Thoughts on Pina

[Jill Hockett]

This morning, Pina Bausch died.

Losing an artistic idol is such a strange feeling. While of course I'd never met her, her work affected me deeply and profoundly, inspired me to create work of my own. I can't help but feel like there's a big gaping hole in the dance universe in her absence.

I saw For the Children of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow at BAM in 2004 blindly on a class field trip. Her use of humor, dance and non-dance that still ultimately felt like dance, nostalgia, music, and the interaction between her dancers completely dazzled me; and after 2 1/2 hours, I wished that the piece wouldn't end yet. It was all of the elements of dance that I loved and none that I hated, and the same for theater, fused together. It was what I always wished theater and dance could be, but didn't really realize was possible.

I've never been more inspired or more excited about being a dancer by seeing any other performance. The way her dancers take the personal into the universal while still having so much personality made her work both accessible and endlessly interesting.

Her work and her attitude had a certain coyness- with her subversion of audience expectations to her almost all out refusal to discuss her work. I found this incredibly appealing- there was something bizarrely satisfying about work that attempted to not satisfy the audience. Most of the dance I had seen up to that point was purely abstract or emotionally straightforward, and it was so incredibly refreshing to see something so playful and emotionally nuanced. And yet, there was a certain simple aspect to her work- it simply WAS, rather than a dramatic narrative that the audience needed to translate for themselves. If a dancer wanted to tell a story, he or she would tell a story- not dance the story with grand gestures to communicate, like ballet. It was narrative in a way that felt like dance SHOULD be narrative- and Pina Bausch was just the first person to figure that out.

I could go on and on (which believe me, I could, since I wrote my senior thesis on her work)- those incredible sets! those beautiful dresses! Her biting social critique! But instead I will simply say that not only the dance world, but theater, film, art, music, cultural studies, etc, are far richer fields because of her work. Pina Bausch, you will be sorely missed.

[kristina jones]

I am so sad that Pina has died: what an inspiration! She was always such an innovator~ To her we owe the presence of long hair, high heels, and furious women...