Inheriting Dance: An Invitation from Pina [1. Aufl.] 9783839427859

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Table of contents :
Inheriting Dance. An Archive as a Workshop for the Future. An Introduction
References
1. How Do We Write History? Translating Processes
Practices of Translating in the Work of Pina Bausch and the Tanztheater Wuppertal
Wild Gardens. Archiving as Translating
References
2. Dance Heritage in the 21st Century. Strategies for Remembering
The Digital Pina Bausch Archive
How to Create an Archive?
Reconstruction as a Creative Process. Pina Bausch’s Tannhäuser Bacchanal: 1972–2004–2013. A Report from the Rehearsals
References
3. It’s Personal – Searching for a Living Archive
Bausch’s American Legacy
Work in Progress. A Schools Project of the Pina Bausch Foundation
“If It’s Your Own, It’s Alive.” An Interview with Students in the Schools Project
References
4. Our Dreams, Our Future – the Coming Archive
An Invitation from Pina. Review
An Archive as a Living Space. Future Prospects
About the Authors
Recommend Papers

Inheriting Dance: An Invitation from Pina [1. Aufl.]
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WE WOULD LIKE TO EXPRESS our most sincere gratitude to Hortensia Völckers and Alexander Farenholtz, Directors of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, Ute Schäfer, Minister for the Arts of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, as well as Lore Jackstädt and Rolf-Peter Rosenthal, members of the board of the Dr Werner Jackstädt Foundation, Wuppertal for their commitment and generous support. Imprint Bibliographic information of the German National Library The German National Library has registered this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographical data can be found online at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Copyright © 2014 by transcript Verlag, Bielefeld No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise. ISBN 978-3-8376-2785-5 Visit our homepage: www.transcript-verlag.de Please request our publishing program and other brochures by e-mail under [email protected] INHERITING DANCE. AN INVITATION FROM PINA is the outcome publication of the project An Invitation from Pina – An Archive as a Workshop for the Future. (2010–2013) by the Pina Bausch Foundation. Funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, the Ministry for Families, Children, Youth, Culture and Sports of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and the Dr Werner Jackstädt Foundation, Wuppertal Editing Dr Marc Wagenbach, Dr Rainer A. Wirth Concept Dr Marc Wagenbach, Delia Fricke Design Delia Fricke Production Sascha Karrenberg Editorial Office Monica Gonzalez-Marquez Translations  Monica Gonzalez-Marquez, Frank Hardt, Steph Morris, Robert Zöger, Dr Rainer A. Wirth Printed in Europe on Garda Matt and g-print

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inheriting dance An Invitation from Pina

Edited by Marc Wagenbach and the Pina Bausch Foundation

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The questions never end, and the searching never ends.

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Inheriting Dance. An Archive as a Workshop for the Future. An Introduction Marc Wagenbach

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References

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1How Do We Write History? Translating Processes

Practices of Translating in the Work of Pina Bausch and the Tanztheater Wuppertal Gabriele Klein

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Wild Gardens. Archiving as Translating Gabriele Klein, Marc Wagenbach

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References

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2Dance Heritage in the 21st Century.

Strategies for Remembering

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The Digital Pina Bausch Archive Bernhard Thull

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How to Create an Archive? Sharon Lehner

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Reconstruction as a Creative Process. Pina Bausch’s Tannhäuser Bacchanal: 1972 – 2004 – 2013. A Report from the Rehearsals Stephan Brinkmann

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References

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3 It’s Personal – Searching for a Living Archive

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Bausch’s American Legacy Royd Climenhaga

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Work in Progress. A Schools Project of the Pina Bausch Foundation Katharina Kelter

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“If It’s Your Own, It’s Alive.” An Interview with Students in the Schools Project Keziah Claudine Nanevie, Linda Seljimi, Michelle Urban

References



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4 Our Dreams, Our Future – the Coming Archive

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An Invitation from Pina. Review Marc Wagenbach

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An Archive as a Living Space. Future Prospects Salomon Bausch

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About the Authors

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Inheriting Dance An Archive as a Workshop for the Future. An Introduction Marc Wagenbach

How do you inherit dance? The aim of this book is to describe and reflect on the archiving project An Invitation from Pina – An Archive as a Workshop for the Future (Pina lädt ein. Ein Archiv als Zukunftswerkstatt)1; to record discussions, decisions and experiences made with internal and external partners, with artists, experts and friends, locally and globally; to pin down ideas and encounters, and categorise thoughts. Inheriting Dance recounts the historic moment we found ourselves in after Pina Bausch’s death. It marks a point in time when everyone involved in setting up the Pina Bausch Archive – the dancers and staff at the Tanztheater Wuppertal, and the Pina Bausch Foundation team – were forced to address something rarely discussed. Even though Pina Bausch had laid the foundations and devised the system for this archive, we now had to accept our inheritance: to unite disparate collections, make inventories, search rooms, describe processes, to document, digitalise, catalogue and conserve. First, all the interrelationships and information, the memories and data, had to be recorded. Isolated fragments, anecdotes and contradictory information also had to be reconciled. How do you approach Pina Bausch’s artistic legacy? How should it be archived? What information can actually be passed on? And what requirements will a future Pina Bausch Archive – a space for encounters, exchanges and experimentation, an archive for tomorrow – be required to fulfil? How did Pina Bausch organise her own archives? What did we find when we began? And how should we manage it? What should the day-to-day at the Tanztheater Wuppertal be like? We began the work with the constant fear of not being able to remember things, of loss, not knowing enough about how individual pieces fit together, dispersed into isolated points, one-off references to a past moment on stage, memories, fragments, singular perspectives, countless anecdotes, attempts to remember, without her – without Pina Bausch.

1 In 2010 the Pina Bausch Foundation launched the archival project Pina lädt ein. Ein Archiv als Zukunftswerkstatt funded by the Ministry for Families, Children, Youth, Culture and Sport of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, The German Federal Cultural Foundation, and the Dr Werner Jackstädt-Stiftung on behalf of the city of Wuppertal. The aim of this project was to ensure the initial safeguarding and systematic recording of Pina Bausch’s legacy, to create a database and initiate a concept for dance history education. The Pina Bausch Foundation was commissioned to execute the project in close collaboration with staff and dancers from Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. The initial results were presented in 2012 in New York as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Iconic Artist Talk series, at the 2013 dance congress Bewegung übersetzen – Performing Translation in Düsseldorf, at the 47th Rheinischen Archivtag (Rhineland Archive Day) and in Wuppertal during the Tanztheater Wuppertal forty-year anniversary season, PINA40. See Progress Report NO.1 and Progress Report NO.2 at http://www.pinabausch.org [correct at Nov 14, 2013] (Pina Bausch Foundation 2010); Pina lädt ein. Ein Archiv als Zukunftswerkstatt and the presentations as part of the forty-year anniversary season PINA40 http://www.pina40.de [correct at Nov 25, 2013].

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What Did We Do? In 2010, the Pina Bausch Foundation began recording and safeguarding Pina Bausch’s legacy, all in collaboration with Tanztheater Wuppertal members and partners nationally and internationally.2 We sought to establish interdisciplinary networks, and to gather expertise in Germany, the USA and Japan with the help of various experts and specialists. Dancers, archivists, information technology professionals and academics, conservators, dance theorists, arts scholars, video technicians, education professionals, among many others all participated in some way. The Pina Bausch Foundation aimed to initiate collaborations in the fields of theory and practice between both prestigious institutions and specialist individuals, breaking down boundaries from the periphery to the centre of high culture, to develop innovative solutions around the concept of the “archive” and to pave new ways.3 It was a question firstly of cataloguing a thoroughly heterogeneous collection of production materials for over fifty pieces going back over forty years. Secondly we sought to understand how to treat performance heritage at the outset of the twenty-first century. How were we to archive Pina Bausch’s œuvre in the context of a global, constantly accelerating information society? How were we to write dance history in the context of everyday digital life? How would this process shape our memories? An interdisciplinary approach was essential to addressing these issues. Tackling the challenges posed by varying points of view, and dealing with contradictions entailed a lengthy, persistent tedious process. A process fraught with differing perspectives, notions and institutions. Nevertheless, it became clear that it was necessary to integrate these diverse perspectives, to define their relationships before we could even begin to describe the material. Thus it was very important not to simply adopt an established model or a traditional description strategy but to ask what the specific requirements of this material were. What were the individual solutions for each type of material, from costumes, sets and papers to videos? We had to engage with this process before we could engage with Pina Bausch’s creative working methods. It was not a case of simulating her processes; we had to translate them.4 The issues we were addressing were thus not limited solely to recording, cataloguing and describing Pina Bausch’s artistic legacy. Instead, they spanned a range of areas and problems, including: > constructing the physical archive and uniting various collections; > digitalising over 7,500 videos, 30,000 photos, choreography notebooks, working papers and programmes, etc.; > designing and realising a digital archive with a particular information architecture; > the methodical conception and execution of the initial dance-history education concept, and collaboration between the Pina Bausch Archive and local schools; > documenting rehearsal processes, and holding systematic interviews with Tanztheater Wuppertal dancers and staff, past and present; > networking and collaborating with other archives on a local, national and international level, such as the BAM Hamm Archives in New York City or the Kazuo Ohno Archive in Yokohama.5

2 See Progress Report NO.1 and Progress Report NO.2 at http://www.pinabausch.org [correct at Nov 14, 2013] (Pina Bausch Foundation 2010) 3 An example of the spectrum the discussion ranged across can be found in chapter 4 of this book: “An Invitation from Pina. Review”. 4 See chapter 2 of this book. 5 See “Zusammenwachsen – Growing Together” in: Progress Report NO.1 and Progress Report NO.2 at http://www.pinabausch.org [correct at Nov 14, 2013] (Pina Bausch Foundation 2010), pp. 49-55. 6 See Gallagher’s and Greenblatt’s reflections on a ‘New Historicism’ in Gallagher, Catherine, Greenblatt, Stephen (eds.) Practicing New Historicism, (London, Chicago: Chicago University Press 2000); on ethnographic history writing methods and practices see Crang, Mike, Cook, Ian (eds.) Doing Ethnographies, (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, Singapore: SAGE, 2007); on documentation strategies, Imhof, Dora, Omlin, Sibylle (eds.) Interviews – Oral History in der Kunstwissenschaft und Kunst, (Munich: Verlag Silke Schreiber, 2010).

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They were all areas affected by our approach to the question, how can Pina Bausch’s œuvre be archived? How do we want to write our history? And what strategies for handing down information have we chosen?6 If we focus more on the activities of a historian or even a philosopher, the archive is a workplace in which the desire for a past is interwoven with the desire to take into consideration the specific reality of one’s own day and age. (Gehring 2004: 65)7 We do not see the Pina Bausch Archive as a depot or a repository but as a centre for the continual generation of knowledge, as a living place, a reservoir of ideas and experiences, a laboratory for transfer, a place “where people meet, speak, experiment, investigate, debate and live”,8 where all the many perspectives, rifts and discontinuities are visible, where memory can be experienced as a creative process.

