Pina

Pina – Pina is an elegiac concert film dedicated the dances choreographed by the late Pina Bausch, the famous and formidable mistress of the Wuppertaltanztheater. Bausch died before the film’s maker, the great German director Wim Wenders, could collaborate with her on staging the compendium of Bausch’s greatest hits comprising the film – hence, the movie’s tone of sorrow, regret, and ultra-refined melancholy. After a thrilling and ecstatic beginning, Bausch’s version of The Rite of Spring, danced on a field of red dirt trucked onto the stage – the sweat on the dancers turns the dirt to mud that stains their garments and the camera is so close to the mobs of young men and women that we hear them panting and gasping for breath – Wenders shows us a series of small ensemble works featuring dancers who look into the camera and confide their thoughts to us in morose voice-overs in the intervals between the dance-numbers. (The effect is similar to the sorrowful internal monologues of the Berliners in Wings of Desire going home in the gloom on the train or sitting alone in their apartments.) The picture is unified by a kind of conga line comprised of the dance company members who strut through the scenery making a series of gestures, repeated over and over again, that signify the cyclical passage of the time and the seasons. Bausch has died, the film seems to say, but her work survives in her ensemble, in the memories of her audiences, and passing time, shown by the procession of dancers, achieves no dominion over her work. Shot in sophisticated and subtle 3D, the dance scenes are staged in deep space – the distances between the dancers are palpable and, in one scene, where men and women splash a huge rock with buckets of water, the balletic arcs of spray are more beautiful than anything the dancers can do (which was surely Bausch’s point). Wenders doesn’t tinker with the dance sequences. He films them in long continuous takes, sometimes slowly tracking with the dancers and many of the episodes are exceptionally gorgeous. Some of the dancing takes place in quarries, forests, on the edge of a manmade waterfall – a hippopotomus sensuously cavorts with a dancer in a rippling stream in a beautiful river gorge and some sequences are shot next to highways, on exit ramps, or on a peculiar inverted monorail, a bizarre mode of locomotion that has obviously fascinated Wenders all of his life: a famous sequence in his early film Alice in the Cities set on that conveyance is reprised in this film. Wenders is a master of showing performances; his film The Buena Vista Social Club was a big hit with the art house crowd fifteen years ago and was another elegiac concert picture – in that instance, an elegy for aging musicians trapped in the decayed splendor of Cuba’s Havana. Ultimately, this film will interest you to the extent that you admire, or are curious, about modern dance. With Merce Cunningham who also died recently, Pina Bausch was the most influential of all modern choreographers and many people in the Walker audience at this premiere looked like long-in-the-tooth dancers themselves, wiry old ladies with grey hair tied back in pony-tails – the reverence in their voices was obvious and they were enraptured by the film. I am struck by the vast distance between Bausch’s work and the jaunty dance sequences that you see in American films like The Band Wagon, Singin’ in the Rain, and, even, Purple Rain. In American musicals, people spontaneously begin to tap dance or waltz out of sheer exuberant joy. Most of Bausch’s dances seem to embody dire agon – the dancers tug and twist at recalcitrant parts of their bodies; their partners have to be massaged, caressed, or, even, beaten into motion. In one striking scene, a woman hurls herself at a wall but is restrained by a rope around her mid-section. After several attempts at escape (or dashing herself into pieces), she uses the rope to make a dance comprised of elegant, almost horizontal motion, held precariously upright by the restraint around her hips. In another scene, a woman creeps across the floor in a series of sinuous motions while another dancer hurls shovelfuls of dirt onto her back and shoulders. The crowd of superannuated dancers crowding the WAC auditorium laughed with delight – I didn’t see anything funny about a dance that mimes burying someone alive. Bausch’s male-female couples keep collapsing against one another. Gravity sucks them down and their own bodies refused to cooperate with their desires; men and women have to physically pull themselves off the floor by their own hair or have to grab their feet to make them move. Bausch’s dance theater is comprised of absurd and grotesque gestures and, although it is sporadically convulsively joyous, the prevailing mood is one of apocalyptic gloom and despair. (I have strong reservations about modern dance in general – it’s an art form that I don’t pretend to understand.) In one sequence, set against huge cranes in an industrial harbor, a woman announces “Das ist Kalbfleish” – “This is veal,” and, then, straps the bloody pieces of meat into her dance shoes before commencing a lengthy and arduous performance en pointe. It is, I suppose, a commentary on the agony that the dancers are undergoing. The film’s hagiography makes me a little uneasy – Pina Bausch, by the accounts provided by her dancers (her creatures), was a fearsome Fuehrer who seems to have commanded absolute allegiance.