Passage V

Choreographing Change

The following paragraphs may or may not be in the most logical order. Each paragraph is numbered in brackets, and question 74 will ask you to choose where Paragraph 3 should most logically be placed.

[1]

The late German choreographer Pina Bausch once said, “I am not interested in how people move, but what moves them.” Indeed, Bausch did not even consider herself a choreographer, but rather a kind of director. Her Tanztheater, translated “dance theater,” pieces received international acclaim for those expressive, unconventional style and the often-raw emotional feelings they portrayed.

[2]

When Bausch began her formal dance education in 1955, Expressionism was again the dominant style. Bausch followed the Expressionists’ lead (and that of other dance pioneers like Martha Graham from the ’20s). She tackled existential themes—identity, alienation, romantic entanglements, suffering—portrayed through intense, sometimes violent, movements.

[3]

By the 1920s and up until the onset of World War II. German art was flourishing and had turned to the abstract. Expressionism, as it was called, (64) replaced representational, or literal, modes of painting. Bausch, born in 1940, having grown up in postwar Germany. The country was attempting to rebuild its economy, its infrastructure, and even the country’s national identification after the fall of Hitler’s regime. German artists, of whom work was previously suppressed by the Nazi party, could refresh without fear. They began to depict the country’s fragile state in their work.

[4]

A Bausch piece may include any number of dancers of any age. Dancers’ emotions are conveyedthrough gestures—joy, passion, grief—that range from subtle to explosive, stationary to dynamic. In Café Müller, one of her most famous works, dancers stumble across the stage, crashing into tables and chairs. Rite of Spring begins with a dancer lying prostrate on a stage, covered entirely with soil.

[5]

Travel to places such as Turkey, Portugal, and India have informed much of Bausch’s work. She, often, incorporated, and combined dance traditions from the East and West, inspiring future choreographers. Her lasting influence lives on through revivals of her work.