The Structure of this Book The book Inheriting Dance documents the way we addressed these issues. The authors aim to present attempts, fragments and suggested solutions, discussions and questions. The essays seek to open a door and demonstrate that we are all part of Pina Bausch’s legacy. We have inherited all the countless moments of happiness and grief, the bursts of joy and the tireless questioning. Now it is up to us to decide how we will take her œuvre into the future, how we will keep it alive, what stories we will want to tell together, and what stories the archive will tell about us. It is the beginning of a quest, as we ask once more: What kind of world are we living in? In the first chapter, “How Do We Write History? Translating Processes”, Gabriele Klein examines the notion of “translation” much discussed in recent critical theory (Bachmann-Medick 2008, Spivak 2008, Stoll 2008). Beginning with the fifteen international Tanztheater Wuppertal co-productions made between 1986 and 2009, she developed a concept of cultural translation which always involved the new and the other, and radically challenged notions of cultural mimesis. Thus, in the text “Wild Gardens. Archiving as Translating” by Gabriele Klein and myself, reflections on an approach to translation practice form the basis for a critical notion of archiving as a translation strategy, a media transfer: from movement into notation, from notation into the digital, and from digital data back into movements. These are reflections on writing dance history in the early twenty-first century, questions of a historical translation. The second chapter, “Dance Heritage in the 21st Century – Strategies for Remembering”, takes a different approach to the search for possible ways of archiving Pina Bausch’s œuvre, and presents examples of solutions found by the Pina Bausch Foundation as part of the project An Invitation from Pina – An Archive as a Workshop for the Future. Bernhard Thull outlines the considerations involved in designing a particular information architecture for the digital Pina Bausch Archive, and the related discussion around a linked data model. He provides updates on the progress of research into semiotic data networking. He describes how for heterogeneous collections such as the Pina Bausch Archive, multilayered description models are needed that are capable of creating multiple perspectives, and that allow contradictory statements to co-exist. They are necessary to handle the fluid nature of dance in a digital context. But how can we describe a piece by Pina Bausch? And what information do we need to put a piece back on stage; what do we need, ultimately, to keep it alive? In the following essay, Sharon Lehner discusses the question of

7 Gehring, Petra, Foucault – Die Philosophie im Archiv, (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2004). 8 Pina Bausch Foundation (ed.), Pina lädt ein. Ein Archiv als Zukunftswerkstatt, (Wuppertal: Pina Bausch Foundation, 2010), p. 16.

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documentation practices for the performative and their potential. What strategies for documentation are needed to enable us to describe a piece by Pina Bausch? And what theoretical and practical implications does this have for the descriptions and structure an archive uses? This raises questions about strategies for remembering. To what extent does working with archive material represent an artistic process? How is memory continually reconstructed? And how is a piece by Pina Bausch reconstructed? These are questions Stephan Brinkman explores in his essay on the reconstruction of Pina Bausch’s Tannhäuser Bacchanal, which he undertook with students from the Folkwang University of the Arts in 2013. He describes the search for the individual within received forms; the continual construction of the now in dance. The third chapter, “It’s Personal – Searching for a Living Archive”, looks at the discussions surrounding notions of a “living archive”. What developments have emerged amongst international dance archives? How can the discussions surrounding Pina Bausch’s legacy be described? And what innovative practices are currently being followed when using archives to teach dance history? Royd Climenhaga places the Pina Bausch Archive in an international context. How was Merce Cunningham’s legacy dealt with in a specifically American context? What kind of archive has Robert Wilson set up in Watermill? And how does this compare with what is practiced at the Pina Bausch Foundation, and with the legacy of Pina Bausch? Katharina Kelter sheds light on the Pina Bausch Foundation’s work via the example of the schools project Work in Progress. Das Pina Bausch Archiv entsteht in Wuppertal. She demonstrates the extent to which new methods for teaching dance and ways to approach Pina Bausch’s work can be found by creating an archive of one’s own life. She concludes that the Pina Bausch Archive can itself be seen as part of a production process. Along with her essay, there is an interview with pupils from the Städtische Pina-Bausch-Gesamtschule, in Vohwinkel, Wuppertal, where they speak about their wishes and visions for a future Pina Bausch Archive. How do young people imagine approaching Pina Bausch’s work? What were her most significant experiences during the course of this project? Various perspectives and voices can be heard, and have been integrated into the reflections on An Archive as a Workshop for the Future. The next and final chapter, “Our Dreams, Our Future – the Coming Archive” looks back with a thematic overview at the activities comprising the archiving project, along with a look at future prospects. “An Invitation from Pina. Review” takes an overall look at the results of the project, and emphasises the intensive collaboration that has taken place between the Pina Bausch Foundation and the Tanztheater Wuppertal, its present and former staff, and external partners. In his final chapter „An Archive as a Living Space. Future Prospects“ Salomon Bausch sketches out future roles of the Pina Bausch Archive. He stresses the significance of diverse strategies of remembrance and practices of tradition: How to archive personal experience? How to keep Pina Bausch’s artistic work alive? What would an archive of the future imply – as a place of mutual exchange and personal encounter? How do you inherit dance? How much of Pina Bausch’s legacy can be preserved? And how can you archive dance? Reflections from an archiving project; dispatches from a historic moment.

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Thanks A big thank you goes to the project’s funding bodies, the Ministry for Families, Children, Youth, Culture and Sports of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, The German Federal Cultural Foundation, and the Dr Werner Jackstädt-Stiftung from Wuppertal, who have made both the archiving project An Invitation from Pina – An Archive as a Workshop for the Future and this publication possible. Thanks to everyone involved in this project, particularly the Pina Bausch Foundation’s trustee Salomon Bausch and managing director Nataly Walter, and the Tanztheater Wuppertal with all its staff. Particular thanks go to the managing director Dirk Hesse, ensemble members Barbara Kaufmann and Bénédicte Billiet, without whom the work of establishing the archive would not have been possible. Thanks to Ismaël Dia for all his energy and technical expertise, to Sala Seddiki, Clara Bauer, Vera Marz, Frank Hardt, Gerburg Stoffel, Christine Splett, Matthias Burkert, Peter Lütke, Grigori Chakhov, Maarten Vanden Abeele, Sofie Friederike Mevissen, Donata Weinbach, Alexander Wagner, Barbara Kryck, Magdalene Zuther, Sven Pacher, Nicolas Sippel, Angela Deußen, Lale Cakmak, Hannah Füsser, Joachim Schmitz, Markus Fischbach, Dörthe Boxberg, Sophie Schumacher, Sebastian Weihs, Delia Fricke, Dr Rainer A. Wirth and Elisabeth Birk for all their work. And to Peter Pabst and Marion Cito for their enormous assistance. Thanks to our partners locally, nationally and internationally, particularly the director of the BAM Hamm Archives, Sharon Lehner, for her friendship and expertise. Thanks to Prof Bernhard Thull (Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences) and his team for their enthusiasm and tireless support, and to Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences (h_da) for the opportunity to collaborate. Thanks to the Landschaftsverband Rheinland, especially Dr Kauertz und Ms Jahn for their knowledge of archiving and for their support, particularly during the construction of the physical archive. Thanks to Dr Illner, head of the Historisches Zentrum Wuppertal, for his support on a local level. Thanks to Julia Bögeholz and the Städtische Pina-Bausch-Gesamtschule for the wonderful time spent developing a dance-history education concept, and the educational partnership Archiv und Schule (‘archive and school’). And without Clémentine Deluy, Anna Wehsarg and Safet Mistele, the schools project would not have been possible. My personal thanks go to Ursula Popp for all her ideas and suggestions, and to Gabriele Klein for her specialist expertise and her support. Thanks to the PINA40 team –Ulli Stepan and Robert Sturm in particular – for allowing us to present the results of our work so far. Thanks to Pina, for her work, and for the time spent working with her.

Wuppertal, December 2013

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References Agamben, Giorgio (2000): Potentialities. Collected Essays, Stanford: Stanford Press Assmann, Aleida (1999): Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses, Munich: C.H. Beck.  achmann-Medick, Doris (2008): “Übersetzung in der Weltgesellschaft. Impulse eines ‘translational turn’.” B In: Andreas Gipper, Susanne Klengel (eds.): Kultur, Übersetzung, Lebenswelten. Beiträge zu aktuellen Paradigmen der Kulturwissenschaften, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, pp. 141–159 Pina Bausch Foundation (ed.) (2010): Pina lädt ein. Ein Archiv als Zukunftswerkstatt, Wuppertal: Pina Bausch Foundation Bhabha, Homi K. (1994): The Location of Culture, London, New York: Routledge Bourdieu, Pierre (1999): Die Regeln der Kunst, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Brandstetter, Gabriele, Klein, Gabriele (eds.) (2013): Dance [and] Theory, Bielefeld: transcript Crang, Mike, Cook, Ian (eds.) (2007): Doing Ethnographies, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, Singapore: SAGE Ebeling, Knut, Günzel, Stephan (eds.) (2009): Archivologie. Theorien des Archivs in Wissenschaft, Medien und Künsten, Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos Ernst, Wolfgang (2002): Das Rumoren der Archive. Ordnung aus der Unordnung (The Rumblings oft he Archive. Order from Disorder), Berlin: Merve Gallagher, Catherine, Greenblatt, Stephen (eds.) (2000): Practicing New Historicism, London, Chicago: Chicago University Press Geertz, Clifford (1983): Local Knowledge. Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology, London: Basic Books Gehring, Petra (2004): Foucault – Die Philosophie im Archiv, Frankfurt/Main: Campus  Imhof, Dora, Omlin, Sibylle (eds.) (2010): Interviews. Oral History in der Kunstwissenschaft und Kunst, Munich: Verlag Silke Schreiber Keupp, Heiner et al (eds.) (2008): Identitätskonstruktionen. Das Patchwork der Identitäten in der Spätmoderne, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Perks, Robert, Thomson, Alistair (eds.) (1998): The Oral History Reader, New York: Routledge Reckwitz, Andreas (2008): Unscharfe Grenzen. Perspektiven der Kultursoziologie, Bielefeld: transcript Stoll, Karl-Heinz (2008): “Translation als Kreolisierung.” In: Andreas Gipper, Susanne Klengel (eds.): Kultur, Übersetzung, Lebenswelten. Beiträge zu aktuellen Paradigmen der Kulturwissenschaften, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, pp. 177–201

Websites P rogress Report NO.1 and Progress Report NO.2 at http://www.pinabausch.org [correct at Nov 14, 2013] (Pina Bausch Foundation 2010) PINA40, http://www.pina40.de [correct at Nov 25, 2013]

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1 How Do We Write History? Translating Processes

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Practices of Translating in the Work of Pina Bausch and the Tanztheater Wuppertal 1 Gabriele Klein

Pina Bausch posed questions during rehearsals. Typically she raised more than one hundred per each new piece in a life’s work encompassing approximately 50 choreographies. She posed her questions in German or in English. The dancers sought answers with their bodies, with their voice, with materials and props. They wrote down the questions in their own rehearsal notes, sometimes in their “native tongue”, in Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, or Korean, along with the things that occurred and had occurred to them in reply. The rehearsals were recorded on video. The video and the notes served as a reminder and an aid during rehearsals for when Pina Bausch decided and told the dancers which parts of that they had created she wished to see again. During the international co-productions, 15 in total created by the Tanztheater Wuppertal, ranging from Viktor in 1986 to the final piece “… como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si…” (“…like moss on a stone…”) in 2009, the company realised something for which there was neither an expression nor a discourse at that time – and which is now disputed, ideologically charged and politically contested: Artistic Research. The company in 2013 consisted of 32 dancers, (18 women and 14 men), from 18 different nations, and is thus itself also a microcosm of different cultures. They travelled to the co-producing cities and countries, to Rome, Palermo, Madrid, Vienna, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Lisbon, Budapest, Sao Paulo, Istanbul, Seoul, Japan, India and Santiago de Chile. The dancers gathered impressions, sometimes while wandering around and by random discovery, at other times at events that had been organised for them in advance. All the while, Matthias Burkert, musical collaborator since 1979, and Andreas Eisenschneider, responsible for music since 1995, searched archives and browsed in record shops and antique dealers, looking for … well, any kind of local music they could find. Some of those on the trips recorded their impressions in photos and on video. And some of these photos reappeared in the programme brochures.

