ALMOST NOT A DOCUMENTARY
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Pina: Dance, Dance, Otherwise We Are Lost. By Wim Wenders. Berlin: Neue Road Movies, 2011.
In Pina, his Oscar Award-nominated documentary film honoring and remembering the German choreographer Pina Bausch (1940–2009), Wim Wenders introduces us to many dancers from her company, Tanztheater Wuppertal. Very few of them have a name, at least in the film. Is this deliberate omission a small detail, soon forgotten by a movie audience? No—and yes. Omissions, after all, are hard to remember, no matter what. Yet in Wenders’s subtly, boldly interpretive vision of her dance, namelessness is next to godliness, and so his decision, on the whole, not to name remains significant. Namelessness in Pina gives dancers the freedom just to move at large in an open, shifting, ideal space as unidentified and unbeholden universalists. We, too, are unbeholden, it would seem: we can just watch and feel, untroubled by the clinging action of stray secondary facts, like names, for none clings. In their place, the theatrically aggressive evanescence of Bauschian motion, as seen on camera, gives the voicelessness of dance and dancers a voice. I can’t transcribe it. I can’t translate it. What I can do is try to dance beside it.
But first, consider this. The critic Daniel Larlham once set himself a curious task: taking a survey of Bausch’s movement vocabulary. As he reports, in part, “The head is tossed, rolled, flung about; the hair falls over the face, is batted, whisked, thrown aside. The palms and backs of the hands seek each other out; the elbows and wrists twine and cradle each other. The arms reach tentatively, or forcefully thrust themselves skyward. The whole body whirls and twists through space with fluid angularity.” As he emphasizes, “The hands again and again find their way to the face, caressing, cradling, and sometimes throwing it into motion.” He’s right. The urgent emotional impact of all that: dancers make and remake themselves in a graphically, violently physical sense, as if desperate to find a way to love some version of themselves, not only for what they are but for what they might become.
What did her kind of motion mean to Bausch? “Basically one wants to say something which cannot be said,” she remarked, “so what one has done is to make a poem where one can feel what is meant.” Feeling is better than knowing, it would seem. As for how to “make a poem” of her chosen movement, she insisted, “Almost anything can be dance.” Speaking with a more definite defiance about her initial impulse to choreograph, she said, “I didn’t want to imitate anybody [ . . . ] Any movement I knew, I didn’t want to use.” She confessed, “I loved to dance because I was scared to speak. When I was moving, I could feel. . . .” Unlike many of the foundational pioneers of twentieth-century modern dance, Bausch always depended on dancers who were, like herself, well and classically trained, yet she never depended on a nascent or a named technique of her own devising. She declared, “I am not so much interested in how people move as in what moves them.”
That fine and strongly drawn distinction becomes visible—indeed, all but touchable—on film, although, happily, what moves “them” stays mostly unexplained. During press interviews about Pina, Wenders has acknowledged observing “two ground rules” in the making of the film: “One was no biography [of Bausch]. The second ground rule was no interviews [with Tanztheater company members].” Virtually no narration occurs in his movie at any time; in that sense, it’s an anti-documentary. Then how do we know that what moves the dancers matters so? We know because we feel it in the pugnaciously surreal images molded in turn by Bausch and Wenders. We feel it throughout the anthology arranged by him of episodes and excerpts from Bausch dances, making up a single dance of hers (and his) with sensitivity and strangeness. We feel it also in his respectful close-up solo portraits, mainly silent and almost motionless, of the dancers. His camera dances Bausch, with a mercurially dynamic perseverance.
His camera also dances Bausch with a difference. Typically her forty works were staged at opera houses. His film takes them out of doors, as well as in, to a noisily trafficked city street corner, to an eerily vacant factory yard; to a barren cliff, a rural river, and an airborne tram, among others. Explained Wenders when interviewed by a journalist, “Because we didn’t have a stage or set at our disposal . . . I started to think of shooting . . . in the city of Wuppertal.”
