Unconditional love

Not many dance-makers have had their art celebrated in major, award-winning feature films. Pina Bausch has. Wim Wenders’s 2011 Pina and Rainer Hoffmann’s/Anna Linsel’s 2010 Dancing Dreams offered unique insights into her creative genius, facilitating the posthumous popularisation of a dance-specific phenomenon. Yet no film, no documentary and certainly none of the countless writings that popped up after the choreographer’s untimely death has managed to draw an exhaustive picture of Bausch or dispel the vagueness that surrounds what her Tanztheater was and still is about.

Three years after her demise, Bausch and her work remain shrouded in mystery, resisting and eluding scholarly labelling or convenient pigeonholing. Central to such elusiveness is the fact that her approach to Tanztheater — which she is traditionally, though erroneously, believed to have invented — was tightly woven with her complex, multifaceted, contradictory and ever-changing persona. Pina the dancer was different from Pina the dance-maker, who, in turn, was different from Pina the director, Pina the actress, Pina the manager; her Tanztheater mirrored all that.