody else. As Erich Fromm has written: "the right to express our thoughts means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own." The

problem is that, having cut the cords which connected them to the old authority - the tramps sag like redundant puppets’ final surrender to the old testament god of fear.

This is the difference between Beckett’s tramps with their inherent sado-masochistic conspiracy of the wounded, and Bausch’s dancers; between the characters she depicts, and the dancers themselves, as well as the aesthetic of the creation process itself; between the rest of the Western world’s media victims and the audience of a Tanztheater piece, forced as they are into the terror of ‘having thought’.

Bausch could be seen to be developing the ability of those she and her work come in contact with, to ‘have thought’. Her work, in its quest-ioningness is a disturbing catalyst for original thought.

Her company can be considered ‘o sweet spontaneous’ e.e. cummings people, with his elegies/ lauding of ‘be’,‘is’:

‘they exist - ‘is’ is their first big word; they love and ‘love’ is their second big word; they are spontaneous; they are childlike; and they are themselves.’

They nurture what in Fromm’s vocabulary is the ‘spontaneous’: thinking feeling and acting the expression of their selves and not of an automaton, an ability to feel and think that is really theirs, and intuition that transgresses the conscious/unconscious border.

Over twenty years ago Blaubart - Beim anhören einen Tonbandaufnahme von Bela Bartok’s Herzog Blaubart’s Burg (1977) with its Beckettian resonances with Krapp’s Last Tape, was the first step towards today’s creation process, which is based on Bausch asking her dancers questions:

It is not surprising that the dancers should have been put off kilter by what was, essentially, the embryo of a new departure in dance and theatre, and a disturbing attempt at transformative renovation in Western (and especially German) imperialist thought and perception.

Naturally enough, the public resisted the ensuing disturbing representation of brutal honesty, what Heiner Müller would describe as ‘Der Striptease der Humanismus’ (described at more length in Chapter Six, on Orientation).

Resistance was to be expected. Bausch’s new interrogative methodology of developing her pieces from a quest-ion/answer base, which implicitly and fundamentally subverted the smugness of a bourgeois audience, blossomed in the 1978 Macbeth paraphrase: He takes her by the hand and leads her to the castle, the others follow. This piece was created with actors and singers as well as dancers. Not insignificant is the fact that there was a Lee Strasberg convention on at the time of its creation in Bochum. (I have elaborated on this in Chapter Three, ‘Chronicle of Journeys in Narrative Abandonment’).

Bausch’s new methodology/praxis, came into its own in the piece she developed with the contribution of actors. This presents a parallel with Grotowski’s ‘poor theatre’ and its emphasis on authenticity: ‘naked’ actors, whose emphasis is on stripping themselves of clichés, and giving of their authentic ’selves’ on the stage. Although Bausch’s performers, as Hélène Pikon, below, emphasise that they are dancers, not actors, and are being themselves as opposed to ‘acting’, there are parallels between their undertakings and Grotowski’s aesthetic:

There are obvious parallels between their undertakings and Grotowski’s aesthetic of the performer, who must rid himself ‘of all that is not his’:

The Performer, with a capital letter, is a man of action. He is not a man who plays another. He is a dancer, a priest, a warrior: he is outside aesthetic genres.

Indeed, Bausch and Grotowski were in New York at the same time and mutual influence is probable.

For many of the dancers this new evolution into unknown territory was just as confusing as it was for the audience. Dominique Mercy, one of the mainstays of the company, who is now a member of the teaching staff at the Folkwangschule, indicates that it was no easy transition for him either. Here, in an interview with Hoghe, Mercy elaborates on the early days of the creation process which Bausch has developed and his own first encounter with what is now the modus operandi of the Tanztheater Wuppertal:

Wir (he and his then wife, Malou Airaudo) haben dann "Renate wandert aus" gemacht und merkten, daß das nicht klappen könnte. Vielleicht war das für uns zu früh, die Art und Weise, wie Pina angefangen hat zu arbeiten. Außer ‘Blaubart’ war ‘Renate’ ja vielleicht das erste Mal, wo sie angefangen hat, Fragen zu stellen und was anderes zu probieren - vielleicht waren wir noch nicht bereit dafür.

Like any genuine effort to begin again, it passes through a moment when there is a scary void, when nothing resembles what it used to be, and gives no indication of where it is going.

This uncertainty which can be painful and confusing, bereft of the comfort of closure, is the perennial location of Bausch’s work (even today).

The death of old forms, and old sentences, which come about by virtue of Bausch’s work, which is executed like a coroner’s inquest, also embraces the birth of the inchoate. This liminal in-between is a disturbing and precarious point to balance.

Mercy and Airaudo were to return to Wuppertal to re-negotiate Bausch’s questions, and participate in her genuinely radical effort to start again:

Bausch’s interrogations are such that they can lead the questioned person in all directions; it is easy to get lost, so seemingly ambivalent and open are the questions at times. It is indeed evocative sometimes of an Artaudian burning at the stake with regard to what it requires from each individual performer, how much of their ‘selves’ they are required to contribute.

So much in the Zeitgeist is Bausch’s oeuvre that its set design in 1989 anticipated the fall of the Berlin Wall in Palermo Palermo. Bausch however says:

The 1989 piece opens with a very real brick wall separating the audience from the Stage. It is the generic and metaphoric barrier, a border, and a frontier, subliminally separating the ‘passive’ spectator from the ‘active’ performers. Breaching this barrier is and always has been fundamental to Bausch’s work.

This is a metaphor of how Tanztheater à la Pina Bausch not only discards narrative and dances on the crumbled rubble, but it also

shows how the influence of these (great historical) processes reaches down into the individual realm - it adds immediate experience as a value in its own right to rational insight through its emotive modes, it contrasts and expands the description of the connections in the macrostructure at the level of the microstructure.

