Portugal: Late Dancer Pina Bausch Still Kicking Up Controversy
"Portugal, therefore, is everywhere in Masurca Fogo (1988), and nowhere at all. The Lisbon that appears on stage is not the Lisbon of monuments or political history. It is a city dissolved into sensation: dazzling white light that erases contours; sudden rain; music drifting from an unseen source; afternoons that seem immune to urgency; public squares where people remain together without speaking; the perpetual awareness of the sea just beyond vision," according to Ivan Nechaev, in Georgia Today (July 23).
Excerpts from Pina Bausch's Masurca Fogo and Café Muller were featured in Pedro Almódovar's film Talk to Her (2002), reported The Guardian (June 30, 2009).
As director of her revolutionary dance-theater company in Wuppertal, Germany, Pina Bausch melded artistic disciplines and broke down performers' emotional barriers, inspiring an international following while others, shocked and disgusted, walked out of her pieces.
Even after her death 17 years ago at age 68, five days after she learned that she had lung cancer, the leading light of modern dance again caused controversy, this time, in Portugal.
The Municipality of Lisbon unveiled a plaque on a street named after the legendary choreographer in the Parish of Lumiar one late September day. Her name was chiseled into a granite slab followed by "Dançarina e Coreógrafa", instead of "Bailarina e Coreógrafa", much to the indignation of many, who contended that her classical training was slighted, reported Observador (September 25). Having only a few words to describe her meant that the words had to be exact, without the need for elaboration.
"Pina had a great gift," said choreographer Paul Sanasardo, in her obituary in The Guardian (July 1, 2009). (Around 1961, English ballet choreographer and dancer Antony) Tudor, had staged this piece at The Julliard School (then the Julliard School of Music) in which Pina danced a section called 500 Arabesques, and she did it on pointe. . . . She was very lyrical, and she also had tremendous intensity."
Julliard Dance Ensemble in Doris Humphrey's Passacaglia. Bausch in center with angled elbows; Rina Schenfeld, her friend, later of the Batsheva Dance Company, second from right; to her right is Steve Paxton, later founding member of the Judson Dance Theater; to her left (far right) is Alice Condodina, later a Limón Master Artist (Photo @ Impact Photos, courtesy of the Julliard Archives)
Antony Tudor also made her a member of the Metropolitan Opera Ballet company, and she worked with Paul Taylor at the New American Ballets company, reported The Guardian (January 26, 2002).
Pina Bausch (July 27, 1940 - June 30, 2009) danced with her company, Tanztheater (Dance Theater) Wuppertal, which she founded in 1973, until she was in her 60s.
Bruno Cochat's Facebook Post
In Lisbon, Bruno Cochat, choreographer and advisor to the director of the National Conservatory's School of Music, posted his strong reaction to the wording of the municipality's homage on his Facebook page (September 23), which garnered 600 reactions and 132 comments, most in agreement with him, as of two weeks later:
"O que não merece é ser chamada (e gravado na pedra) de "Dançarina"! Eu sei que é confuso, em português, os bailarinos dançam e os dançarinos bailam mas, na dúvida, era só perguntar . . ."
("What she doesn't deserve is to be called -- and have carved in stone -- a "Dançarina"! I know that it's confusing in Portuguese -- bailarinos dance and dançarinos dance -- but, when in doubt, all it took was asking . . .")
As in Pina Bausch's Tanztheater (Dance Theater) Wuppertal company, Bruno Cochat's LAP (Laboratório de Artes Performativas) - Dança/Teatro workshop sessions blend dance, theater and music to create scenes from the stories, memories, dreams and fears of the participants.
In his Facebook post, Cochat offered to pay for the correction. However, on September 24, the Lisbon Municipality acknowledged the error and assumed responsibility for the "lapse", as the plaque wording differed from that approved by the Commission of Topography. It said that it would correct the mistake as soon as possible, reported Observador.
At the unveiling of Rua Pina Bausch (From Câmara Municipal de Lisboa)
Pina and Portugal
Pina Bausch visited Portugal many times. Portugal's relationship with her was a close one.
President Mário Soares awarded her the official rank of Grand Officer of the Order of Santiago on September 6, 1994, according to Waiting for Pina Bausch (September 27, 2004), Biblioteca de Arte Gulbenkian.
It was Jorge Salavisa, who as artistic director of São Luiz Theater, had arranged her performance there in Café Muller in 2008. After her death in 2009, Salavisa, who had been the artistic director of the Gulbenkian Ballet (1977-1996), organized the tribute, Pina Bausch One Year Later.
