In Pina Bausch’s choreo-stagings, outside and indoors trade places; in Wim Wenders’ new 3-D documentary, Pina, we see in the crispest of photographic detail her deep-pile stage floors, where dancers are forced to rise in relevé in the loam. Her troupe braved elements that were punishing, even if simulated. We watch them get soiled in Le Sacre du Printemps, drench themselves in Vollmond.
Wenders conceived the film, which opens in New York Dec. 23, with Bausch herself before her unexpected death in 2009. It sometimes transports her work to settings around the company’s home base of Wuppertal, Germany, and in the surrounding countryside, so that the excerpts become teasing exercises in faux site-specificity. The tactics of 3-D also provide a singular reconfiguration: theatrical downstage meets cinematic foreground as the lower margin of the frame protrudes into our visual field.
Pina gives us lengthy and representative samplings of her “dance-theater” pieces, but only by the most oblique means does the movie attempt to provide an interpretative handle on her life or work. That is its prerogative as an exponent of a particular documentarian approach. Perhaps that minimalist framework functions as liberation; one is certainly free to fill in the missing antecedents and context. We note that one of Bausch’s favorite gambits is tasking her dancers with stripping down façades of persona, like a choreographically “real-life” parallel to an acting improvisation class. For me, much of the impetus behind Bausch’s work also involves an Antony Tudor connection. She was a student of Tudor at Juilliard and danced for him at the Metropolitan Opera. Tudor was interested in people whose desires were frustrated by societal and psychological obstructions. “What are you longing for?” Bausch would ask her dancers.
When it comes to the “character dance” repertory—those people who arrive at the prince’s ballroom or the rajah’s palace to dance stylized versions of national or gypsy or aristocratic dance, not wearing ballet slippers or pointe shoes—a significant challenge is posed to the American dancer, since the character discipline has only rarely been taught in our ballet schools. But in recent years that has been changing: When the studio company of Gelsey Kirkland’s Academy of Classical Ballet performs at the Symphony Space Dec. 16, examples of different character genres will be staged by someone in a position to know: Slava (Yaroslav) Fadeyev, who teaches both character and classical at Kirkland’s Academy. Fadeyev graduated in 1989 from the state ballet school in St. Petersburg, where study of character dance is mandatory. He then danced both character and classical roles at the Kirov Ballet (where, as in most of the state-subsidized companies of Europe and Russia, entire rosters may be dedicated to character alone). In 1995, he emigrated to join the Hartford Ballet.
Character work is usually done with the legs turned in, rather than turned out in classical imperative. Character dance classes, Fadeyev’s included, start with a special warm-up at the barre. As distinctly different as they are, ballet and character are mutually complementary and essential ingredients in the 19th-century “grand ballet” mix. Indeed, in ballets like Raymonda or Don Quixote, the lead balletic roles require fluency in steps that are shaded by character flavor. In addition, as Fadeyev confirms, the intricate co-ordinations of character work actually help the student in her pursuit of ballet technique as well.
The Kirkland Academy program is self-explanatory: “Mostly Bournonville and Petipa.” Stagers include former Royal Danish Ballet Karina Elver, Alexandra Lawler, as well as Kirkland herself and her husband and the co-artistic director of the Academy, Misha Chernov.
Read more by Joel Lobenthal at Lobenthal.com.