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The article is based on a lecture which was held during the dance congress Bewegungen übersetzen – Performing Translations, June 6–9, 2013 in Düsseldorf, Germany and related to the research project Gestures of Dance – Dance as Gesture. Cultural and Aesthetic Translations in the Work of the Tanztheater Wuppertal, funded by the German Research Foundation.

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This small insight shows that the process of artistic rehearsal was and is a permanent and complex process of translation between language and movement, movement and writing, between different languages and cultures, and between different media and materials. With the Tanztheater Wuppertal, Pina Bausch developed a multifaceted artistic working method: Posing questions, improvising, researching. And it was translated repeatedly by different choreographers as well as by theatre directors worldwide. Precisely these translations, and I avoid the word “imitations”, confirm the pioneering achievement of this process-oriented working method. The process aligned itself with the company members, their subjectivities and their specific everyday perceptions by becoming a starting point, thus legitimising itself as an initial positing. The multicultural background of the dancers of the Tanztheater Wuppertal, admittedly also a feature of other dance companies, is of special significance, precisely due to this working method. Since cultural translation is from the onset a fundamental principle in collaborative working methods involving people from different cultures, Pina’s method underscored and reaffirmed processes already at work. In the last few years cultural translation has become an expression that has attained an important role in the language games of advertising and the media. However, the use of the term is also popular in relation to political matters. The reason is obvious: “The term is politically correct and promises a secure investment in the creation of cultural capital”2. If the term is now being applied strategically to politics, education, media and the market, how can it still be made fruitful for artistic processes? This question concerns dance in particular given the phrase that has dominated dance discourse for a number of years: dance is translation. This general hypothesis is seductive, convincing and overloaded, all at the same time. It is seductive because it elevates dance to the role of the leading metaphor of cultural translation and thus declares it to be the leading metaphor of culture. It is convincing because translation processes can be found everywhere: translations between dance bodies, between dance cultures, between language and movement, between different media, between theory and practice, and between politics and aesthetics, for example. It is overloaded because in this broad interpretation of the term, translation can be everything. The metaphorical openness thus removes the contours of the term translation, making its boundaries no longer discernable. In order to circumvent this problem and, in particular, to get closer to the dance-aesthetic practice, this article does not ask what the cultural translation of dance is, but rather how the translation occurs. This how is directed at the act of translating, at its practices and its performances. It is a praxeological interpretation that tries to approach the movement practices and choreographic procedures of translation. This approach is itself an attempt at translation, namely to find a theoretical language for aesthetic practice. The fact that this translation attempt meets its limits and must necessarily fail due to the impossibility of translating between aesthetic practice and discourse is inherent to the fundamental idea of translation. The text is divided into three sections: 1. Dancing as translating 2. Translating as practice 3. The politics of translating

2 Birgit Wagner: “Kulturelle Übersetzung. Erkundungen über ein wanderndes Konzept”, in: Anna Babka, Julia Malle (eds.): Dritte Räume. Homi Babhas Kulturtheorie. Kritik, Anwendung, Reflexion, Vienna: Turia und Kant 2012, p. 29.

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Dancing as Translating Translation is a term that is itself a translation, namely from Ancient Greek (hermeneuein, metaphrasis) and Latin (transferre, translatio)3. It is endowed with an imagery of “carrying from one side to another” or “crossing over”. This draws attention to the fact that translation can never be “one to one”, that it can never represent the transportation of a supposedly authentic meaning, just as Tango Argentino, for example, can neither be transferred authentically to other cultures nor placed on stage as “art” because it is a popular dance culture. Raimund Hoghe quoted Pina Bausch during the rehearsals for “Bandoneon” as saying, “If one were to desire such a thing, then one would not have understood anything about Tango”4. Translation is always a negotiation and mediation between things that are different. Translation should therefore be seen per se as a cultural and media practice. Yet translation is not defined solely in terms of difference theory as a cultural and media practice. It is also always confronted with a paradoxical relationship between identity and difference. The paradox is that the translation actually removes the difference, in other words, the translation should correspond with the original, and yet at the same time identity can only emerge through difference. This paradox is a genuine part of translation, though at times attempts are made – also in dance – to dissipate it in one direction or another. There are countless examples of attempts to suspend the difference in the history of the reconstruction of dances, i.e. attempts to reconstruct a choreography to its original as with historical translations instantiated by Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring or Kurt Jooss’ Green Table. And there are attempts to create identity as difference. This has happened with forms of re-enactment, which are at times framed within formats such as Lecture Performances (like Martin Nachbar’s work Urheben/ Aufheben (2008), in which he addresses Dore Hoyer’s Affectos Humanos) or also pieces that deal – associatively or from the perspective of subjective experience – with “dance heritage”, like the Nussknacker by Antje Pfundner (2012). Walter Benjamin, wrote the “The Translator’s Task” (1923), as essay that refers to theories of cultural translation that find their starting point in a “cultural turn” in translation studies5, and in the establishment of “postcolonial studies” and “translation studies“6. He solved the paradoxical problem of identity and difference by attributing two tasks to translation: creating difference while at the same time testifying to “suprahistorical kinship”7. Accordingly, translation is not about decoding the sense of what was meant, but rather a translation “touches the original fleetingly and only at the infinitely small point of meaning, in order to follow its own path.”8 It would appear that Pina Bausch recognised and played with this paradox of identity and difference. Indeed, she almost made it into a central topic of her artistic work with the Tanztheater Wuppertal. For instance,

3 See Dieter Mersch “Transferre/Perferre. Übersetzen als Praxis”, Lecture, Hamburg University in the series “In Transit. Mediales Übersetzen in den Künsten“ (“In Transit. Media translation in the arts“), winter term 2012/13, unpublished manuscript. 4 Raimund Hoghe, Ulli Weiss: Bandoneon – Für was kann Tango alles gut sein?, Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1981, p. 15. 5 Karl-Heinz Stoll: “Translation als Kreolisierung”, in: Andreas Gipper, Susanne Klengel (eds.): Kultur, Übersetzung, Lebenswelten. Beiträge zu aktuellen Paradigmen der Kulturwissenschaften, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2008, p. 177–201. 6 Doris Bachmann-Medick: “Übersetzung in der Weltgesellschaft. Impulse eines ‘translational turn’”, in: Andreas Gipper, Susanne Klengel (eds.): Kultur, Übersetzung, Lebenswelten. Beiträge zu aktuellen Paradigmen der Kulturwissenschaften, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2008, p. 141–159. 7 Walter Benjamin: “The Translator’s Task”, (translated by Steven Randall) in: TTR, vol. 10, no. 2, 1997, p. 156. 8 Benjamin, ibid, p. 163.

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she addressed this paradox in the context of age by haivng some dancers take the same roles over a number of decades, such as in 1980, a piece that was revived in 2012 with almost the complete original cast. Or, for example, by having dancers from earlier generations teach their dances to current members of the ensemble for revived pieces. This was the recent case with Auf dem Gebirge hat man ein Geschrei gehört (On the Mountain a Cry was Heard) from 1984, a revival realised after Pina’s death, and thus structured only using the collective knowledge of the dancers, and with the help of media translations (videos, notations). Another example is Kontakthof, a piece performed by adolescents, the elderly, or dancers from the company, where the choreography always remains the same, thus giving the choreography a different hue each time through the differences in the actors. Dance-related cultural translation is Janus-faced: it would be meaningless and random without the assumption of an admittedly fictional, kinship between dance cultures and dance languages. At the same time, however, it requires a differentiation between the cultures and languages. The latter can be seen in the uncertainty and the principle impossibility of translating movement, i.e. in the testimony of its breakdown and failure. This becomes evident in practice as dance follows “its own path”. Dance-related cultural translation can therefore be described – in line with Alexander Garcia Düttmann – as a translation of the untranslatable. The productivity of the translation, its poetic and political potential, lies precisely in the (im-)possibility. The cultural translations that are specific to the international co-productions of the Tanztheater Wuppertal can also be understood in this sense. Many critics complained that they recognised few genuine, or even clichéd elements of the co-producing country in the productions. However, contrary to their expectations, the primary intention had never been to put “the other culture” on stage. “Presumptuous”, was how Pina Bausch described this suggestion in one of her rare interviews. When striving to “grasp” the other (and grasp is meant here in the literal, physical sense), she insisted on the one hand on the difference of the cultures, a difference that she considered to be due to the limits of understanding. On the other, she highlighted that which is common to all, and tranverses all cultures. For example, when accepting the Kyoto Prize in 2007 she said: Of course there are many cultural differences, but are also always commonalities (…). It is about finding a language (…) which makes something that has always been there noticeable (…) It is wonderful when things come together, with all of these different people, in this one evening, then we experience together something unique, unrepeatable.9 Just as translation is a foundation of culture, the untranslatability between cultures and languages also forms a basic condition of human culture: cultural processes should themselves be understood as translation processes to the same extent to which translation can be seen as the transformation of the cultural. 10 Translation itself is therefore culture, just as culture is a permanent translation. According to this interpretation, cultural translation is not a special cultural process. It neither points to a starting or an end point, nor does it take place in the relationship between original and copy. Rather, the idea of culture as a unit emerges, from this perspective, only retrospectively in the act of translation, as outlined by Barbara Johnson in her book Mother Tongues11, in which she deals with Benjamin’s text and emphasises his hypotheses. From

9 Pina Bausch: Etwas finden was keiner Frage bedarf. The 2007 Kyoto Prize Workshop in Arts and Philosophy. http://www.inamorif.or.jp/laureates/ k23_c_pina/img/wks_g.pdf [correct at Nov 25, 2013]. 10 Peeter Torop: “Translation as Translating Culture”, in: Sign System Studies, 30, 2 (2002), p. 594–605. 11 Barbara Johnson: Mother Tongues. Sexuality, Trial, Motherhood, Translation, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. 12 Homi K. Bhabha: Über kulturelle Hybridität: Tradition und Übersetzung, Anna Babka, Gerald Posselt (eds.), Vienna: Turia und Kant 2012.