Lisbon Municipality
Lisboa, Informação (September 22), Câmara Municipal de Lisboa wrote:
"Her work broke down the boundaries between dance and theater by exploring human relationships, social dynamics and emotions through the body and movement. This approach transformed contemporary dance and established Pina Bausch as one of the most significant choreographers of the 20th century.
"Her connection to Lisbon was particularly highlighted in 1998 with the presentation of Masurca Fogo, a co-production between Expo '98 and the Goethe-Institut. The performance brought together dance, music and theater in a creation defined by multiculturalism and the city's energy during the world fair.
" 'We are inscribing in the city the name of someone who created here, returned here, made Lisbon the subject matter of her work, and danced here for the last time,' said Diogo Moura, Lisbon's City Councilor for Culture, at the street's inauguration ceremony.
"As of today, Pina Bausch 'becomes part of Lisbon's everyday geography. Perhaps this is one of the most enduring tributes a city can offer: weaving a name into daily life and passing it on -- without excessive solemnity -- to future generations.' "
Masurca Fogo (Fiery Mazurka) takes its name from the mazurka danced in Cape Verde. The mazurka, a Polish folk music and dance genre from the Mazovia region, home to Warsaw, Poland, was popular in Europe in the 19th century, and it spread along the routes of European colonialism to Cape Verde, Brazil, Martinique and elsewhere, according to Mazurka, Cabo Verde a Música (April 8, 2020).
Masurca Fogo
Pina Bausch's work consisted of 55 pieces, 47 with the Tanztheater Wuppertal, and 14 created on a stay in a city or country, according to the company's website.
Masurca Fogo was of one of those 14. It belongs to Bausch's cycle of works developed after extended creative residencies across the world: Palermo, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Seoul and, of course, Lisbon. These productions frequently are described as "travel pieces", a phrase which misses almost everything essential about them, according to Ivan Nechaev, in Georgia Today (July 23).
"They are not portraits of cities nor ethnographic observations translated into choreography. Bausch never attempted cultural representation. She collected atmospheres."
In 1997, Regina Advento, with other members of Tanztheater Wuppertal, made the journey to Lisbon, "a special time for Advento" because "they had toured her native Brazil before landing in Portugal in late summer", reported The Guardian (January 26, 2017).
Bausch had counseled the dancers "to go where your eyes and ears take you, see who you meet and what you feel". Advento recalled:
"We were open to everything, seeking new experiences and challenges."
The process itself has become almost legendary, according to Georgia Today (July 23).
"The company would spend weeks wandering through unfamiliar places with no intention of researching history in any academic sense. Dancers visited cafés, beaches, parks, markets, restaurants, abandoned streets. They watched strangers. They listened. They accumulated fragments without knowing whether any of them would matter eventually.
"Back in Wuppertal, Bausch asked questions rather than give instructions. What frightened you? What surprised you? What stayed in your memory? Show me. Not through explanation, but through action. . . ."
"The resulting work occupies a strange territory between memory and invention. Places disappear as geography and re-emerge as emotional landscapes.
"None of these images claim authenticity. Their truth lies elsewhere. They belong to memory after memory already has begun transforming experience into fiction."
She asked her dancers questions about painting, The Little Assassin, by the uncompromising Portuguese artist, Paula Rego, reported The Guardian (January 26, 2017). One of the dance scenes is inspired by their answers.
Masurca Fogo is two hours and 30 minutes long, according to the company's website.
"Music drifts through the evening as though carried by weather rather than dramaturgy," according to Ivan Nechaev, in Georgia Today.
"(Portugal's queen of fado) Amália Rodrigues, (American pianist) Duke Ellington, (American saxophonist) Ben Webster, (Brazilian guitarist) Baden Powell (de Aquino), (Swedish singer) Lisa Ekdahl, (Brazilian percussionist) Marcos Suzano and dozens of other voices coexist without hierarchy. The soundtrack behaves less like composition than recollection. Songs return unexpectedly, interrupt one another, disappear before completion. Listening becomes another form of traveling."
"Pina Bausch danced Café Muller for the last time in May 2008 at the São Luiz Theater," reads a plaque there, according to Observador. (Photo from Paulo Pimenta Diários)
Café Muller is inspired by the choreographer's childhood memories of her father working in a café, according to Screening Pina Bausch, Fundação Caixa Geral de Depósitos, Season 2024-2025.
