Pina Bausch can make the need for contact clear through movement alone. Her screen appearances are few, but Talk to Her shows how much feeling her work can bring to a film without a speech to explain it.
Fi1m perspective
In Talk to Her (2002), Pina Bausch’s dancing carries feelings that the conversations cannot quite manage. She appears performing in an excerpt from her own Café Müller (1978), a work concerned with isolation and failed connection. We were moved by the dance passages because their need for contact is recognisable without anyone explaining the steps. Javier Aguirresarobe’s gliding camera connects the dancing with the physical business of care elsewhere in the film. Bausch gives Almodóvar another way to help us understand his characters, and the film is richer for it.
Her screen work is sparse, and treating her as a conventional character actor misses most of what she does. With Tanztheater Wuppertal, she combined dance, speech and song in scenes that did not depend on a conventional story. Her dancers contributed personal material through a question-based rehearsal process, giving their experiences a place in the work. The Rite of Spring (1975) put dancers on a stage covered in soil; Café Müller concentrated on isolation and failed connection. Federico Fellini gave her a different kind of screen appearance as La Principessa Lherimia in And the Ship Sails On (1983).
Her own feature, Die Klage der Kaiserin (The Plaint of the Empress) (1989), extended her stage methods into a collage of scenes filmed on location. She directed, wrote and choreographed it, so movement was only part of her responsibility. Her stage collaborators included set and costume designer Rolf Borzik and set designer Peter Pabst, working in a theatre where soil, water and flowers made the surroundings physically important. The risk in her approach is repetition: an expression of pain can become familiar without becoming more revealing.
In Talk to Her, Pedro Almodóvar gives that physical expression a clear purpose. The dance passages sit alongside a drama about two men caring for women in comas, with Aguirresarobe keeping our attention on bodies in both. We recommend the film with a reservation about how readily it forgives its men, not about Bausch’s contribution. Her choreography makes the longing for closeness understandable without resolving the troubling questions raised by the story. Start there for Bausch on screen; there is no need to learn a dance vocabulary first.
Biography
Pina Bausch was a German dancer, choreographer and actress. She was born in Solingen in 1940 and died in Wuppertal in 2009. She founded the company Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch.
Bausch appeared in films as an actress, including as La Principessa in And the Ship Sails On (1983) and as Bailarina in Talk to Her (2002). Archive footage of her work featured in the documentary Pina (2011).
