Why Pina Bausch is Important to Me

I chose Pina Bausch as the choreographer I was interested in studying because I know that she required her dancers to take ownership of their experiences and opinions. The first piece of choreography that I saw by Pina Bausch was le Sacre de primtemps, which was a production that called for the dancers to dance on peat that covered the stage. The movement was driving and desperate to the point where I found myself emotionally connecting to the struggle that the dancer was going through on stage. After investigating more about Pina Bausch’s process of generating movement and inspiration for the content of her movement, I realized that most of the time the inspiration stemmed from socio-political ideas or issues that were occurring to her dancers.

As a dancer, I found that Pina Bausch was giving her dancers a responsibility that many other dancers never knew about. Pina Bausch’s dancers could not be blind to what was happening in the world and they always had to evaluate what their opinion of feelings were, directed towards a specific topic. Not many people challenge themselves to think about how the issues and topic in the world affect them even though they are not in the same time zone or country. Pina Bausch had the gift to ask the audience, through movement, questions that were personal and global. She forced the audience to see the opinions of the artists on stage and in the end the audience began to question their experiences and opinion of the production that they just attend.
Pina Bausch made people think and feel by purely looking at movement. Her movement vocabulary was simple and repetitive enough for the audience to decode the secret questions in locked in the choreography. She made everyone take responsibility for who they were and what their life stood for. As a dancer for Pina Bausch, there is no way that you could not change after dancing for her. She made her dancers move through a different light that made her movement more real and sensible for the audience.