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this perspective, the term “German Dance Theatre” also appears to be a step that creates a national notion. It is a step that is highlighted only in hindsight, in the differentiation e.g. towards history (expressional dance on the one hand and contemporary dance on the other) or in the normative differentiation towards other aesthetics (postmodern dance, conceptual dance). Accordingly, it is the translation itself that unmasks a unity of culture as imagination. Cultural translation therefore does not mean an understanding of culture, or the building of bridges between cultures, or their merging. Instead it refers to “cultural hybridisations”. The term “hybridity” was introduced by Homi Bhabha, similarly to the inflationary expression “third space” he proposed when discussing “cultural translation”. Subsequently, this term has become greatly overloaded and ideologically charged. In his Viennese lectures in 200712, Bhabha drew attention to the fact that the hybrid subject cannot only be greeted euphorically as a cultural globetrotter, an artist or intellectual, in other words as a subject that creates hybridity through (permanent) border crossings. Rather, cultural translation is always a movement at the boundary, both directly and metaphorically. In his essay “Names of Place: Border”, the philosopher Massimo Cacciari demonstrates that the border is always both things: limes: i.e. the border area, the wall, the parapet, but also limen: the contact zone, the intermediate space, the place of encounter. The border is therefore necessary in order to facilitate contact and touch. Bhabha locates the perspective of crossing borders in the experience of colonialism. In line with Sloterdijk, it can also be anchored in the kinetic concept of modernity, which has declared movement, transgression and progress as its leading metaphors. The dream of boundlessness connected to these concepts of colonialism and modernity is, if taken to its logical conclusion, totalitarian.13 If translation takes place at the border, this border marks both a separation and a connection of the cultures. Especially in cultural practices, what is decisive is how the experiences of boundaries are treated. It is not least for this reason that Waldenfels argues (in following with Derrida and Levinas) for an “ethos of a regard for boundaries (Grenzachtung) and infringement of boundaries (Grenzverletzung) (…). This means that one crosses the threshold to the other without suspending the boundary or leaving it behind.”.14 – “One is never installed within transgression, one never lives elsewhere. Transgression implies that the limit is always at work”15, says Jacques Derrida. The hypothesis of the research project16 is that the co-productions of the Tanztheater Wuppertal are borne by this “ethos of a regard for and infringement of boundaries”. They do not exhibit the “strange”, are not, therefore, ethnological shows, travel guides or folklore, as claimed by some critics who turned away in disappointment. They do not make accusations (for example, not even with regard to human rights infringements in co-producing countries like China or India), they do not rise up, they claim no cultural authority. The translations of that which is perceived during the research trips lead to some scenes that draw attention to the everyday culture of the cities and countries – such as funeral rituals in Palermo Palermo, massage rituals in a Turkish bath in Nefés, or bathing scenes in Água, the co-production with Sao Paulo.

13 Wolfgang Müller-Funk: “Transgression und dritte Räume: Ein Versuch, Homi Bhabha zu lesen.“ In: Homi K. Bhabha: Über kulturelle Hybridität. Tradition und Übersetzung, Anna Babka, Gerald Posselt (eds.), Vienna: Turia und Kant 2012, S. 81. 14 Bernhard Waldenfels: Der Stachel des Fremden, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1990, p. 39 (italics in original). 15 Jacques Derrida: Positions (translated by Alan Bass), London and Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981, p. 12. 16 Cf. footnote 1.

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However they are also reflected more subtly in the choreography: in the hard cuts in Rough Cut, the co-production with Seoul, where the everyday rhythm of the South Korean metropolis is translated into a scenic and musical dramaturgy. Or they are noticeable in the underlying meditative mood in Ten Chi, the co-production with Japan, which ends in an ecstatic dance by all. Or they become tangible in the cloths waving silently and gently in the breeze in Bamboo Blues, a co-production with India. These aesthetic translations illustrate that translation not only refers to transferral, or crossing over, but also to positing, each of which is an essential element of translation. Translation always begins with a positing. It is, as described by Dieter Mersch, “always ‘another start’, an act that must constantly begin again”.17 – “One must always begin again from the start,” said Pina Bausch. What do the dancers notice in other countries? What do they choose to translate during rehearsals? What is taken and transported into choreography? All of these steps contain different positings.

Translating as Practice In order to describe the act of translation, it is necessary, as claims the thesis of this article, to concentrate on the practices of translation. How does translation take place and how can the aesthetic practices of translation and their performative effects be examined? The approach that this article wishes to outline is a praxeology of translation. This school of thought makes it possible to expand the definition of translation beyond its latent attribution to include all cultural transformations (e.g. text/image; music; theatre/performance, dance/film, etc.). A praxeological approach poses the question of how these complex cultural processes of exchange and negotiation take place. It therefore concentrates on everyday and physically bound practices that underlie cultural translations. The term “practice” here should not be confused with that introduced to philosophical debate by Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach and Marx, when referring to the sensory or representational activity of humans. Practices, rather, are “meaningful, regulated bodily movements, which depend on a related implicit incorporated knowledge” and are often “routinized patterns of behaviour using artefacts (...).”18 They are based on a complex collective knowledge. This should be understood not so much as know-what but instead as a know-how knowledge, “less mentally known/ conscious than … a knowledge incorporated by means of physical exercise”19. Bodies are therefore not prerequisites for practices, or, to put it another way: a body does not conduct or carry out practices, but rather “the body is inherent in the practices”20. Practices of translation show themselves in their situatedness, in other words in their materiality and physicality – in contrast to a semiotic approach that is oriented towards the systems of signs and symbols of dances. The practical ability and implicit knowledge of bodies is demonstrated in these practical situations. Therefore, for example, the bodies of the dancers of the Tanztheater Wuppertal, trained in daily ballet sessions and with specific research methods, have developed a practical ability that the dancers can call upon in the research phases. This is based on knowledge gained from experience, which is implicit knowledge in so far as the ability is not reflected in the situation.

17 Dieter Mersch: “Transferre/Perferre. Übersetzen als Praxis”, ibid. 18 Andreas Reckwitz: “Praktiken und Diskurse: Eine sozialtheoretische und methodologische Relation”, in: Herbert Kalthoff, Stefan Hirschauer, Gesa Lindemann (eds.): Theoretische Empirie. Die Relevanz qualitativer Forschung, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 2008, S. 188–209: p. 192. 19 Reckwitz, ibid., p. 45.

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Thus activities and actions come into focus: the practices of warming up, of training, of improvising, of researching, of noting and recording, of composing, of choreographing, etc. This ensemble of practices is organised along collectively shared, practical forms of knowledge, which, as bodily and implicit knowledge, also always generate difference. In this way such, the working methods of the Tanztheater Wuppertal and thus the practical know-how are more than simply different to those of other dance groups. In addition, the carrying out of the practices themselves produces other bodies and subjectivities. Practices of translating movement should therefore be understood as a combination of physical and mental activities, whereby the mental aspect of practice is registered, ratified, confirmed and observed. From this perspective it is also more explainable that the translation of movement should not be understood primarily as an intentional act, as a process by which the meaning of movement is transferred. Rather, and this is one hypothesis, the translation of movement can be seen as a “doing dance” (not as an acting dance). It is a direct physical process that is generated practically by means of work on the form. “A [dance-related, G.K.] act must be set in motion. It demands an impulse and a centre for endowing it with meaning. This is why we address it with ‘why’ and ‘what-for’ questions. A [dance-related, G.K.] practice, on the other hand, is always ongoing, and the question is merely what keeps it going and how ‘one’ or ‘people’ practice it. How can it be done?”21 This how places the focus beyond the bodies of the dancers to contain within it the relationship of the practices to the material artefacts: e.g. to the spaces, materials, props, stage scenery or costumes. A praxeological perspective circumvents the dichotomy between a subject and object world by taking into consideration the involvement and effect of artefacts in the bodily practices of translation.22 Pina Bausch was also a pioneer in addressing the relationship between material artefacts and dance-related practices, in making it physical and thus finding for it an aesthetic form. Rolf Borzik designed stage sets and costumes from 1973 until his death in 1980, and played a significant role in the aesthetic of the Tanztheater. He saw the stage as an “action space”, with his designs based on a spatial dramaturgy that understood the space as an “agent” that interacts with the dancers, as a space that contains risks for the dancers and provokes resistance. One example is the peat on the stage in The Rites of Spring, which makes the dance floor unpredictable for the dancers because it is always different regardless of where in the world the piece is performed. Another example is the carnations stuck in the ground in the piece by the same name (Nelken), which served to inhibit and unsettle walking. Yet another is the collapsed wall in Palermo Palermo, which forces the dancers into many jumps and balancing acts. And finally, the water on the dance floor in Vollmond, which makes clothing wet and heavy, thus changing the movements of the dancers as well as their appearance. All of these material artefacts of the stage – earth, water, leaves, stones – are not solely representations of nature. Their use is not limited to re-presenting or exhibit something. Instead, and above all, they create something. They change movements, generate smells, provoke sounds – they make different movements. They are translated to the bodies of the dancers. Here, dance bodies and material seem to be connected to each other inseparably. And it was precisely this, the physical exposure of bodies to things, which perhaps constituted the political radicalness of Bausch’s aesthetic.

