Pina Bausch's passing away marks the passage of an era. Bausch brought to a synthesis the formal divides between theater and dance, beween village and the world. Bausch's grounding in the village of Wuppertal, Germany for her movement work became an artistic practice unique and critical to the world of performance and movement. Bausch's model of producing dance theater is a powerful model of alternative living. Her example is extreme but inspiring: move to an unknown site and start your own theater company that centralizes the life of performance and artistic practice at its core. Bausch's dance practice based on communal living in a small village echoes earlier aesthetic practices of the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College and prior to that, the more esoteric investigations of Francois Delsarte and Emile Dalcroze, who respectively investigated the associations between movement, emotions, dance and theatricality. In Bausch's work, the distillation of movement as a kinetic medium whose compositional formality incorporates the daily gestures of life, comes to a head. The dancer in Bausch's work became a conduit of the contemporary gesture, a walk, a casual squat, a slide of the feet that cites both Buster Keaton and the Judson Church movement.
In Pina Bausch's dance pieces, theatricality acquired a clarification- movement heightened dramatic action, action became the event, and choreography replaced Stanislavskian fidelity to produce fresh new images on slices of life. The detailed gesture in Pina Bausch's dance work becomes an investigation into the science of movement- it brings Delsarte's interest in the "science of movement" into conversation with the quotidien life of the expendable present.
The passing of the great movement theorist and practitioner is the passing of an era of investigation of big gestures through little things, where the world is unpacked within the confines of a utopian village.
No comments:
Post a Comment