"What Moves Them"
Bausch once said, "I am not interested in how people move, but in what moves them," according to How Choreographer Pina Bausch Revolutionized Modern Dance (June 28, 2019), Sleek dance magazine, based in Berlin.
In rehearsals, Bausch provoked her dancers into movement by asking them to delve into their past experiences. Using prompts such as "Show me in movement the memory of the first time you laughed very hard", or "How do you behave when you've lost something?", she then turned the dancer's responses into choreography.
"Pornography of Pain"
Given the sometimes disturbing nature of the work, critical and popular reactions, at times, have been sharp, reported The Guardian (January 26, 2002). 'Silly, empty, stupid, self-indulgent, self-congratulatory,' railed Clive Barnes, theater critic of The New York Times. The New Yorker dance critic Arlene Croce dismissed Bausch's work as 'pornography of pain" and Bausch herself as 'an entrepreneuse who fills theaters with projections of her self-pity'.
"The most ferociously negative reaction came from citizens of the German city of Wuppertal, where Bausch and her company have been based since 1973, who, right up to the early 80s, viewed Bausch as an avant-garde anti-Christ:
" 'They would bang the doors and leave,' remembers company member Meryl Tankard. 'Sometimes they would throw oranges at us when we were trying to dance. Once a man got up on stage and took a bucket of water I had as a prop and tried to throw it over one of the other dancers who was repeating a poem over and over. But she ducked, and the water went all over the audience.' "
Indebtedness to Bausch
Bausch has since become a treasured legacy of Wuppertal. The city's former municipal theater, 50-year-old Schauspielhaus, where she created the majority of her works, is under construction for its future as part of the Pina Bausch Center. The center is designed to preserve the artistic legacy of the choreographer while serving as a dynamic space for experimentation, research and performance, according to its website.
It is impossible to enumerate the hundreds of works over the past 20 years whose bleak weltanschauung, skewed narratives and self-consciously bizarre stagings have screamed their indebtedness to Bausch, wrote The Guardian (January 23 2002).
Wim Winders, the German auteur filmmaker, created the Academy Award-nominated documentary Pina (2011) as a visual homage to her legacy. Risk-taking musician David Bowie used choreography inspired by her work in his Glass Spider Tour (1987). Renowned British sculptor Antony Gormley said, in a Sadler's Wells publication, that he was indebted to Bausch:
"Pina Bausch has enriched the language of dance and theater and made it into a kind of rite of passage, taking it back to its early roots in ritual as well as forward to a form of collective psychotherapy. I am inspired, challenged and indebted to Pina, not least for her acute sense of body in space."
"Rather than excavate romance, Nelken (1982) seals a connection between parent and child, state and subject. Bausch built richly strange images, which in this piece gesture at power and dependence. An overly controlling game of grandmother's footsteps; capricious command ("Pray! Tickle!); men burying their faces in a heap of chopped onions or kissing the reddening cheek they have just slapped. Bausch's women are always chic; here, the men caper in pastel cocktail frocks -- to be ordered back into suit and tie is a kind of shaming," explained The Guardian review (February 16, 2024) of its performance at Sadler's Wells Theatre, in London.
"Self-Doubt", "Ferocious Determination"
Controversy did not deter Pina Bausch, "who is, at least on the surface, shy and reticent. Dressed invariably in dark tones, always sucking on a Camel cigarette or draining a cup of coffee", and speaking in a low, halting, gentle voice, described The Guardian (January 26, 2002).
During the process of creating a new piece, when she takes copious notes, she is engulfed in "a miasma of uncertainty and self-doubt". However, these insecurities are tempered by the artist's "ferocious determination".
Her partner, Ronald Kay, who lived with her in a Wuppertal apartment not far from the theater, said:
"She comes home like a heap of ashes. I have learned to look at it from a distance. To be absolutely outside of it is the only way I can help.
"She works in the rehearsal room from 10 in the morning, and rehearsals don't end 'til late in the evening. She comes home at about 10 at night. We eat, and then she sits there 'til two or three o'clock getting an idea of what it was all about, what can be kept, what are the little jewels of the piece. And then she gets up at seven, sometimes even earlier, to prepare. She always manages to keep the same intensity."
Big, Long Pieces
"Bausch's works are anything but modest," according to The Guardian (January 23, 2002). "Most of them are created on a huge scale, lasting for up to four hours and taking place on stages that have been transformed into giant dreamscapes."
