‘Pina and Beyond’: Goethe-Institut film series explores German modern dance

(Courtesy of Neue Road Movies GmbH/ ) - Image from the film ‘Pina,’ focused on the life of Pina Bausch.

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By Sarah Kaufman,
Sarah Kaufman
Jun 22, 2012 02:44 PM EDT
The Washington Post
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“It’s no fun, creating a piece,” says Pina Bausch, her sunken eyes and careworn face, veiled in cigarette smoke, testifying to the stress she’s describing.

“For years I’ve been thinking, ‘Never again.’ ”

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(Anonymous/AP) - Mary Wigman, choreographer, and innovator of German modern dance, performs in Berlin in Dec 4,1934. Wigman is known for creating ‘the new German dance’ and ‘Orchestra of Movement.’

(Courtesy IFC Films) - Movie still from the film ‘Pina’ by Wim Wenders.

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The world-renowned German choreographer made those statements in Anne Linsel’s brief, poignant 2006 documentary, “Pina Bausch.” The film takes us inside Bausch’s work and offers a rare chance to hear the camera-shy artist speak, just three years before her death, and it will be shown as part of the Goethe-Institut’s series “Pina and Beyond: Contemporary Dance in Film.” The series, the first of its kind at the District’s German cultural center, begins Monday and runs through July 16.

Watching the Bausch documentary, along with the series’s other films about dance pioneer Mary Wigman and one of today’s leaders, Sasha Waltz, you can see why Bausch felt such melancholy.

Dancing for joy is not the German forte.

Serious subjects — emotional distress, the dehumanization of the body, the dehumanization of society — dominate these films. To be sure, there are also light, or light-ish, moments, but they are invariably complicated. For instance: A young woman dressed as a Teutonic Playboy bunny — wearing black rabbit ears, a black bustier and heels — scrambles down a hillside in a 1990 film that Bausch conceived and directed, “Die Klage der Kaiserin” (“The Complaint of an Empress”).

She’s kind of cute — but in a moment the gloom sets in, and the absurdity. The bustier is a few sizes too small for this long-waisted woman, so she’s falling out of the top and her tugging won’t fix it, and the hillside is really a muddy wasteland, so her pumps are sinking into glop that splats all over her when she stumbles, which is often.

She’s panting from trying to run in this sucking porridge, and she is plainly fearful, but of what? The inner demons, failed intimacy and apparent psychosis that plague the other characters we meet throughout the film?

Waltz’s “Koerper” (“Bodies”) trilogy, created and filmed between 2000 and 2002, is full of wit, but it’s dark and sharp as concertina wire. In the first section, also titled “Koerper,” one dancer smears paint in circles across her bare chest. Another slaps a price tag over the paint and announces in the bark of an auctioneer: “One hundred thousand deutsche marks. Art.”

Skin is generously on view in this 70-minute film, but the nearly naked bodies are rarely, if ever, in seductive poses. Their bare skin is an object, a prop, as dancers drag one another around by gripping fistfuls of flesh. Slim as these performers are, they find enough loose skin to pinch into pockets for bizarre illusions. Through some sleight of hand and folded skin, the dancers pull what appear to be red, rubbery veins and wiggling organs out of their own bodies.

These scenes are not funny, but they’re unusually clever. Throughout the film series you’ll see some of the most peculiar images you’re liable to find in a dance performance. A few of the other moments in Waltz’s work are so risque, unnerving and even brutal, I decided to stop watching them on my office computer, for fear that a colleague might accuse me of creating a hostile work environment.