Pina Bausch

Imagine a huge stage covered with fresh carnations. Or dead leaves. Or giant cactuses. Or ankle-deep dirt. A stage where women are slammed, face-first, into glass partitions, are stalked by a giant crocodile--and always live in fear of their men. German choreographer Pina Bausch energized a whole generation of European artists and audiences with these and similar visions, becoming a central figure in the new Expressionism. Ever since Bausch, 55, opened the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival with a series of her uncompromisingly bitter feminist dance-dramas, her local admirers have longed for her return.

I am traveling around the country these days trying to get people to buy my new book. During the day, I fly to distant cities, my nerves frayed by turbulence, trying to catch a glimpse of the pilot to see if he is drunk or on cocaine. At night, I go onstage, doing the figurative dance we writers do, sharing myself and my stories while trying to sell a few books. But a strange thing has happened on this book tour. I have found myself not just dancing in that figurative sense; I am also dancing literally, like Zorba, or Gregory Hines, or Granny Clampett.

Pina Bausch, a German choreographer and dancer whose innovative work transcended traditional barriers between dance and theater, died Tuesday in Wuppertal, Germany, five days after being diagnosed with cancer. She was 68. Bausch was the artistic director of Tanztheater Wuppertal :// www.pina-bausch.de/& ;ei=aYpKSq7uIZS6NuOf7JYB&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=1&ct=result&prev=/s earch%3Fq%3DTanztheater%2BWuppertal%2Bofficial%2Bwebsite%26hl%3Den%26 rlz%3D1T4ADBF_enUS260US260"> www.pina-bausch.

Pina Available on VOD April 6 Prior to the death of legendary choreographer Pina Bausch in 2009, she and director Wim Wenders had been collaborating on a performance film, which Wenders then re-fashioned into "Pina," as a sort of testimonial. Working in collaboration with Bausch's troupe, Wenders breaks up lengthy dance routines with interviews about the choreographer's spiritual, aesthetic and personal influence on her employees. These interviews are understandably sappy, and they prevent the dances from developing as they would onstage; but Bausch's work is still stunning, with staging that involves the addition of obstacles such as dirt, rocks and water to the dance floor.

At the beginning of their stint at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last week, Pina Bausch and her brave ensemble of dancing actors offered an Angst orgy involving, among other elements, a watery stage and a potentially friendly hippopotamus. Friday night the Tanztheater virtuosos of Wuppertal turned to something more conservative--for them. It is called "Kontakthof." The title can mean a number of things: Meeting Place or Contact Court seem most apt.

Avant-garde chic definitely is "in." So is glitzy ennui. Therefore, the "innest" place in Fun City on Tuesday night had to be the sweet old Academy of Music in Brooklyn. It used to be a rather stuffy opera house and concert hall that tried, in an admirable but impotent way, to emulate the Met and Carnegie Hall. Now it is a haven for all that is daring and experimental and difficult and different and obscure and foreign and glamorous. The current attraction at 30 Lafayette Ave.

What we bring to and take away from a foreign environment has been the subject of six Neo-Expressionist dance-theater travelogues by German choreographer and company leader Pina Bausch. The most recent -- her typically cornucopian, plotless Japanese extravaganza, "Ten Chi" -- received its North American premiere Thursday in Royce Hall as part of the UCLA Live series.

Only the blooming chestnut trees proclaimed that spring nominally had arrived in this gray and fog-shrouded city 25 miles east of Cologne. But the dreary weather did not dampen the enthusiasm of Pina Bausch's Saturday night audience who, judging from the license plates in the parking lot of the Wuppertal Schauspielhaus, had arrived from all over Germany, as well as Holland, Belgium, France and Luxembourg.

Like the great Pelé, Pina was a one-name person, a groundbreaking dancer and choreographer with accomplishments so one-of-a-kind that to her admirers no surname was necessary. But whether you're familiar with Pina Bausch's work or not, the new film "Pina" is a knockout. Directed by the veteran Wim Wenders, "Pina" is the most exciting use of 3-D since "Avatar. " The performance documentary takes us inside Bausch's extraordinary dances in a way that nothing else could. In fact, though Bausch and Wenders had been talking about a filmed collaboration for 20 years, it wasn't until the director saw the three-dimensional performance footage in the concert film "U2 3D" that he felt he had found the key to bringing Bausch's work to the screen and doing it any kind of justice.

It's 3:45 a.m., and German choreographer Pina Bausch, one of the most influential figures of the international avant-garde, is standing in front of an all-but-deserted Union Station. Transfixed by the building's Spanish Deco facade, she stares at a pair of stately palm trees that reach up toward the moonlit sky. It's a distinctly Southern California image, or so it seems--for nothing is really archetypal in a place so marked by diversity--and that is what she has come here to find.