As early as Rite of Spring in 1975, she had the stage covered with wet soil while dancers pulsated and panted audibly, according to Sleek.
In Viktor (1986), 20-foot-tall walls of mud flank the dancers on three sides, so that the performers appear like an exposed ant colony or a lost tribe unearthed in an archaeological dig, according to The Guardian (January 23, 2002). In Nelken (1982), the stage is carpeted with thousands of carnations and patrolled by Alsatians. In Arien (1979), the floor is covered with water.
"These magical places, simultaneously sinister and beguiling, are peopled by the dreamers themselves, men and women whose fantasies collide in controlled mayhem."
Bausch and student Koert Stuyf, in Antony Tudor's A Choreographer Comments (Photo @ Impact Photos, courtesy of the Julliard Archives)
Her Beginnings
Philippine Bausch was born on July 27,1940, in the German city of Solingen, in North Rhine-Westphalia, bordering Wuppertal. She was the third child of August Bausch, proprietor of a small hotel and restaurant, and his wife Anita. Pina's brother, Roland, and sister, also Anita, were almost a decade older, and her parents were busy with the family business, which meant that the girl Pina was left alone often to amuse herself, according to The Guardian (January 26, 2002).
"Even the restaurant in our hotel was highly interesting for me," she said, in What moves me (2007), on the occasion of receiving the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy. "My parents had to work a great deal and weren't able to look after me. In the evenings, when I was actually supposed to go to bed, I would hide under the tables and simply stay there. I found what I saw and heard very exciting: friendship, love and quarrels -- everything that you can experience in a local restaurant like this. I think that this stimulated my imagination a great deal. I have always been a spectator."
From a very young age, Bausch was dancing constantly. Performers from the Solingen theater noticed her precocity, according to The Guardian (January 26, 2002).
"People from the chorus came sometimes to eat in the restaurant, and they saw me always hopping about and doing handstands. So, they took me to the children's ballet. All the children had to lie on their stomachs and put their legs behind their heads. And it was so easy for me to do that the teacher said: 'Du bist ein schlangenmensch', which means something like 'You are a snake person or a contortionist'. I thought that it was fantastic to be like that and afterwards always wanted to go back.' "
At 14, the "contortionist" won a place at the Folkwang Ballet in Essen, which was run by the renowned choreographer Kurt Jooss, one of the founding fathers of German Expressionist dance, or ausdrucks-tanz, which combined movement, music and dramatic elements."
Jooss veered off from Rudolf Laban's movement choirs for everyone in a community to develop tanztheater as a concert form, according to Pina Bausch at Julliard and in NYC 1959-1961 (September 18, 2023), by dance history teacher at Julliard, Wendy Perron. A prolific choreographer, his company toured extensively in Europe. His anti-war ballet, The Green Table (1932) is one of the iconic works of the 20th century.
Bausch, in The Guardian (January 26, 2002) said: "At this time, at the Folkwang, all the arts were together. It was not just the performing arts like music or acting or mime or dance, but there were also painters, sculptors, designers, photographers. If you just went to a little ballet school, the experience would have been entirely different."
New York City 1959-1961
After her graduation from the Folkwang in 1958, the student won a scholarship from the German academic exchange service to continue her dance studies at the Julliard School of Music, now The Julliard School, in New York. For a teenager who barely had ventured outside of the landlocked state of North Rhine-Westphalia, it was daunting.
"I was just 18 when I stepped on that ship. I couldn't speak any English."
In her acceptance speech upon receiving a Dance Magazine Award, December 8, 2008, only seven months before she died, and in her 2007 Kyoto speech, she recalled her oceanic journey:
"My parents took me to the port of Cuxhaven. A brass band was playing as the ship was setting off, and everybody was crying. I went onto the ship and waved. My parents also were waving -- and crying. And I was standing on the deck and crying too. It was terrible. I had the feeling we would never see each other again. Then I wrote a short letter to Lucas Hoving (who taught at Julliard) in New York and posted it on the way to Le Havre. Lucas had been one of the best teachers in Folkwang School in Essen. I was very much hoping that he would pick me up in New York.
"Eight days later, when I arrived in New York, I didn't have my health certificate in my bag, but it was in my suitcase. Therefore, I had to spend many hours on the ship waiting until the over thousand passengers had been dealt with. Finally, they took me to the suitcase. I no longer expected that Lucas would still be there, even if he had received my letter. Yet, when I walked off the ship thirteen hours later, he was still standing there. Hanging over his arm were flowers that had wilted in the meantime. Poor Lucas! He had been waiting for me all this time!