Wenders adjusts or alters Bausch’s work in other basic respects, as well. As seen from good seats or from bad, her dances look monumental in their scale and feel monumental in their length. Bausch’s early piece, Orpheus and Eurydice, performed powerfully by the Paris Opera Ballet at the David H. Koch Theater in New York in July of 2012, certainly felt monumental to me. By contrast, the Wenders film intersperses self-contained bits from markedly varied and far longer dances than his own audiences will view on screen. Variously bleak, feisty, frayed, clownish, ethereal, visceral, ironic, and agonized, or sometimes most of those at once, her dances dance in his montage. In the movie their intensity only increases over time, because Wenders erases objective distance along with balcony seats. His 3-D technology puts us where the dancers are. Their subjectivity is ours to share. What moves them also moves us, even though I still cannot say just what it is. At the very least, what moves us is, I suppose, the intemperate longing to search for what we feel strongly but cannot name.
For some followers of the dance, being thrust into a dancer’s midst, to feel too much, might cause an uncanny rumpus, as uncomfortable as it is unwelcome. For me, though, being thrust there is a revelation, because I’m reminded that even as a spectator I must imagine something: step into it, sort of; begin dancing; begin feeling. And I want to. Why doesn’t everyone? The ten urbanely international Bausch pieces restaged by Tanztheater Wuppertal in the London 2012 Festival to mark the summer Olympics were received skeptically by an insular British press corps, although their sold-out performances gave twenty-six thousand people from around the world the chance to see them over a five-week period. The Paris Opera Ballet’s Orpheus and Eurydice in New York was panned by Alastair Macauley in The New York Times and by Robert Gottlieb in The New York Observer, partly because Bausch rewrote the story by restoring its originally tragic classic ending—which Christoph Willibald Gluck, composer of the production, had drastically rewritten in 1762 to reunite the doomed lovers in a culminating joy. Is there an irony in the house?
Some of us want to be asked to imagine. At the Washington, DC, opening of Pina early in 2012, I noticed several moviegoers in their fifties and sixties gathered, jubilating, in the foyer after the film. The excitement spoken by their bodies told me even better than their words how they felt: ready, all too ready, to move once again—whatever that meant. New York City audiences hungry to see and re-see Pina kept it playing for nine months in Manhattan theaters, a distinct rarity. Yet in her lifetime, although gradually saluted and adored, Bausch was also frequently reviled. Her uncompromising postmodern version of theatrical expressionism had to clamber over obstacles to reach Americans, and Germans, too. At first, her dances didn’t travel well to Brooklyn. (Her last piece, . . . como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si . . . , a.k.a. Like Moss on Stone, came with Tanztheater Wuppertal to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October of 2012. This too was panned by Robert Gottlieb, although he left at the intermission, after seeing only one half of the piece.)
Memorably, Bausch was attacked at a 1985 symposium in New York concerning contemporary German and American dance, when the distinguished panelists clashed with a beguiling bitterness uncommon even in New York City. New York Times chief dance critic Anna Kisselgoff that day proclaimed the work of Bausch, damningly, as but “a form of distortion.” American choreographer Nina Weiner complained of the Bausch aesthetic, with a notable lack of political nicety, “That kind of angst emotion is not something I want to participate in.” German choreographer and panelist Reinhild Hoffman demanded in response, “Why do so many people here in America try not to be confronted in their art with human problems?” This was no ordinary cross cultural contretemps.
In a postmortem article about the symposium, Susan Allene Manning condemned both the American and the German panelists as “chauvinistic” for the problematic unacknowledged nationalism inherent in some of their aesthetic arguments. For Manning, the best next step to take in exiting from the fracas was this one: to concede the neutral fact that Bausch’s work offers “a peculiar catharsis, for the experience of the work leaves spectators drained, but with no sense of resolution.” Could American dance-goers learn to cope with that? Six weeks after the symposium, Kisselgoff herself suggested much the same, although she expressed it differently; for her, expressionists like Bausch “ask the viewer to ‘complete’ the work of art.” Yet the dance establishment here has sometimes seemed less than willing. Even the late Alan Kriegsman, at that time the esteemed Pulitzer Prize–winning dance critic of the Washington Post, rebuked Bausch, with a xenophobic swagger, for her “Teutonic attraction to the powers of darkness.”
