Pina Bausch, German Dancer/Choreographer, Dies Of Starvation

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Another choreographer/dancer has literally starved herself to death.  Like Jackson, the tendency is to whittle away one’s body to sinews and bone.  The French called the Theater, Ballet, Music, Art and Poetry world, ‘Le Demi-monde’.  That is, the practitioners of these various arts also were the sexual partners and the social happy hunting grounds of the elites and the wealthy.  One aspect of that world was to be ‘unworldly’ and starvation while being pampered and petted was considered the highest calling of these denizens of the Creative World.

Generally speaking, the artistic world had many severe diseases such as consumption (tuberculosis) or sexual diseases as well as outright starvation due to lack of food.  This was much admired by the very well-upholstered Victorians who prided themselves on feeding these starving artists.  This is all tied up with obvious prostitution, of course.  A lot of Victorian opera, painting, poetry, etc, revolved around prostitutes and lovers.  Literature as well as history, was soaked in sex.

The curious fact that a fine artist also was physically ‘fine’ is due to contrasts: if a rich industrialist or a self-centered royal were to show up with a starved looking, but very refined and extremely high strung artiste on his or her arm, the other members of Society would ‘Ooh’ and ‘Ahhh!’ with delight.  Only a few such as Oscar Wilde, could get away with being fat but then, he had an acid tongue and was tremendously entertaining and he always had some slender thoroughbred on his own arm for everyone’s delight.

Today, if one wishes to be an entertainer, a fashion model, an artist, an actor, etc, one has to be extremely skinny.  The mental disease of anorexia is a hideous affliction inside this Demi-monde community!  Michael Jackson, just for example, was a human skeleton when he died, trying to dance.  Talk about the ‘Red Shoes’ curse!  To dance until you literally keel over dead!  But he was not alone.

Click here for an examination of the movie, the THE RED SHOES- ISADORA DUNCAN’S BAREFOOT SOUL « Culture of Life News

Of all artists, dancers and fashion models are the ones most in danger of dying of anorexia.  Many actresses, too, suffer from this disease. Both males and females in these areas resort to a wide variety of drugs in order to be extremely thin and extraordinarily active at the same time.  Heroin addiction and the use of cocaine flourish but in particular, pill popping is the road to super-thin perfection.  But some don’t even do this, they use sheer will power to destroy the appetite and thus, be a ’size zero’ which usually is fatal.

An Appraisal – Pina Bausch – A Stage for the Social Ego to Battle the Anguished Id – NYTimes.com

The productions of the German choreographer Pina Bausch, however, always and immediately made a striking impact as theater, and the audiences they attracted included many who were by no means dance specialists. Choreography as a term does not suffice to define her work, which frequently used the spoken word and relied on elaborate scenic effects. Anyone who saw her pieces will recall how the women of her “Rite of Spring” covered themselves in earth; how in “1980” the stage was a lawn; how “Carnations” (“Nelken”) began as a field of, yes, carnations (gradually trampled as the work proceeded); and how “Palermo Palermo” began with the coup de théâtre of a tall wall, across the stage, toppling forward and falling apart.

Here are two versions of Stravinsky’s ‘The Rites of Spring’, one by Bausch and the other one by the world’s most daring and perhaps greatest choreographic revolutionary, the ill-starred Nijinsky:

YouTube – Le Sacre Du Printemps by Pina Bausch Wuppertal Dance Theater

Vaslav Nijinsky – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Vaslav Nijinsky (French transcription; Polish: Wacław Niżyński; Russian: Вацлав Фомич Нижинский / Vatslav Fomich Nizhinskiy; March 12, 1890 – April 8, 1950) was a Russian ballet dancer and choreographer of Polish descent. Nijinsky was one of the most gifted dancers in history, and he grew to be celebrated for his virtuosity and for the depth and intensity of his characterizations. He could perform en pointe, a rare skill among male dancers at the time (Albright, 2004) and his ability to perform seemingly gravity-defying leaps was also legendary. The choreographer Bronislava Nijinska was his sister….

1900 is when he began learning how to dance and he broke apart in 1920 and ceased dancing.  In this short time, he not only became one of the world’s greatest male dancers, he also became a revolutionary choreographer.  He virtually invented ‘modern dance’.  Along with Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis and her husband, and Mary Wigam, they changed the way we view dance.

In Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring, with music by Stravinsky) (1913), Nijinsky created choreography that exceeded the limits of traditional ballet and propriety. For the first time, his audiences were experiencing the futuristic, new direction of modern dance. The radically angular movements expressed the heart of Stravinsky’s radically modern score.