"This, for me, an unforgettable memory, shows how I was welcomed then, and how I feel welcomed each time I come to New York."
(Photo from Pina Bausch, HiLobrow)
Embraced Cultural Diversity
In The Guardian (January 26, 2002), life-long friend choreographer Donya Feuer, who would move to Sweden in 1963 and become one of Ingmar Bergman's closest theater co-workers, remembered her in the early days:
"She was very shy and cried a lot. Everything was so foreign to her. We would have to walk her to the subway every evening until she felt secure. But once we saw what a gifted person she was, we did everything we could so she could be at ease."
Once in the rehearsal room, Bausch's timidity melted away, and her grace and radiance as a dancer immediately impressed her Julliard teachers and colleagues.
The New York influence on Bausch was threefold, according to Pina Bausch at Julliard and in NYC 1959-1961. First, her teachers, most of whom were international figures: Antony Tudor, Alfredo Corvino, José Limón, Martha Graham (especially through company members Mary Hinkson and Donald McKayle) and, to some extent, La Meri, Louis Horst and Anna Sokolow. Second, the choreographers she worked with outside of Julliard: Paul Sanasardo and Donya Feuer, Paul Taylor and, again, Tudor, at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet. Lastly, the sheer diversity of styles, ethnicities and music genres which populated New York at the time."
Pina embraced the cultural diversity at Julliard. On the day she auditioned for placement levels, she met Rina Schenfeld, a young dancer who had sailed from Israel. Neither could speak English, but they bonded immediately. As Schenfeld told Julliard teacher Wendy Perron, "We were both foreigners, and we were treated so beautiful, like real important guests."
Bausch worked with dancers of different cultural backgrounds every day at Julliard. The Graham technique classes were taught by members of the Martha Graham Company, including notable black dance artists Donald McKayle and Mary Hinkson. Pina took classes from Mexican-born José Limón. In Antony Tudor's Little Improvisations, she understudied for Mercedes Ellington, the granddaughter of Duke Ellington, and, in A Choreographer Comments, she danced alongside Japanese-born Chieko Kikuchi (no relation to Yuriko Kikuchi).
When talking about New York, she said, "The people, the city, all embody something of now to me, where everything is mixed together, whether's that's nationalities or interests or fashion, everything is just side by side," she said in Pina Bausch: dance, dance, otherwise we are lost (2018), by Marion Meyers, according to Pina Bausch at Julliard and in NYC.
When she reshaped Wuppertal Ballet into Tanztheater Wuppertal in 1973, she started building an international company. By the 1990s, the dancers hailed from every continent, except Antarctica, according to Pina Bausch Finds a Ray of Light (November 2004), Dance Magazine, reported Pina Bausch at Julliard and in NYC.
Also, The Guardian (January 26, 2002) described her company members as having "an astounding range of physiques, types, sizes, personalities, ages. It's immediately obvious that this is not a typical troupe of flawless ballet drones."
Graham technique at Julliard. From left: William Louther, Martha Hill, the first director of Julliard's Dance Division in 1951, 46 years after the school's founding, Donald McKayle (teaching the class), Dudley Williams, Mabel Robinson, and Pina Bausch (Photographer unknown, Courtesy of Julliard Archives). All pictured became key figures in dance.
Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto
After the year-end concert at Julliard in the spring of 1960, Pina headed for the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, as a dancer with Paul Taylor. That summer, Gian Carlo Menotti conceived a new, short-lived company called New American Ballets, which would perform both ballet and modern dance works, according to Pina Bausch at Julliard and in NYC.
The choreographers were Donald McKayle, Karel Shook (later to co-found Dance Theatre of Harlem with Arthur Mitchell), Herbert Ross and Taylor. The company included future luminaries Mabel Robinson, Dudley Williams, and Graham dancer Akiko Kanda (all of whom had been Pina's classmates at Julliard) as well as Mary Hinkson, and Arthur Mitchell, who was asked by Menotti to organize the group.
Paul Taylor was making a duet for Bausch and Dan Wagoner, on leave from the Graham company, called Tablet. According to Pina Bausch at Julliard and in NYC, in his autobiography, Taylor wrote that he was inspired by Bausch:
"Pina . . . one of the thinnest human beings I've ever seen . . . is able to streak across the floor sharply, though a bit unevenly, like calipers across paper. She's also able to move slower than a clogged up bicycle pump; I love watching her and suddenly have an idea for the duet."