Circa 1985, certain influential Americans seemed to be expecting from Bauschian expressionism, however paradoxically, a return to formalism like that produced in America, which they understood as the craft of making steps, not the brave abandon (Bausch’s) of taking steps into the unknown or the unknowable. Stick to whatever it is you think you understand, and let us see it by your design, they implied. Don’t feel it too much—if you can. For we can’t feel it as you do, they seemed to warn.
If one follows those instructions, then generations of important choreography arrive: Balanchine’s, Graham’s, Cunningham’s. Each of the choreographers just mentioned invented a technique and a personally inflected lexicon of form in movement. Without that storehouse of deposited artistic signatures and works for hire, there would be no Balanchine, et al. For we know him only when we see the steps that he composed.
Bausch reversed those procedures. When making a dance, she always floundered first, on purpose and with purpose, sometimes for months, among her feelings and—equally important—among the feelings and the memories of her polyglot company of multinational dancers. She took an inventory of those feelings. Most of her mature works were summoned into being only after Bausch plied her dancers with numerous questions, stirring them to improvise a danced response to the questions, which included, “How did you, as children, imagine love?” and “Tell me, describe to me: When you cry, how do you cry?” Bausch constructed her pieces as exactingly edited anthologies of their danced replies to her queries, as the soul-searching of “dark” and “Teutonic” dancers assembled from six or seven continents.
In a 1994 interview, Tanztheater Wuppertal dancer Ruth Amarante recounted of Bausch and her approach to choreographing, “She has a list that can go from 100 to 200 questions during a work. That is divided into two or three months.” (Bausch has commented, “Sometimes I think I’m asking the wrong questions all the time.”) Amarante remembered, “She asks one question, or even two questions in a period of two hours, four questions in a period of four hours. It isn’t lots of questions, and she gives a good amount of time for the people [i.e., dancers] to improvise.” In a 1987 interview, Bausch observed, “It’s not that easy to simply answer a question.” She elaborated, “Sometimes it takes a long time before someone can get beyond all of these clichés and. . . answer from themselves.”
As Lutz Forster, a member of her company, put it, “Pina always starts with a lot of movement, and during the process she finds out things that are much stronger.”
Why put feeling first, indefatigably sought, and not the highly conscious visible craft of choreography, rendered, refined, and decided? Maybe it was because, according to Wim Wenders, Germany “has its own history of images that lie. It is probably the first country in modern history that has been seduced in such a horrible fashion by false images and lies, so much so that . . . we have developed a deep mistrust of our own images and stories,” he said during a speech delivered in Munich in 1991. Both he and Bausch knew postwar Germany firsthand as children. For them to get under the surface of a morally debased recent history, or to exorcise the lie of it, required energy, skill, and foolhardiness if they were to reckon ably with the lie, yet not be undone or destroyed by it—or by its stories.
One of his critics, Roger Bromley, regards Wenders as an avatar of “redemptive storytelling.” Wenders has described his dilemma as a Neuer Deutscher Film auteur in this way: “Stories are impossible, but it is impossible to live without them.” His aversion to story was explained in further detail, with a methodical precision, at a conference on narrative held in Italy in 1982. “I reject stories completely,” he revealed, “because for me they create lies, and nothing but lies, and the biggest lie is that they create a coherence where none exists.” Nevertheless, Wenders remarked, “[W]e need these lies so much that it is totally pointless to fight them and to put together a sequence of images without a story—without the lie of a story.”
In this respect and others, he and Bausch seem kindred spirits: they are not willing narrators.
Even so, his documentary film made “for Pina” after Bausch’s sudden and unexpected death in 2009 from cancer gives us a version of Bausch that mostly doesn’t ravage the senses, moral or otherwise, in the Bauschian manner. Why? Perhaps because, while restoring her to life by means of filming portions of her dances, Wenders puts her to rest with an abiding clarity, and with a tranquility not typical of Bausch. This is his answer to her, but not her answer to herself. The unearthly earthiness of 3-D technology has more than a little to do with bringing that about.