The initial unyielding wall of Palermo Palermo can be seen as an embodiment of brittle rigid orientalism itself:

a system of ideas that can remain unchanged as teachable wisdom (in academies, books, congresses, universities, foreign-service institutes) from the period of Renan in the late 1840’s until the present...

like that common species of migratory birds, who find themselves in the disorientated predicament of fatal liminality, their:

instinct preserved over millions of years guided them to their exhausted death... where scientists assume that millions of years ago the great land mass broke apart into two entirely separate continents ... the birds (the dancers) circling, frantically seeking their land where it no longer exists ...

ninety per cent falling dead from exhaustion into the middle of the Atlantic...

At the outset of Palermo Palermo, a concrete wall collapses unprovoked to rubble, and the piece is unleashed onto the Tanztheater Wuppertal stage. It can be seen as

walls we build around ourselves, borders between countries, the frontier between audience and performers, the Berlin Wall. The post-fall rubble is an open metaphor which embraces a multitude: post-war debris and the Tänze der Trümmerfrau, collapsing borders, change, mutability. It can be seen as:

This metaphoric wall can embrace ‘identity’, ideology’, all the ‘isms’, all the labels, or perhaps the wall is simply fear. Fear in the Frommian sense, of freedom, for:

The connecting link between ‘external’ (State power), and ‘internal’ (individual emotional structures) is our fears. They transfer the general structure of society to the psychic functioning of the individual.

The concrete wall represents all of the above, yet no ‘one’ definable thing. It remains elusive, and ungraspable. To our impetuous Western questions: What does it mean? What does it signify? How can I recount it? explain it?, Bausch replies with a non-answer:

Bausch’s perennial quest is to orientate oneself again and again:

Where are the new limits? These things have to be found. They don’t just fall out of the sky. There are things which have to be worked at, things one is always having to discover, step by step .

Bausch’s quest is not for followers. In contrast to Macbeth, who is ‘taken by the hand, and led to the castle, the others follow...’, in Bausch’s work the spectator is interrogated in an impressionistic manner, and led into self-doubt. Instead of offering to lead the spectator by the hand into a safe and soothing narrative like a Fascist lullaby, Bausch’s work itself could be seen as the interrogator, asking ‘why take my hand? Why reach out to be led by the hand at all? Why follow mindlessly? Why don’t you wake up and take responsibility for yourself ? Don’t go to sleep - wake up! The experience is neither comforting nor reassuring. The fundamental disturbance is that no comfort of closure is offered.

Echoes of the Macbeth Paraphrase can be heard in the opening of Palermo Palermo, when we hear:

Take my hand !

cried out from a thin blonde-haired woman across the freshly-fallen rubble. What might lurk behind that wall, that wall of narrative which is another Kafkaesque threshold? Certainly no method of escape, to replace narrative. This woman continues, to neurotically draw an X on her face, making a metaphoric target/victim of herself. Then in true masochistic fashion she yells at two mute men to throw tomatoes in her face. Oblige they do. Shaking, and covered in tomatoes, she eventually yells hysterically at the two men to carry her off. They do. Is her hand really one to be taken, to be led by?

Pandora’s box is opened, but nothing is put back. The spectator is fundamentally interrogated, disturbed, and left with an unresolved mess.

Not one brick of this fallen wall is picked up during the Palermo Palermo performance. It is, rather, ‘danced’ over, insofar as the danse macabre of the Tanztheater Wuppertal exposes the ubiquitous mental constructs of Fascism in Ingeborg Bachmann microcosm.

However, once the illusory borders and narratives drop and the initial euphoria is over, there is the problem of dealing with the rubble. Like the Trümmerfrau of the aftermath of the World Wars, Bausch’s dance is the Tänze der Trümmerfrau. Nowhere, not even in Palermo Palermo, do they seem to be making any progress in their big clean-up. Instead they wallow in the rubble.

The work of the Tanztheater Wuppertal is transitive, in that it seeks to transform the viewer, to activate his or her mind and emotions. It demands active viewing. It demands a journey, an effort on the part of the viewer whose passivity and unquestioningness is rudely unaccommodated, is given no space, by virtue of neither being taken by the hand nor led to the castle with a trail of ‘others’ following.

It unleashes instead an enforced re-evaluation of very first principles, beginning with a series of questions, and forcing the spectator eventually to call his/her own first principles into question.

This is how Bausch turns form and content inside-out, by starting with interrogative and unrhetorical questions, instead of statements, and working from the inside outwards.

...during a panel discussion early in her career, Jooss and Bausch were asked how they had influenced each other.’They didn’t say anything for a long time’, Schmidt recalls, ‘but then they both answered with one word: honesty’.

As I have demonstrated, its relevance to the present moment and Zeitgeist is absolute because of its porous characteristic of openness to the present moment and to the individual. It facilitated the gradual erosion of a mediating narrative.

This frankly questioning openness and receptivity is characteristic of Bausch’s productions from the outset, not excluding Iphigenie auf Tauride, and Orpheus und Euridyke. However her work had to travel through many phases before it would culminate in its present innovative method and ensuing organic form. It was not born overnight, and was welcomed with open arms by neither public nor performer.

The demands of the unorthodox Tanztheater Wuppertal, both of themselves and of the audience, are exigent. It exposes the basic brutality which is at the root of cliché lives and thought patterns, in a way that of itself is non-totalitarian. It interrogates. The methodology of the Tanztheater Wuppertal is based on the initial spontaneity of the creators, and eventually, the spontaneity of the spectator’s response.

Thus, Bausch has developed a new language of the theatre which succeeds in uprooting and challenging the deep rooted preconceptions embedded in the fabric of Western society, by virtue of her interrogatory quest-ioning methodology.