Pina Bausch

Pina studied dance in 1973 in New York then went back to Germany. A director of dance for Wuppertal theatre. She created an unfamiliar form of dance which struck a lot of controversy among many. The new way of dance was also a theatre performance, it gave the audience a chance to use their emotions with laughter, sadness, anger and many more. Pina influenced and inspired many and gave her performances meaning in what she portrayed. It was quite edgy for the time and made the audience use their own opinion in what was going on in each play.

 From research, I have found that the title of this play came from the fact that her dad owned a Cafe called Cafe Muller. The play was first performed in 1978 and the emotions it portrayed were quite sad, angry and confusion. This play is different because it shows many different things going on in one time and does not look choreographed at all. It comes across as quite mismatched and altogether very abstract. The story is about a woman in two halves but both showing quite different expressions in how they act."A man holds a woman in his arms then drops her, whether through tiredness, carelessness or cruelty.  At once she gets up and clings to him.  Again he holds her, lifts her up into his arms but drops her.  And again, after she falls, she stands up and clings to him.  It is cruel, funny, pathetic, indescribably sad – all these at once.  The cycle goes on for so long that eventually you pray for it to end." (http://jildysauce.wordpress.com/2012/06/29/Cafe-Muller/)

      I thought there there were some awkward movements and many different emotions performed and also, that it altogether had quite a natural flow but also some quick sharp movements too. There was a change in pace quite a lot and this kept the audience interested when Pina knows that the play could be quite boring and continuous. This play lets the audience guess what was going on without telling them anything to let their imaginations tell the story, this could also be allowing the audience to be involved with the story and let them write it for themselves. At first, I thought that the story was about each character telling their own story because of how strange it looked to me, I thought that the story kept changing showing all of the changes in Pina's lifetime. Some parts were a lot more dramatic however and many different emotions were shown throughout the piece. I also found many different genres within the play such as love, fright, sympathy and worry. I found the play overall quite confusing but it also did give off a message to everyone, even if they were all different messages. I like the way it was different and gave off many different impressions.

 When watching the clip of '1980', I discovered that it was at first quite dark, gloomy and mysterious. I first thought that it was going to be a beauty pageant, which then turned into the thought of it being a hypnotist class. I thought it was meant to be a comedy, until I realized that it could also be Pina showing the hate that she had over men's dominance in the world. The men in the performance were very over powering to the women and they could tell them to do anything and they would do it straight away. It portrayed many different emotions from the audience, and it shown that the women of that generation were being treated like puppets for the opposite sexes entertainment. All of the girls in the clip had to all perform different tasks and this shows that Pina thought that men discriminated women and they made them feel embarrassed and silly. Pina was a feminist and this really shows in 1980. She thought that men controlled women and that they had no say when even doing the stupidest things. It was a different genre and it shows a big difference in today's society. It gave off that women could not be themselves, they could never be their own person if men stayed as they were and that she felt disgusted in generally, men's behaviour throughout society. However, I would say that this piece was more comical than the earlier 'Cafe Muller'. It also was very different and quite funny, yet still had a bold message to it. 1980 defiantly had a clearer message than what Cafe Muller did, she wanted to get it across to the audience quite clearly that men could control women by hardly doing anything and that needed to change. So whereas Cafe Muller did have a message, it was more hidden away because it must not have been as important as it is in this piece. There was no music in the clip, this shows that it was not needed because men did not need any extra guidance in power, they had enough to do what they wanted at any point. Usually music helps a piece because it can easily move an audience in any way, but the fact that it was not played shows that it could not of been wanted by the men so it was not played (power). Also, the movement was quite stiff compared to Cafe Muller, this was more straight forward and got to its point a lot easier because of how structured in was in comparison with Muller. It was less abstract than Muller, yet it still shown a lot of different meanings around the main point. The proxemics were very tight and the girls stayed in the same place all of the time, like dogs being trained.

 I found that we used a lot of Bauch's work in our final performance. When watching her videos I can see a lot of similarities in our piece to hers, this shows that she influenced our style and way of thinking when creating the piece. Her style is very abstract, with no words and a lot of movement too. She uses frantic movements, some soft some harsh and I see this in our piece too. This really represents our performance and what we used came a lot from her work. She is a great influence to us and we were glad to create work that was similar to Bauch's.