Ten Evenings with Pina: Bausch's "Late" Style and the Cultural Politics of Coproduction

Abstract

This essay reconsiders the legacy of German dance theatre choreographer Pina Bausch through a series of thoughts collected and tested while sitting in the dark during the World Cities retrospective that was presented as part of the Cultural Olympiad of the London 2012 Olympics. While Bausch's aesthetic is almost entirely articulated on the basis of her vintage period, World Cities called attention to the coproduction process under which Tanztheater Wuppertal primarily operated from the mid-1980s until Bausch's death in 2009. Interweaving structures of patronage, rehearsal processes, and aesthetic strategies, the essay argues that it is by recognizing how they built and were built by more distributed structures of support that we can shift our understanding of Bausch's "late" works themselves.