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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Pina Bausch and William Forsythe, who turned up with their German-based companies at the Brooklyn Academy of Music recently, are the two most influential choreographers in Europe today. Actually, Bausch has left a deep print in America, too. In New York's "downtown" dance scene of the late eighties, dancing was largely replaced by a violent sort of drama, in which, very often, someone was dying and the audience was to blame. If I had to name the reasons for that, the first would be AIDS and the second would be the 1984 American debut of Bausch's company, the Tanztheater Wuppertal. On her stage, there were slashings, rapes. The dancers threw each other into walls. When they got tired of that, they assaulted themselves. In one show, a man (seemingly) sliced off a piece of his hand, cooked it on a hot iron, and ate it.
The work was violent in form as well. By the eighties, Bausch had more or less abandoned dance in favor of "dance theatre." Each piece was basically a series of skits, united only by theme, and from piece to piece the theme was pretty much the same: sex, cruelty, or absurdity, or (usually) all three. The work was often long and sometimes intermissionless. You couldn't have a drink or go to the bathroom, because Pina Bausch wanted to tell you that the center could not hold. Her New York fans tended to see this as strikingly experimental. A curious view. Duration? Had these people seen "Einstein on the Beach"? Miscellany? Had they heard of "happenings"? Bausch was also acclaimed for breaking through the fourth...
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