20 Stefan Hirschauer: “Praktiken und ihre Körper. Über materielle Partizipanden des Tuns”, in: Karl H. Hörning, Julia Reuter (eds.). Doing Culture. Zum Begriff der Praxis in der gegenwärtigen soziologischen Theorie, Bielefeld: transcript, 2004, p. 75. 21 Hirschauer, ibid., p. 73. 22 Cf. Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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The Politics of Translating Until now, this article has attempted to outline the relationship between movement and translation mainly using three prepositions: translation through, translation into and translation as movement. All three of these references are characterised by a metaphorical openness and a poetic potential. All three references predestine the term translation to the description of artistic processes, especially as translation itself is always something aesthetic, and therefore also always, in following with Jacques Rancière,23 something genuinely political. Also with regard to the political, cultural translations are always exposed to ambivalence, and in conclusion the text draws attention to this. On the one hand, they contain a political and emancipatory potential, as translations represent ways of negotiating differences, and contain the potential to overcome hegemonic conditions. On the other hand, there is the corresponding aspect of cultural translation: establishing authority, making something one’s own, stabilising and updating hegemonic relationships, and this is the hegemonic aspect of translation that is sometimes ignored in the debate about cultural translation in the arts. Whether a painting by Vermeer, a piece of music by Bach, a play by Shakespeare or the Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky, in all works of art that have been established globally as art, it is always also about the establishment of cultural authority. Or when popular dances from other cultures, such as Tango Argentino, son, salsa, rock ’n’ roll are re-formed by German dance clubs into the corset of the European dance culture. Or, for example, when hip hop is adopted as “street art” in the context of contemporary dance, our view is not limited to the paradoxical relationship between identity and difference, and the political two-facedness of the boundary that is simultaneously a separation and an overcoming. In this process of inclusion and exclusion the hegemonic side of translation also manifests itself. But even here there is an intrinsic productivity24 for new choreographic forms and dance styles have also emerged in and through these political practices of inclusion and exclusion via translation. The politics of translation reveal themselves in the practices, in the acts of negotiation. Conversely, the practices of translation point to the political dimension of artistic practice and the political place of art. Translation also here means “not merely a blending, but the strategic and selective appropriation of signification, creating a space for actors”.25 Precisely here we see the relevance of setting up the translation of movement as an empirical project because a praxeology of translating provokes us to understand acts of negotiation as a practice of the political at the boundary between aesthetic practice and discourse. The discourses that must be “translated” into aesthetic processes exist always with a qualification: the translation of the untranslatable. They miss the mark, they place something other, and they cannot be identical to aesthetic processes. This irrevocable alterity between the aesthetic and the discursive practices means preserving a boundary, i.e. on the one hand defending the intrinsic meaning and intrinsic logic of the aesthetic, and on the other working on the practices of discursive placements. Here, too, translations are a practice of negotiation.

23 Jaques Rancière: The Politics of Aesthetics: The distribution of the Sensible, ed. and translated by Gabriel Rockhill, London and New York: Continuum, 2004. 24 Dieter Mersch, unpublished manuscript, ibid. 25 Homi K. Bhabha: On Cultural Hybridity, ibid., p. 13.

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Wild Gardens. Archiving as Translating Gabriele Klein / Marc Wagenbach

History breaks down into images, not stories. Walter Benjamin1

What to Archive? The Pina Bausch Archive consists of an abundance of various different materials: More than 7,500 videos of performances, volumes on rehearsals and different research phases of the Tanztheater Wuppertal throughout the world. Originals, copies, copies of copies, fragments of individual recordings. Complete performances – often recorded with a home video camera in a dark theatre space somewhere in the world. Or film clips. Documentation about the work of the Tanztheater. Reports. Television coverage. Advance notices. Volume after volume. Format after format. Picture after picture. Since the early 1970s. The volumes exist as open reel video formats, as U-matic, Hi8, VHS, Digibeta or as digital files. They are filmic attempts to document the present – to historicise it. To document the genesis and performances of a choreography by Pina Bausch, in order not to forget. Rehearsals, premieres, revivals, guest appearances. Media and dance history in one case with 102 volumes. All of them fragments of an artistic process of creation over more than forty years. Collected with the goal to carry on. Not to stop. Archiving. Protected processes with sensitive materials. Archives. Protected places of written records and the lore of rehearsal processes: Pina Bausch’s manuscripts and collections of pages. Her countless white, perforated A4 pages, on which she noted a scene with pencil during its process of creation, giving it a name, in each case up at the top of the page, fixed with paperclips, so that it could be altered constantly. Interim statuses. Momentary snapshots. Always unfinished. Reworked and put together anew the following day.

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Benjamin 1989: 67.

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Pina Bausch collected production materials based on her pieces in chronological order. Driven by the desire to be able to stage a piece again. To revive it. To keep it alive. They are registries of time, inventories of a materiality of things, fixations of processes: technical stage directions, lighting plans, copyright lists, stage manager recordings, documentations of sceneries, costumes, props. Information on the consistency of turf, on quantities of water, on the colour of flowers. Descriptions of a close network of various actors and relationships on the stage. A positioning system of emerging atmospheres. Dancer’s jottings. Notes by generations of dancers on their positions on stage. Role descriptions. Notes of their own impressions, on squared or lined paper with pen, pencil or crayon, with a typewriter. In various different versions. With little sketches or descriptions in words: details of spaces, information on gaits, lists of sequences. Each time different. Radically subjective. Personal focal points. Programmes and posters – from Wuppertal or of guest appearances worldwide in 28 languages from 47 countries. Information on the casting of dancers, opera singers, musicians and conductors. Tales of global performative and receptive practices of the choreographic work: from the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, to the BAM in New York, the Teatro Alfa in São Paulo, Sadler’s Wells in London, the LG Arts Center in Seoul, the Teatro Argentina in Rome, the Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley, the Hong Kong Cultural Centre and the Saitama Arts Theater in Tokyo. Reference points of past events, which become seismographs within an enormous network of memories, moods and impressions. Pina Bausch. The archivist. Press folders. Countless critiques, reviews, and interviews worldwide. Since the late 1950s she herself collected reviews of her performances as a dancer and of her first works of choreography in her press archive. She filed, stuck and labelled page after page. Meticulously. Practices of a biographical self-description. Techniques for organising the materials that she herself invented. Archiving was part of her choreographic working process, an essential element of her work. It was an attempt to retain the momentary and the transient, to be able to remember, in order then to once again create an artistic present. Fragment after fragment. Detail after detail. Situation after situation. Photos. There are more than 30,000 photos in the various different collections of the Pina Bausch Archive. In colour, black-and-white, as slides or negatives. Press, rehearsal or performance photos. Or photos from the research trips to the 15 co-productions of the Tanztheater Wuppertal, or private photos by Pina Bausch. Photos of honours and awards ceremonies. Photo, the stilled pictorial memory of an artistic process of creation. The archive collects documents that mark a translation between the private and the public sphere, between brief momentary snapshots and Bausch’s constant artistic working process. Her life. So, how should an archive be set up?

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Archiving Dance and Choreography Two central functions are generally ascribed to archiving. It should contribute to the “afterlife” (Warburg) of the present, and also satisfy a claim to completeness. Neither of these expectations can truly be fulfilled in an archive that collects the material on the working methods of a dancer and choreographer. Not only because Pina Bausch’s work is so extensive, but above all because the archiving of dance-related and choreographic material is subject to a fundamental transfer, namely that the materials of movement and of choreography are translated into word and image – and in the process follow the abstract order of the archive. But, only in and by means of the translation into other media is the continuation of Pina Bausch’s work possible. Thus the archive always operates in the paradox of identity and difference2. It aims to maintain the artistic work of Pina Bausch in the present and to be identical to it. At the same time, archiving always generates something else in the media transfer – like this book, which in turn documents the process of archiving. In that respect it is only logical that the Pina Bausch Archive not only wishes to store that which is past, but above all wants to focus its attention on the multifaceted and dynamic nature of archiving, pulling the process of archiving itself into the foreground. This process not only highlights the object in the medium of its recording, but also demonstrates that the archive does not aim primarily to be the representation of something that is past, but is rather a matter of performance. An archive is always different, depending on how the material collected there is inspected, ordered, stored, researched, sought for, found and interpreted. An archive is therefore also something moveable. It consists of an ensemble of archiving practices and it constantly re-emerges anew in the practices of dealing with the archived materials. The idea of the performativity and movement of archives is accompanied by another instance of archiving: at the cost of the demand for universality and completeness, aspects of the unordered, the unfinished, the multifaceted, the absent and the hidden attain greater significance. These are aspects that not only accommodate the phenomena of dance and movement, but which also represent the method of working for which, among other things, Pina Bausch was renowned. These are the work in progress, the diversity and incomplete nature of her “pieces” as well as the posing of questions that demanded answers from the dancers, which they in turn documented, thus adding further perspectives on the rehearsal process to the video recordings, music research, costumes and notes by Pina Bausch. In that respect, the Pina Bausch Archive gathers materials in which not only the records are important, but also the manner in which the choreographic processes are recorded. The archive is therefore a place of translation of the second order, as the record – in images, writing, sound and text – is itself already a central element of the choreographic creation3, which is now compiled anew in a further step of archiving. Processuality and participation are therefore not only terms that characterise the artistic working methods of Pina Bausch, but also principles that distinguish the archival work. Like the “pieces” themselves, which found their strength only in the choreographic and scenic composition of the individual images and solos developed by the dancers – in combination with scenery, music and costumes –, the archived material also attains its contemporary reference only by means of specific policies of displaying and making visible. And in the process, the archive, understood as the order of classifying, documenting and archiving, can only ever be contemporary in part, never a representation of the whole. It is, rather, a space of possibilities, a place where the hidden is sought out, an archive of the absent – of the ensemble of practices that characterise practical dance and choreography: researching, rehearsing, improvising, recording, composing, choreographing, training, performing, reconstructing, reviving.

2 For a more detailed treatment of the concept of translation, see the contribution by Gabriele Klein in this volume. 3 On the connections between choreography and records, see Klein 2011: 14–77.

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An archive is always confronted with expectations and fears. Which materials will see the light of day? What will be made public? What remains hidden? Who can get an insight? Where and how can archived material be seen? Can an archive keep the œuvre of Pina Bausch alive? Can dance and choreography be archived at all? Can artistic skills be archived? Will it ever be possible to understand the specific competencies of the dancers of the Tanztheater Wuppertal by means of archived material? What status does archived material have in relation to the culture of remembering on the part of the participating dancers, costume designers, musicians, set designers, stage manager, etc.? “The archivization produces as much as it records the event,” wrote Jacques Derrida, thus expressing a fear that he associated with the political critique of the “so-called news media” (Derrida 1996: 17). The mass media, rather than merely showing an event, actually creates it in the first place by putting it in the spotlight. It is a fear shared by those who emphasise the contemporaneous and fleeting status of dance, and who presuppose the co-presence of the actors in a theatre and dance event. Only by these means, its contemporaneousness and presence, can dance be understood. In this view, dance history could only be accessed via the history of the bodies of the dancers and their audience. It would be inscribed in the bodies as a lived experience and thus bound directly (and solely) to the communicative memory. Archiving, in contrast, marks chains of transference. It is an achievement of technical and cultural transfer, an attempt at de- and re-contextualising. It occurs consciously and at the same time subconsciously. Archiving, understood as the translation of the untranslatable4, creates instable networks of uncertain memory and makes the archive a “swimming memory” (Schlingensief 2009: 146).5

4 See the contribution by Gabriele Klein in this volume. 5 Christoph Schlingensief: So schön wie hier kanns im Himmel gar nicht sein. Tagebuch einer Krebserkrankung. Köln: Kiepenheuer und Witsch (6th ed.) 2009. With reference to Erik Kandel, Schlingensief speaks of a “swimming memory”: “Kandel is the discoverer of this protein, which has an important function in memory. This thing, he says, is the explanation for the fact that the memory swims and we never remember something in exactly the same way. Perhaps columns of numbers, but not stories, experiences. Something different always emerges.”