YouTube – The Rite of Spring Part 3

To my eyes, the Nijinsky offerings is much more distressing and deep than the modern version by Bausch.  Audiences wanted to see Nijinsky jump and jump and jump.  So, in this masterpiece, he has the ’sacrificial virgin’ jump and jump until she dies.  She stops to rub her leg and is in greater and greater distress but keeps returning to her job of jumping with increasing desperation.

This piece was a great masterpiece yet, was dropped from the public until the Joffrey Ballet revived it.  When I went to see it in Manhattan, many years ago, I was just bowled over.  It immediately became one of my favorite renditions of this music which was also very revolutionary when it came out, at the opening shots right before the assassination of the Archduke caused a total collapse of European civilization.

Pina Bausch & the Tanztheater Wuppertal Masurca Fogo by Verinha Ottoni ©

Then in NY “Pina became extraordinarily thin” says Sanasardo. “We were very concerned because we had great difficulty getting her to eat. It was confusing because we were all young and Pina didn’t speak very much English. We were not sure if something was bothering her. And when we tried to talk to her, she would just say, “No, I’m fine, I am fine”. In the end a safe passage back to Germany was organised for her.”

Kurt Jooss had told her to put on some weight or get out of the company she got better quickly, and became one of the principal soloists while assisting Jooss on many pieces, after recovering from this eating disorder. When Jooss left after a decade Bausch took over as artistic director for Folkwang Tanzstudio and began choreographing pieces on her own: Fragment in 1968, music of Bela Bartok; Im Wind der Zeit, 1969; Actionen fur Tanzer, 1971. She says, “I never thought of being a choreographer, the only reason I made those pieces was because I wanted to express myself differently and I wanted to dance. She also adds, about forging her own style: “I didn’t want to imitate anybody, any movement I knew, I didn’t want to use.

Jooss is one of the fathers of modern dance.  I enjoyed the revival of his early masterpieces.  Here are two videos of a piece he made after WWI:

YouTube – 1 Intro thru beginning of The Farewells

2 Farewells, con’t.; and The Battle

Many things which people think Jackson created are actually modern recreations and expansions on dance moves and choreography done by Jooss.  A lot of the ‘robot/zombie’ dance stuff done by the MTV generation is actually inspired by the Joffrey Ballet revivals which swept the NYC dance community from 1970-1980.  I was part of this business.  I knew many of the dancers who took these lessons from Jooss and expanded on it, working in music videos, a new business.

Ballet’s approach to weight is an ugly tragedy | Stage | guardian.co.uk

According to David Kinsella, the director of a groundbreaking new documentary, A Beautiful Tragedy, if I wanted to be ballet dancer in Russia, I should weigh 39kg (6 stone, 1lb). I am 5ft 5in. This would give me a clinically emaciated body mass index of 14.1 – a weight that would probably land me in hospital in the UK. In an email exchange with David, he told me that to get my “ideal Russian ballet weight” (in kilograms) I should take my height in centimetres and subtract 127. When I asked how he knew this he exploded: “EVERYBODY knows this in Russian ballet.”

To put this in perspective, 21-year-old Ana Carolina Reston, one of the anorexic models at the heart of the size zero debate, died in November 2006 with a BMI of 13.5, and in the same year the organizers of Madrid’s Fashion Week banned models with a BMI below 18, considering them too thin to hover about in high heels, let alone dance a three-act ballet.

All ballerinas I have known and I have known many, worry about their weight.  They have to be light enough to be picked up.  They have to be like a feather, a flower.  Isadora Duncan, for example, was rather heavy but then, she didn’t need to be picked up and tossed about.  Anorexia is a very, very dangerous disease.

It destroys all the organs.  The heart gets weaker.  The liver fails.  The body eats the muscles if there is no fat to consume.  And couple this with powerful wills to keep on doing things and we get a terrible clash of wills: and Mother Nature always wins these.  I was once extremely thin.  Thin enough to worry my doctor.  Well, having children fixed that!  Now, it is the opposite.  Can’t seem to win.

But then, this is what life is all about: balancing many forces!  And the struggle to do this is what creates many other things both artistic and ugly.  It is all up to us, how we deal with it, ourselves.  Bausch died only a few days after being diagnosed with cancer.  But then, she was dying for a long, long time.  At least she didn’t have immense wealth to squander like Jackson.  So the temptation to make all of her demons real was not a problem.  Nonetheless, she also had demons in her life, it is obvious in her choreography.

If you go to my THE RED SHOES- ISADORA DUNCAN’S BAREFOOT SOUL web page, I dissect the choreography of that movie and it has some amazing scenes such as when the dancer, in total fear and despair, runs away through this wall and ends up in first, a place of prostitution and then, through another wall to a place peopled by monsters.  So many dancers can’t exit that place.  They remain there, until they finally can’t dance anymore.

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Tags: dance, Germany