3-D or not 3-D: That is the question. Or at least it's one question ricocheting through the dance community in the aftermath of "Pina," Wim Wenders' recent 3-D film tribute to the late innovative German choreographer and Tanztheater Wuppertal company leader Pina Bausch. In one sense, it's a nonissue: Every classic dance film ever made would have infinitely more power with real dimensional space around, behind, above and in front of the dancers. Think about Fred Astaire gunning down the corps in "Top Hat" or the fantastic colors and shapes in "The Red Shoes" ballet or Baryshnikov defining male classicism for the whole century in "The Turning Point" or Patrick Swayze having the time of his life in "Dirty Dancing" or the Merce Cunningham company making modernism irresistibly seductive in "Points in Space.

Like the great Pelé, Pina was a one-name person, a groundbreaking dancer and choreographer with accomplishments so one-of-a-kind that to her admirers no surname was necessary. But whether you're familiar with Pina Bausch's work or not, the new film "Pina" is a knockout. Directed by the veteran Wim Wenders, "Pina" is the most exciting use of 3-D since "Avatar. " The performance documentary takes us inside Bausch's extraordinary dances in a way that nothing else could. In fact, though Bausch and Wenders had been talking about a filmed collaboration for 20 years, it wasn't until the director saw the three-dimensional performance footage in the concert film "U2 3D" that he felt he had found the key to bringing Bausch's work to the screen and doing it any kind of justice.

Twenty-five years ago, Wim Wenders' girlfriend dragged him to a performance by Tanztheater Wuppertal, the modern dance company led by Pina Bausch. "I tried to avoid it," the German filmmaker recalled. "Dance was not for me.... Finally I went along, expecting a boring evening. " It turned out to be a life-changing experience. "I have seen other dance since then, but I've never been touched by anything as much as Pina's work," Wenders said in a recent interview in West Hollywood. He eventually struck up a friendship with the choreographer, and together they planned to make a documentary about the company.

A painting, according to Marcel Duchamp, dies after 50 years. Dances are rarely so lucky. The West Coast premiere of Pina Bausch's "Danzón," which Tanztheater Wuppertal brought to UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Auditorium over the weekend, was made in 1995. It felt marvelously alive Saturday. Yet "Danzón" lives on borrowed time. The company is now halfway through its third year without its founder. Unlike Merce Cunningham who decreed that his dance company would disband two seasons after his death, Bausch made no such plans for Tanztheater Wuppertal, which she began in 1973.

As part of its citywide festival bringing dance film to Los Angeles every June, Dance Camera West presents "Weekend at the Hammer," three programs over two days. On Saturday afternoon, two films tell the story of Pina Bausch, a modern dance phenomenon. Saturday evening's documentary, "Dancing Dreams," explores what happens when 40 teens rehearse a performance of Bausch's piece "Kontakthof (Comfort Zone)." On Sunday, the festival will switch gears, showing six award-winning short films of dance.

It was not without trepidation in 1984 that I first met Pina Bausch, the revolutionary German choreographer who died unexpectedly Monday at 68. Her Wuppertal Tanztheater was about to make its U.S. debut by opening the Olympic Arts Festival at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, and I asked for an interview. She was unknown in the States, and what I had gathered from a not always admiring European press was that she was angry, violent, feminist, sexually intimidating, emasculating. She said she would speak with me under two conditions: that I travel to Wuppertal, Germany, and that I first see her work.

Pina Bausch: In the Fall Arts Preview last Sunday, choreographer Pina Bausch's name was misspelled as Nina in the "Must-See List" of Leonard Nimoy. Also, a preview item said the Los Angeles Master Chorale would be presenting "The City of Dis" by Louis Andriessen on Oct. 14. The performance will be Nov. 18.

German choreographer Pina Bausch, artistic director of the Tanztheater Wuppertal, has been chosen as one of three winners of the 23rd annual Kyoto Prizes for Lifetime Achievement, awarded by the Inamori Foundation in Japan. Bausch, 66, along with University of Tokyo chemist Hiroo Inokuchi, 80, and Caltech emeritus professor Hiroo Kanamori, 70, will receive a gold medal and 50 million yen (approximately $410,000) during ceremonies Nov. 9 in Kyoto.

Pina Bausch, a German choreographer and dancer whose innovative work transcended traditional barriers between dance and theater, died Tuesday in Wuppertal, Germany, five days after being diagnosed with cancer. She was 68. Bausch was the artistic director of Tanztheater Wuppertal :// www.pina-bausch.de/& ;ei=aYpKSq7uIZS6NuOf7JYB&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=1&ct=result&prev=/s earch%3Fq%3DTanztheater%2BWuppertal%2Bofficial%2Bwebsite%26hl%3Den%26 rlz%3D1T4ADBF_enUS260US260"> www.pina-bausch.

What we bring to and take away from a foreign environment has been the subject of six Neo-Expressionist dance-theater travelogues by German choreographer and company leader Pina Bausch. The most recent -- her typically cornucopian, plotless Japanese extravaganza, "Ten Chi" -- received its North American premiere Thursday in Royce Hall as part of the UCLA Live series.