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Digital Archiving What happens when collective memory disintegrates into fragments? When information is divided among various different circles of people and storage media: from servers and hard drives to dancers, assistants, stage technicians and administrators? How can the performance of a “piece” by Pina Bausch be translated into digital media? What happens to the materials when they are compiled and digitised, and countless compressed and uncompressed data files are generated from them? When they become data formats, removed from all sensorial production contexts? At the turn of the 21st century, the cultural and scientific discourse about archives and practices of archiving became increasingly relevant, as it also did in the field of dance.6 It is no coincidence that this happened at a time in which digital media took on an essential function in storing and processing data. On the one hand, digital media bear the hopes and visions of new forms of archiving and, with these, new concepts of institutionalising archives. These hopes are drawn from the capacities of digital media to transport and store large amounts of data quickly, and to make data available digitally all over the world. On the other hand, the possibilities provided by digital media also provoke anxieties. If the archiving of digital data has become easier, if the archive is no longer a physical place but instead provides “access” from everywhere, then the question as to whether the material to be archived should be selected and by whom is not the only urgent problem. Digital media have also made both the control and abuse of data easier. Thus digital media presents power, control and abuse, issues that accompany archives in any case, in a new light. However, the debate about archives has become pressing for reasons beyond the technological developments displayed in the digitisation of analogue image and textual media. Its cultural relevance is derived from apparently contradictory phenomena. For instance, from the musealisation of society that accompanies the speed of digital communication, from the question of what is considered a national and local legacy in the context of globalisation, from the capacity of human memory in relation to digital memory storage, or from the debate about the meaning of a culture of remembering in an age of fleeting and fast-moving information. The Pina Bausch Archive in particular faces great challenges with regard to the generation of a cultural legacy. There are no previous models for archives of 20th century choreographers, which means that the Pina Bausch Foundation is performing truly pioneering work here. Further, the ensemble itself is also a globalised group with dancers from more than 20 nations. It has toured over 40 countries and was and remains bound locally to Wuppertal, the “everyday city” (Pina Bausch). Finally, the Tanztheater Wuppertal encompasses a total of three dancer generations, so that the dancers themselves are “living archives” who have always passed on their experience and memories from generation to generation, and continue to do so. The archive also collects material that records the rehearsal and research processes of 40 years of cooperation. In other words, it contains sensitive and confidential material that not only documents the specific working methods of the Tanztheater Wuppertal, but also captures the improvisations of all dancers in images and words. These forms of communicative memory are now placed in relation to structures of a cultural memory in the context of archiving processes. Here, too, questions of authenticity, authority, truth and power arise.

6 Cf. e.g. Baxmann 2008, Thurner, Wehren 2010, Brandstetter, Klein 2013 and Hecht 2013.

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Archiving as Translating Digital archiving is a special process of media translation. It contains within it the general media-related proposal that media not only “transports” things but also, at the same time, brings them to bear. This general theory raises the question of how the “transport” takes place and how processes of generation take place digitally. It is thus a question concerning translation and a concept that has, until now, been attributed primarily to language-theoretical relevance, but which has been reinterpreted by the cultural sciences in recent decades7 and also gained significance in the field of media science. The process of translation is thus reflected, for example, in the concept of (intra- and intermedia) “transcriptivity”8, which represents a “symbolic operation of reciprocal intermedia transcription, inscription and transference” (Jäger 2004). Or also in the concept of “remediation”9, which emphasizes the fundamentally cyclical dependence of media on each other, in which they imitate, surpass or otherwise repeatedly reference each other and in the process both stabilise and undermine the limits of individual media. Ultimately, the concept of media translation is anchored in the idea of the recursiveness of methods10, according to which, in the course of a recursive self-processing, an intrinsic logic emerges in media transformations11. If we follow this approach, archiving digitally not only involves the coordination of the technical processes of digitalising data. Rather, this process itself becomes a cultural process that occurs between digital and physical worlds. Furthermore, digitization is a performative process, to the extent that “reality” is not illustrated by the transfer into digital models, but instead by creating something new. Each layer of material requires its own strategy of conservation as well as a fitting digital description. Material is collected, recorded, digitised, catalogued – firstly, what is seen is captured. Word for word, error for error, sentence for sentence. Collections of material by different authors. Written by Pina Bausch, but also by generations of assistants, employees and dancers. But is that all? What else must be described? How can a filigree network of actors, things and practices in constant motion, such as a “piece” by Pina Bausch, be described in a digital environment? Production processes? Surfaces of materials? Or textures of costumes? How can we approach the description of a stage design? What props should be included? Water bottles, rubbish, food? A “piece” is an artistic work, but it is only ever created through the perception of the audience, and it is often a different matter here. Is it possible to digitise feelings? Smells generated by the turf? The hint of a gentle breeze caused by the water on the stage? How should this kinaesthetic sensibility be digitised? What is the function of this data? How is it passed on, specifically? And what do we do about contradictory information, from different actors, in programmes and on posters? How can strategies of translation be found, in order to get closer to this highly complex matter of archiving a “piece” by Pina Bausch, and by these means be able to understand and describe a heterogeneous inventory? This can happen with the help of the analysis of processes, the question of routines, of practices of artistic production and reception. Here, archiving and the creation of historiography go hand in hand. For example, how are production processes generated in Pina Bausch’s work? What function do specific reference systems such as video, storyboards, or notes by dancers have within the process of remembering a “piece”? How do audiences remember a “piece” all around the world and in different historical phases, e.g. The Rite of Spring, which has by now been performed for over 35 years more than 250 times in over 37 countries?

7 Cf. the contribution by Gabriele Klein in this volume. 8 Cf. Jäger 2004a: 69–79, 2010: 301–324 and 2004: 35–73. 9 Cf. Bolter, Grusin 2000. 10 Cf. Luhmann 1997. 11 Cf. Jäger 2005: 45–64.

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But questions about the limits of digital translation are also appropriate. What can these materials not do? How to describe this “hole”, this “empty space” in the information that happens only by means of a direct transfer from dancer to dancer, from body to body? How can that be translated? What does it mean to collect different reference systems and at the same time to know that it won’t be enough? All of these are key questions of best practice in digital archiving. They arise from the interest in preserving the performative legacy of Pina Bausch at the beginning of the 21st century and in passing it on so that something new can emerge in performative processes. Perhaps the principle of failure that is intrinsic to media translation becomes apparent above all in the transfer of dance and choreography, in the discussion about a performative legacy, albeit in the knowledge that the translation always remains only a reference and indicates that which is absent, that which is not there, not present, but which was there and will perhaps be there again. Something that can only be. Archiving presupposes the description and reflection of working processes. Seeing, for example, where movements originate. How they came about. In rehearsals or on stage? In Wuppertal or somewhere else in the world? How do performative networks emerge on the stage? Analyses in quick motion. When does something happen within the rehearsal process? Which materials are generated as a result? What, for example, did the production locations look like? These questions touch on transfers. They are the positioning of time and space, translation strategies for a digital environment. Accumulated knowledge. Existing knowledge. At the same time ordered and disordered. Permanent questioning. Taking stock. The search for a language of its own, a cultural form in the digital: an ontology.12 When, for instance, did Pina Bausch give a “title” to the “answers” of her dancers to questions she had posed? What steps preceded it? And how can we relate to it all the white pages covered in pencilled writing and held together with paperclips? Position them in a specific time? The “titles” became processes. The processes became sequences. And the sequences became pieces. Always altered. Fragmentary. They are choreographic translations of the first order: attempts to note processes, practices, movement. In the digital environment, the “titles” by Pina Bausch became structures of digital information, patterns for the descriptions of sequences, allocations of theatrical situations. They are translations of the second order: tracing processes in order to transfer, to transport them into something different, into digitally-generated forms of processuality.

12 See the essay by Bernhard Thull in this volume on the development of a Pina Bausch Archive Ontology (pbs) – a descriptive tool for the description of performance in the context of developing a digital Pina Bausch Archive.

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Archives as Meeting Places Digital archives find their anchor not only in the digital space. They are always a composite of digital and physical spaces, of technology and culture, of virtuality and materiality, of absence and presence. These interactions have become obvious since the beginning of the 21st century. Hybrid transgressions have emerged since then, due to the rapid and global mobilisation of the Internet. In the context of everyday mass media culture, strategies of archiving and staging oneself have become dominant cultural techniques. Digital information has proven to be omnipresent, especially in urban metropolises. The self-image is recorded meticulously on smartphones and other devices and posted simultaneously online: contemporary strategies of an autobiographical self-historicisation. Archives are always places of remembrance, but also of the present and future. How can digital archives be designed as new spaces of communication and reception? To put it another way, how can an aesthetic experience be shaped in conjunction with digitised materials? These questions touch upon the relocalisation of “pieces” in the form of digital information. Archives are places of encounter between the digital and the physical, between the past, present and future, between different materialities. Here, in these hybrid transgressions, the archive displays itself as a translation of the third order. The desire for physical meeting places, for laboratories of memory, describes a contrary position to the debate propagated on all sides about an unrestricted networking of digital data, to a dissolution into the digital “flow space” (Castells), to a non-discussion of the places of digital experience (Potthast 2007). But in which cultural or spatial contexts is information received? How and where do they become central coordinates of an aesthetic experience when dealing with digital material? Archiving is a never-ending process of the digital conservation of information. Accordingly, archives are places in which translation processes can be stimulated, in which remembering can be experienced as an active and creative process, as a practice that prompts the shaping of dance legacy in the first place, the search for the new and the continuation of processes. Or their forgetting. For if the insight has been gained that dance, in particular, exemplifies the unquenchable yearning of the archive, that neither the artistic practice nor the artist Pina Bausch can be represented, in other words, that art has no place in the archive, and if the position of the archive as uniform, complete and unambiguous is recognised as a phantasm, then the archive has a chance in the future: by seeking to archive the creative work of Pina Bausch and the Tanztheater Wuppertal in the interrupted and absent, in the transitive and transitory, in the unfinished and the oblique. Dance archives are not places that testify on artistic creativity or verify it as “art”. Their quality is not based on elaborate classification systems, but rather on openness, on open systems, which allow us to address anew the treasure of the knowledge stored there repeatedly. This provides the prerequisite for the fact that the Pina Bausch Archive does not become an end in itself, but instead a living place in which historiography is shaped as a process of present creative discovery, of re-formulating, of re-translation, translation of the fourth order. Such historiographic translation is not merely a method of documenting but rather, like archiving, part of dance history itself. The documents about a “piece” by Pina Bausch do not write its history alone. More revealing is how they are dealt with. Put another way, the continued existence of the “piece” is made possible only by translation. In this respect, the productive, forward-looking treatment of tradition exists less in the definitive conservation of documents than in a permanent visualisation, less in a final storage than in the alternating, differing reinterpretation, and thus less in preserving than in moving.