Much has been made, by Wenders and his critics, of the intimacy fomented by 3-D. During interviews with reporters about the movie, he’s claimed that only 3-D made his work possible after he abandoned the Bausch project for a period of years. But, at least for me, the most telling transformation offered by 3-D isn’t that it helps us to feel at one with the dancers, although it certainly does. Instead, the novelty of 3-D is its potential ability, especially in the hands of Wenders, to dispel the faux and fabricated aura of incessant factuality that besets most documentary films. Here the aura has receded, giving Pina the right to live on, more honestly and fully, as an ideal fiction, bathed in a buoyant clarity. As Wenders has remarked, “[A]ctually, it’s almost not a documentary because choreography is fiction.”
Still, the clarity bestowed on Pina by 3-D presents a paradox. For finally, whatever in a dance may have felt most real to Bausch or her dancers cannot be perceived physically by us, only suggested symbolically by the choreographer’s fiercely articulated series of gestural engagements, which endeavor to express the inexpressible. We can receive but the tidings. To those we respond, sometimes viscerally, as if struck or shocked senseless. Regardless, the clarity of 3-D confers a bracing irony. Our minds cannot miss the irony while our eyes, or our souls, enjoy the totality of the fictional truth before us, and the beauty of its truth.
The irony of Wenders’s clarity preserves, for the moment or much longer, in the memory, one aspect in particular of Bausch’s dances esteemed by the choreographer: their depth and range of definitional detail. As Wenders offers Bausch’s Tanztheater to us, each detail worthy of the name in a dance persists like a soloist itself, dancing attendance upon the dancers who might have been expected just to dance it.
Her dances typically dispatch fingers, palms, wrists, and fluttery sinew of the arms to palpate their owner, the dancer, exploring and discovering the dancer’s body with an ecstatic alacrity, as if it were the spirit. Maybe for some it is. In a bit of Bausch choreography from Wenders, the hands of a petite male dancer dance attendance on his chest, where his heart is. Tapping, beating, stroking, flying, his fingers are also praying in distress, as much as anything else. Soon he hurls himself at a very tall man in an apparent love duet. But to say so curtails and compromises the range of meaning implied. Better say instead that this man’s heart seems to be beating, not inside him, but outside, in the image created by his hands as they dance attendance upon him, in joy or suffering. We feel it, if we can. The fleeting imagery of fingers, a mere detail, tells us that he is himself a beating heart. The dance produces this idea, this metonymy, and its intensely affecting emotional reality.
The hands of Bausch herself appear briefly in archival footage included in the film. By comparison with her long, slender arms, the hands look enormous, like those of men painted by Max Beckmann, yet they also convey the sadness, the anguished attenuation, and the exquisite wingspan of hands portrayed by El Greco. Bausch’s lyric gravity seems concentrated in her hands. They suggest the sobriety of being made and unmade, without pause, by their own making—by themselves.
Another flurry of the fingers from a Bausch dance in Wenders occurs when a huddle of elegantly suited men surround a woman in gauzy pink evening dress. Eyes closed, she is both worshipped and assaulted by male hands. She submits while they press her ankles, grasp her wrists, nudge her stomach without cease, persist to test her nose. Although there’s nothing overtly erotic about it, the probing has to lead in that direction, incessant and accelerating, while she remains stubbornly passive. Their fingers also seem to pull us to her, until we almost must become her, or at least feel like her, feel her. If she is us and we are her, then where are we, now? And who is guilty—or responsible?
Maybe we’re somewhere in between the inside and the outside of her. I can’t say for sure, nor would I want to know precisely, since in Bausch the prospects and options never ought to close. Only imagination matters, and it never ends.
But expressionism in Bausch does seem to mean that inside and outside are one another’s loving, chosen means and venue, intimate and changeable, if only we can see that, feel it. One embodies, the other is embodied, and vice versa.
Even so, all the thinking one may do about this only confuses that truth, or any other, dismantles or stops it from being felt. For Bausch and Wenders, feeling any truth is infinitely preferable; feeling it is vehemently different from everything else. For feeling fully can give you the truth back, in one piece, as you might hope to be someday yourself.