Donald McKayle, in Transcending Boundaries: My Dancing Life (2002) had a vivid memory of Bausch in Tablet, according to Pina Bausch at Julliard and in NYC:
"Paul took advantage of Pina's wafer-thin physique, clothing her in a white body suit and painting her face white, except for a circle of orange encasing her eyes, nose and lips. . . . When the lights came up on the motionless Bausch, there was a gasp from the audience and a woman's voice spoke aloud, "Guarda la morte!" (Look at death!)".
Despite the ghostly look, the public adored Pina, along with the other two female leads of the company: Mary Hinkson and Akiko Kanda. McKayle wrote that the three "were suddenly stars".
Torn Between Staying or Going Home
After two years in New York, in 1961, Jooss invited Bausch to join his reconstituted Jooss Ballet.
"At the time, I was wrestling with a great conflict between the desire to stay on in America and the dream of being allowed to dance in Jooss's choreographies. I wanted both of these things so much. I loved it so much being in New York; everything was going wonderfully well for me. However, I returned to Essen after all," said Pina Bausch, in What moves me (2007), on the occasion of receiving the Kyoto Prize.
So, Bausch went back home to work with her mentor. She danced with the Folkwang Ballet (later called Folkwang Tanzstudio) as a soloist and assistant to Jooss.
"Extraordinarily Thin"
However, there is another story about her return to Germany.
In the autumn of 1961, she practically moved into a loft in New York with Feuer and Sanasardo, and it quickly became apparent that she was not well, reported The Guardian (January 26, 2002).
"Pina became extraordinarily thin," said Sansarado. "We were very concerned because we had great difficulty getting her to eat. It was confusing because we were all young and Pina didn't speak very much English. We were not sure if something was bothering her. And when we tried to talk to her, she would just say, 'No. I'm fine, I'm fine.' "
In the end, they called on the help of Lucas Hoving. He organized Bausch's safe passage back to Germany.
She was well enough to dance, but she was still uncomfortably thin. Jean Cebron, a teacher at Folkwang, said that Jooss gave her an ultimatum: put on some weight or get out of the company. She put on some weight.
In her Kyoto speech many years later, she talked about her eating habits as a way to stretch the one-year grant over two years.
"That meant saving! I walked everywhere. For a time, I lived almost exclusively on ice cream -- nut-flavored ice cream. Accompanying this was a bottle of buttermilk, a lot of lemon that was lying around on the tables and a large amount of sugar. All mixed together, it tasted very good. It was a wonderful main meal.
"However, I liked getting thinner. I paid more and more attention to the voice within me. To my movement. I had the feeling that something was becoming purer and purer, deeper and
deeper. Perhaps, it was all in the mind. But a transformation was taking place. Not only with my body."
"I Never Thought of Being a Choreographer."
Once a healthy weight, Bausch established herself as one of the principal soloists while assisting Jooss. On Jooss's departure, at the end of the decade, she took over as artistic director, beginning to choreograph pieces of her own, reported The Guardian (January 26, 2002).
"I never thought of being a choreographer. The only reason I made those pieces was because I wanted to express myself differently and I wanted to dance. . . .
"I didn't want to imitate anybody. Any movement I knew, I didn't want to use."
In 1973, Bausch was offered the post of director of the Ballett der Wupperthaler Buhnen. At first, she was reluctant. Wuppertal was gray and provincial and its people renowned for their conservative tastes. However, she was seduced by the potential to build up her own company with assurances of artistic freedom.
In her Kyoto Prize acceptance speech (2007), she said:
"I have traveled a long way. Together with my dancers, and with all the people I am working with, I have had so much luck in my life, above all, through our journeys and friendships. This I wish for a lot of people: that they should get to know other cultures and ways of life. There would be much less fear of others, and one could see much clearer what joins us. I think it is important to know the world one lives in."
Where audiences once walked out of her company's performances, many of the public in Wuppertal -- and in London, Vancouver, Dublin, Jacob's Pillow, in Massachusetts, and elsewhere -- annually dance the section in Nelken, where performers form a procession and signify the four seasons with four concise movements. However, in Wuppertal, in September, the line began at the historical base of Tanztheater Wuppertal, and it ended at the former municipal theater, which is under construction for the Pina Bausch Center, physically and artistically linking the past, present and future of the artist's creative legacy.
Perhaps the Nelken Line will be done in Lisbon.
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