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References  ausch, Pina (2007): Etwas finden was keiner Frage bedarf. The 2007 Kyoto Prize Workshop in Arts and Philosophy. B http://www.inamorif.or.jp/laureates/k23_c_pina/img/wks_g.pdf [correct at Nov 25, 2013]  achmann-Medick, Doris (2008): “Übersetzung in der Weltgesellschaft. Impulse eines ‘translational turn’.” B In: Andreas Gipper, Susanne Klengel (eds.): Kultur, Übersetzung, Lebenswelten. Beiträge zu aktuellen Paradigmen der Kulturwissenschaften, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, pp. 141–159 Baxmann, Inge (2008) (ed.): Körperwissen als Kulturgeschichte. Die Archives Internationales de la danse (1931–1952), Munich: Kieser Benjamin, Walter (1971): “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers”, in: Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. IV/1, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp ------------. (1982): Das Passagen-Werk, in: Rolf Tiedemann (ed.): Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. V, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Bhabha, Homi K. (2012): Über kulturelle Hybridität: Tradition und Übersetzung, Anna Babka, Gerald Posselt (eds.), Wien: Turia and Kant Bolter, Jay David, Grusin, Richard (2000): Remediation. Understanding New Media. Cambridge, London: The MIT Press Brandstetter, Gabriele, Klein, Gabriele (2013) (eds.): Dance [and] Theory. Bielefeld: transcript Derrida, Jacques (1996): Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago, London: Chicago University Press ------------. (1981): Positions (translated by Alan Bass). Chicago, London: Chicago University Press Hecht, Thom (2013): Dancing Archives – Archive Dances, Bielefeld: transcript Hirschauer, Stefan (2004): “Praktiken und ihre Körper. Über materielle Partizipanden des Tuns”, in: Karl H. Hörning, Julia Reuter (eds.) Doing Culture. Zum Begriff der Praxis in der gegenwärtigen soziologischen Theorie, Bielefeld: transcript Hoghe, Raimund, Weiss, Ulli (1981): Bandoneon – Für was kann Tango alles gut sein? Darmstadt: Luchterhand Jäger, Ludwig (2004a): “Die Verfahren der Medien: Transkribieren – Adressieren – Lokalisieren”, In: Jürgen Fohrmann, Erhard Schüttpelz (eds.): Die Kommunikation der Medien. Tübingen: Niemeyer ------------. (2004b): “Störung und Transparenz. Skizze zur performativen Logik des Medialen”. In: Sybille Krämer (ed.): Performativität und Medialität. Munich: Fink ------------. (2005): “Vom Eigensinn des Mediums Sprache”. In: Dietrich Busse, Thomas Nier, Martin Wengeler (eds.): Brisante Semantik. Neuere Konzepte und Forschungsergebnisse einer kulturwissenschaftlichen Semantik. Tübingen: Niemeyer ------------. (2010): “Intermedialität – Intramedialität – Transkriptivität”. In: Arnulf Deppermann, Angelika Linke: Sprache intermedial. Stimme und Schrift, Bild und Ton. Jahrbuch des Instituts für Deutsche Sprache 2009. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter

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Johnson, Barbara (2003): Mother Tongues. Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation, Cambridge: Harvard University Press Klein, Gabriele (2011): “Zeitgenössische Choreografie”. In: Klein, Gabriele (ed.): Choreografischer Baukasten, Textband. Bielefeld: transcript Latour, Bruno (2005): Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press Luhmann, Niklas (1997): Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Mersch, Dieter: “Transferre/Perferre. Übersetzen als Praxis”, lecture held during the lecture series “In Transit. Mediales Übersetzen in den Künsten” at the Unviersity of Hamburg, fall semester 2012/13 (Claudia Benthien, Gabriele Klein), unpublished manuscript Müller-Funk, Wolfgang (2012): “Transgression und dritte Räume: Ein Versuch, Homi Bhabha zu lesen”, in: Homi K. Bhabha: Über kulturelle Hybridität. Tradition und Übersetzung, Anna Babka, Gerald Posselt (eds.), Wien: Turia und Kant Potthast, Jörg (2007): Die Bodenhaftung der Netzgesellschaft. Bielefeld: transcript Rancière, Jaques (2004): The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, ed. and translated by Gabriel Rockhill, London, New York: Continuum 2004 Reckwitz, Andreas (2008): “Praktiken und Diskurse: Eine sozialtheoretische und methodologische Relation”, in: Herbert Kalthoff, Stefan Hirschauer, Gesa Lindemann (eds.): Theoretische Empirie. Die Relevanz qualitativer Forschung, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, p. 188–209 Schlingensief, Christoph (2009): So schön wie hier kanns im Himmel gar nicht sein. Tagebuch einer Krebserkrankung. Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch (6th edition) Stoll, Karl-Heinz (2008): “Translation als Kreolisierung”, in: Andreas Gipper, Susanne Klengel (eds.): Kultur, Übersetzung, Lebenswelten. Beiträge zu aktuellen Paradigmen der Kulturwissenschaften, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, pp. 177–201 Torop, Peeter (2002): “Translation as Translating Culture”, in: Sign Systems Studies, 30, 2 (2002), p. 594–605 Thurner, Christina, Wehren, Julia (2010) (eds.): Original und Revival. Geschichtsschreibung im Tanz. Zurich: Chronos Wagner, Birgit (2012): “Kulturelle Übersetzung. Erkundungen über ein wanderndes Konzept”, in: Anna Babka, Julia Malle (eds.): Dritte Räume. Homi K. Babhas Kulturtheorie. Kritik, Anwendung, Reflexion, Wien: Turia und Kant, pp. 29–42 Waldenfels, Bernhard (1990): Der Stachel des Fremden. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp

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2 Dance Heritage in the st 21 Century – Strategies for Remembering

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The Digital Pina Bausch Archive Bernhard Thull

Preserving Pina Bausch’s Work Pina Bausch’s work is documented in a large amount of material, as well as in the memories of people all over the world. Preserving the work of Pina Bausch means both, capturing material and memories (PBF: 2011). The material comprises lists of pieces and performances, audio recordings and their transcriptions, sound schedules, production books, documentation of stage settings, photographs and video recordings, cue sheets, costumes, light schedules and light plans, manuscripts, props, programmes, notes by dancers, and much more. It contains information and content relationships about e.g. persons, pieces and their performances, castings, roles and their development, and recordings. Although the majority of the material is located in the archive of the Pina Bausch Foundation, some material is distributed among different dance archives worldwide, or is not even part of a dance archive at all, as e.g. a newspaper article about a certain performance in a newspaper archive, or a book about the work of Pina Bausch in a library. One might even think of an enthusiastic spectator making private diary entries about a performance. They may also be part of a distributed digital archive some day. Memories are associated with persons, performances, scenes, or maybe stage settings, or the music, and they are related to each other, and to the material, in individual and unforeseen ways. They are distributed among members of the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, as well as among many other people worldwide. Compared to physical materials, human remembrance is unpredictable, emotional, inaccurate, contradictory, inconsistent, conflicting, and incomplete in nature. It provides fragments which might eventually yield a picture when looked at together, much like impressionist paintings. This is what the digital archive of the Pina Bausch Foundation should be about: collecting and preserving material and memory fragments that allow for a picture to emerge showing the work of Pina Bausch.

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Linked Data Approach Requirements. What tools are needed to support the collection of these fragments, and that can then allow images to emerge? More specifically, the necessary tools should be able to: > Describe the material collected by Pina Bausch. The material should be filed, and cross-referenced, and it should be searchable. > Offer and make accessible the complete collection of materials. They comprise pieces, performances, manuscripts, video recordings, photographs, and much more. > Collect memories, oral or written annotations about any material in the archive by anybody. E.g., a dancer should be able to contribute an oral annotation to a certain scene of a piece, or a spectator should be able to comment on a certain performance, or a photographer on a certain photograph that she took. > Linking arbitrary material. E.g. it should be possible to link a certain prop to a manuscript and comment that its design has been described in the manuscript. Or some enthusiast found a rare newspaper clipping from the 70s which he would like to link to the performance discussed in the news article. > Aggregate, reorder, classify or otherwise process the material to prepare it for the development of interpretations, visualizations, or interactive experiences not yet anticipated. They might be investigations within research projects, websites for specific audiences, e.g. children, or interactive installations as part of exhibitions. Conventional databases. When designing conventional relational databases, one does exactly the opposite of collecting fragments. Using a top-down strategy to analyze a hopefully well-defined application domain, it is possible to define and describes it in terms of schemas which are subsequently filled with data. Hence, these schemas have to be defined a priori. Although possible, experience has shown that it is not easy to dynamically adapt schemas to changing situations. Furthermore, conventional databases focus on entities, e.g. pieces and their performances, and their attributes, e.g. dates, casting, etc., whereas associations between entities can only be modeled in a rather restricted fashion. Last, but not least, conventional database models are defined as closed worlds, and reside in proprietary database management systems that are difficult to share or link with other resources or institutions (and therefore sometimes called silos) thus hindering the establishment of larger collections of fragments, and with it the possibility to yield larger pictures. Based on conventional database technology, it is of course feasible to model and capture the archival materials at the Pina Bausch Foundation. But capturing human memory in all its forms seems to be rather difficult, as it also does to open the archive up to link it to other resources. Using conventional databases seems not to be the best option.

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Linked Data. The requirements that we have to meet resemble the situation of the World Wide Web. The web is a distributed system of linked websites. Some parts of the web are neat, well structured and organized. Other parts are spontaneous and chaotic. And everything is interlinked. Anybody can contribute content, eventually forming a huge web of documents, reflecting the know-how and opinions of many people. The content, i.e. web pages, can be rendered by entering Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) into the address field in a web browser, as anybody who uses the web well knows. These URLs uniquely identify each webpage within the World Wide Web. Recognizing that the requirements listed above are very common among many different application domains, the World Wide Web Consortium1 (W3C) proposes a new data modeling paradigm called Linked Data2, which makes it possible to transform the Web of documents into a Web of data, and at the same time to keep the open and dynamic nature of the web as we experience it. By enhancing the Linked Data paradigm with tools to automatically generate logically consistent data sets over distributed linked data, it is possible to build what is commonly known as the Semantic Web3. It seems reasonable to investigate whether the Linked Data paradigm is an appropriate base for the digital archive of the Pina Bausch Foundation. Uniform Resource Identifiers. The starting point for Linked Data is the concept of a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) which looks like a URL, and even behaves like a URL, but which has its own meaning. As the URL in the web of documents, the URI is used to uniquely identify data in the web of data. A URI denotes any entity as e.g. a piece like Danzón, or a certain performance of Danzón, or whatever else can be distinguished from other entities, and about which one would like to say something about. In the context of Linked Data, these entities are called resources. The URI for the piece Danzón might e.g. be ‘http://www.pinabausch.org/resource/danzon’. Since these URIs are not very handy to read and to memorize, we abbreviate these URIs by replacing the first part of the URI, i.e. ‘http://www.pinabausch.org/resource/’, by e.g. ‘pba:’ with the meaning resources within the Pina Bausch Archive (a so-called namespace). Hence, the URI for the piece Danzón would be written in abbreviated form simply as ‘pba:danzon’. It is assumed that the data resides on a web server that has a web address, which corresponds to the URI of the resources. In our example, the server would have the web address ‘http://www.pinabausch.org’. The W3C proposes a common meaning and behavior for linked data URIs (see Cool URIs for the Semantic Web4): > Semantically, the URI denotes some entity in the sense of database modeling. > Entering a URI, e.g. that of Danzón, into the address field of a web browser would render a humanly readable representation of the resource, in this case the piece Danzón, i.e. the user would receive an HTML webpage with information about Danzón. > If a software agent, e.g. the store of another digital archive, were to address the URI, the server would deliver a data set about the piece Danzón containing machine readable data. The software agent could read and process that data for whatever purpose, e.g. to aggregate that data to build up a larger and more comprehensive dataset.

