“I once said: “I am not interested in how people move, but what moves them.” This phrase has been quoted many times and remains true to this day.”
Pina Bausch
Speech at the Kyoto Prize ceremony in 2007.
“Today’s life cannot be danced in the traditional way. I am not interested in the aesthetics of the gesture for the sake of the gesture. I had to sacrifice my own dance to find a way to include the problems of our world in movement. Life is never like a dance floor, smooth and reassuring. ”
The way is improvisation. The creator invites the dancers to answer questions such as what would you do with a corpse? or how do you behave when you have lost something ?; to jump towards someone, “but with a stuffy nose, like someone who jumps into the water”, to “do harm by protecting yourself” or to “take a kiss from someone somewhere” … To express a state of mind, wishes, with which she later composes collages, images that are themselves a story.
I am not interested in the aesthetics of the gesture for the sake of the gesture. I had to sacrifice my own dance to find a way to include the problems of our world in movement.
“Müller coffee”
Pina evokes the Café that her father had in the Solingen region, where little Filipina (Pina) grew up, sheltering her childhood between the legs of the tables, seeing the world from below and without being seen. “I was not aware of everything that was happening around me. In any case, I don’t remember hearing about the war. She was a very shy girl. I lived in that restaurant. And for a child, a restaurant can be a wonderful place: there were so many people and so many strange things happened ”.
It speaks of the lack of communication and the impossibility of loving in a world without hope, with death as the only possible horizon.
But the landscape that now make up the chairs and tables of that small post-war German cafe makes one think of child’s play.
Pina raises with them a desolate and disturbing landscape, which speaks of the lack of communication and the impossibility of loving in a world without hope, with death as the only possible horizon. The nightmare of being abandoned, failure, the pain of not being loved …
