Pina Bausch

Wim Wenders’ magnificent Pina began as a 3-D collaboration with the German dancer-choreographer and her troupe.  It was completed after Wenders and her dancers, some of whom had been with her for 30 years, came to grips with their shock and grief over her sudden death, 5 days after she learned she was ill.

You won’t find a better evocation of her work than this, by Wenders:

PINA BAUSCH
INVENTOR OF A NEW ART FORM
No, there was no hurricane that swept across the stage,
there were just … people performing
who moved differently then I knew
and who moved me as I had never been moved before.
After only a few moments I had a lump in my throat,
and after a few minutes of unbelieving amazement
I simply let go of my feelings
and cried unrestrainedly.
This had never happened to me before…
maybe in life, sometimes in the cinema,
but not when watching a rehearsed production,
let alone choreography.
This was not theatre, nor pantomime,
nor ballet and not at all opera.
Pina is, as you know,
the creator of a new art.
Dance theatre.
MOVEMENT
Until now movement as such has never touched me.
I always regarded it as a given.
One just moves. Everything moves.
Only through Pina’s Tanztheater have I learned to value
movements, gestures, attitudes, behaviour, body language,
and through her work learned to respect them.
And anew every time when, over the years I saw Pina’s pieces,
many times and again,
did I relearn, often like being struck by thunder,
that the simplest and most obvious is the most moving at all:
What treasure lies within our bodies, to be able to express itself without words,
and how many stories can be told without saying a single sentence.

[Speaking at the ceremony of the 2008 Goethe Prize of the city of Frankfurt am
Main to Pina Bausch (excerpt)]

Wender’s Pina is now a retrospective, a portrait, and an evocation of her power, her wit, her soulfulness and the breadth of her reach.  And right close to the end of the huge list of those who worked on it. there’s this credit:

               Dancers over 14. . . (roughly 50 or so names)

Dancers over 65. . . (at least half that many names)

Cannot tell you how encouraging that is.