GHOSTS ON THE STAGE

Pina Bausch's legacy.

- JENNIFER HOMANS

I have always loved the dances of Pina Bausch and her company, Tanztheater Wuppertal. Their performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where they have appeared since 1984, were her own theatre of the absurd: I remember seeing, that year, her astonishing “Rite of Spring” (1975), with the stage thickly covered in dirt and the dancers flinging their spines with a violence that was almost frightening to watch. And the melancholy “Café Müller” (1978), in which Pina herself was a fragile woman in a white nightgown who walked barefoot, eyes shut, arms faintly extended, as a man rushed to shove tables and chairs aside to save her from smashing into them. She said that she could find her way into that ghostly body only if her eyes, behind closed lids, looked down, not forward. That’s how intense she was as an artist.

Over the years, her dances grew lighter—to darker effect—as she developed her method of working. Rather than “making a dance,” she asked her dancers questions—“What do you do, in order to be loved?” was one—and they responded with stories and movements from their own lives and imaginations. With them, she would elaborate, cut, compile, and integrate the material into a dance. Many of her dancers and collaborators joined her soon after her start in Wuppertal, in 1973, and stayed for decades. A whole repertory developed out of these stories, and out of these people. (“She is a vampire,” one of her longtime dancers noted.)