1 http://www.w3.org 2 http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/data 3 http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb 4 http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/

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Hence, like credit cards, every resource of a linked data store does have two faces, one readable to humans, the other one readable to machines. Following linked data principles (see Linked Data – Design Issues5) allow us to build up distributed databases where each web server holds certain data which can then be linked to other data by just addressing the necessary resources on other web servers by their URIs. Triples. Statements about resources are expressed as so-called triples. Each triple represents a statement having the components subject, predicate, and object, and is depicted as two bubbles with an arrow in-between. These statements are comparable to those in a natural language. The hypothesis is that similarly to statements in a natural language, each fact can be expressed with the help of a subject-predicate-object-triple. Figure 1 shows the example of triples that can be interpreted as: “The Pina Bausch Foundation states that the piece Danzón was created by Pina Bausch during the 1994/95 season.”.

Figure 1: Triples. The statement subject – predicate – object is called a triple when held within a so-called context. Ellipses denote resources, and boxes denote values, as e.g. a date. The context on the right side can be interpreted as saying: “The Pina Bausch Foundation states that the piece Danzón has been created by Pina Bausch during the 1994/95 season. If you would like to know or state something about this piece, please use the URI ‘pba:danzon’.”

To be more specific, we should add that by creator we mean in the sense of a distinct intellectual or artistic creation as defined by the International Federation of Library Associations6 (IFLA) in their Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR, [IFLA: 2009]), i.e. ‘frbr:creator’, and to the notion of a title and a creation date as defined by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative7 in their DCMI Metadata Terms8, i.e. ‘dct:title’ and ‘dct:created’ respectively. The use of well-defined and established vocabularies ensures that distributed data can be consistently linked together. Furthermore, a triple store tracks the provenance of each triple by a concept called context. It can be imagined as a tag on each triple which indicates who created that triple. The technical nature of contexts is diverse. Contexts can be anything that contains triples, as e.g. files, websites, or other triple stores. They allow aggregating triples from various distributed sources into one single pool of data without losing their authorship. See Figures 2 and 3 for two more examples showing data about Pina Bausch and a photograph, respectively.

5 http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html 6 http://www.ifla.org 7 http://dublincore.org 8 http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/

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Figure 2: Triples about Pina Bausch. “Pina Bausch is a choreographer and there is an image depicting her. Furthermore, there is also a Wikipedia entry about Pina Bausch.” Please note that digital images themselves are referenced by URLs, and can therefore be part of triples. To keep the illustration simple, context and namespaces were omitted.

Figure 3: Triples about a photograph. “In October 1995, Jochen Viehoff took a photograph which depicts Pina Bausch, and which is described by ‘Pina tanzt mit großem Fisch’ (Pina dances with big fish).”

Please note that all these entities are described from a local perspective on that data. Every example only deals with data about the represented entities themselves. No global knowledge about the archive as a whole is necessary, including a lack of a data model in the conventional sense. What is necessary is some common vocabulary with notions such as e.g. ‘title’, ‘creator’, or ‘created’.

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Inferences and ontologies. Nevertheless, since we collect and describe data locally and do not care about connecting the data globally, there remain some inconsistencies within the data. A certain photograph depicts Pina Bausch (see Fig. 3). But when looking at Pina Bausch’s data, there is no link to the photograph where she is depicted (see Fig. 2). According to the given triples, the piece Danzón was created by Pina Bausch (see Fig. 1). But again, when looking at the data about Pina Bausch, there is no cue that she created that piece. Linked data technology allows for defining logical inference rules to handle such inconsistencies. In our example, we would need two rules (see Fig. 4). An inference process applies such rules and derives new triples.

Figure 4: Logical inferences. “If a photograph depicts a person, then this person is depicted by this photograph (depiction).” “If a work has been created by a person (creator), then the person created this work.” The inferred triples (dashed arrows) are added automatically to the triple store by the inference process.

All given, as well as inferred, triples together form a net of data, or one single graph. This makes up the database (Fig. 5). Looking at the data on Pina Bausch after the inference process results in a comprehensive and consistent view. In this way, the triple store combines local and distributed knowledge to produce consistency.

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Figure 5: The example net of data with explicitly given triples in solid and inferred triples to solve inconsistencies in dashed lines. Looking at the entity ‘pina_bausch’ now gives a more comprehensive picture of Pina Bausch, the work she created, images on which she can be seen, and more to read about her, in this case a link to Wikipedia. Please note the two notions of ‘created’. According to the DCMI Metadata Terms (dct), it denotes the creation date of something, whereas according to FRBR, it denotes the intellectual or artistic work somebody created. With the help of namespaces, these different meanings can be distinguished. The same goes for ‘creator’: The use of ‘frbr:creator’ implies an intellectual or an artist, whereas using ‘dct:creator’ does not qualify the person.

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The abilities to close gaps and to generate a consistent data set by inference is very powerful and can do much more than merely produce inverse relationships. One example might be the ability to reason about activities. The Pina Bausch Archive Ontology characterizes persons according to what they did. If a person danced a certain place during the performance of a piece, then she or he is a dancer. If a person took some photographs, then she or he is a photographer. By this mechanism, it is possible to collect the roles of persons according to various entries in the database about their activities. Hence, persons are characterized in two ways: by explicit statements that somebody is e.g. a dancer, and by reasoning about what somebody did. This gives a more comprehensive view of a person. A second example might be the ability to reason about locations. For all performances, we store the venue where the performance took place. The Pina Bausch Archive Ontology uses the linked open data GeoNames geographical database9 which covers all countries and contains over eight million place names, and which relates the places to each other. GeoNames knows that e.g. the venue Schauspielhaus Wuppertal is located in Wuppertal, Wuppertal is located in Germany, and Germany in Europe. Therefore, with the help of GeoNames, the store can infer all the geographic relations about the performances. As a result, we can ask for all performances in a certain country, or a certain town, despite this information not ever being given explicitly. The collection of such definitions and rules is called a model, vocabulary, or ontology (Allemang: 2011).

9 http://www.geonames.org

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Visualizing and exploring Linked Data Of course, it is not very efficient and useful to work with the data of the archive the examples given. An obvious approach to a web-based user interface is to visualize the data for each resource on a dedicated webpage, and to translate the links to other resources into links to other webpages which than visualize data about the linked resources. This way, a data browser can be built which makes it possible to explore the archive by just following links, and in this was pave a path through a data jungle. A good example of such a user interface can be seen at the website of Freebase10, a community-curated database of people, places, and things based on linked data (see also Fig. 8).11 Furthermore, it is useful to design dedicated tools for specific tasks in the context of the digital archive. Figure 6 shows the example of a web-based tool to annotate scenes in videos of performances.

Figure 6: A web-based tool to annotate scenes in videos of performances. The tool retrieves data about pieces, performances, and videos from the store, and puts data about scenes and annotations back in the store. This design and usability study was conducted by Prof. Tsune Tanaka and his students.

10 http://www.freebase.com 11 Google uses Freebase to improve its search results.

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Scenarios Collecting material. Since no a priori schema is needed to describe data, it is possible to capture data as it appears. To e.g. enter data about a piece, a performance, or a video recording of a performance, it is only necessary to create a new URI to denote the new resource, and describe them by providing the URI with attributes as necessary. In contrast to relational databases, linked data entities can take a different set of attributes for each entity. As such, it is possible to characterize each entry in the database in an adequate degree of detail. Furthermore, this URI serves as an anchor for links to other resources, annotations, or comments. A linked data archive can be distributed. It therefore might comprise many different locations, as e.g. the archive in Wuppertal, material in the Brooklyn Academy of Music12, or even material from Wim Wenders from when he researched his film Pina. Annotating the material. One important slogan of linked data is “Anyone can say anything about any topic.” (Allemang: 2011, p. 6). Each entity in the digital archive is identified by an URI that is globally unique. These are resources to which anybody can link any data from anywhere in the web. Hence, anybody worldwide can use the URIs to associate his or her annotations to these entities, thus contributing to the digital archive. Since the store keeps the provenance of data, it is always clear who contributed which statements. Let’s assume a spectator would like to annotate his impressions of a certain performance of Danzón, e.g. the performance from July 17, 1995 (URI: ‘pba:danz_19950717’). With the help of some appropriate, and probably web-based tool, she or he would enter a comment on that performance: “What I felt when watching the performance of Danzón ...”. This comment would end up as a file (i.e. context) which is owned by that spectator and which contains the triple ‘pba:danz_19950717 rdfs:comment “What I felt when watching the performance of Danzón ...”‘. This triple could be aggregated by the store and can thus be part of the archive which may span many different servers (see section Uniform Resource Identifiers). From the viewpoint of the digital archive, that data simply is another part of a distributed archive. This scenario shows how it is possible to collect annotations and knowledge worldwide about Pina Bausch’s work, and put it together into one net of data. That said, nevertheless, the Pina Bausch Foundation remains in control of what is shown from whom in which context. Retaining different opinions, inconsistencies and contradictions. The concept of contexts makes it easy to keep different opinions, inconsistencies and contradictions. Although they remain within their own contexts, they can be put side by side (see section Triples). Thus, it is possible to have one context saying: “Author A states that this picture shows a moment within a performance of Danzón.”, and a second context saying: “Author B states that this picture shows a moment within a performance of Nur Du.”. It is up to the reader of the data to deal with the different statements.

12 http://www.bam.org

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Emerging pictures. And so, what data can be found in the archive about a given performance of Danzón? There is data about that performance stemming from material in the Pina Bausch Archive, e.g. date, venue, notes of dancers, but also posters, manuscripts, and related newspaper articles. There are links to the piece Danzón, the cast and other people related to the performance, links to photographs and videos showing the performance, and even links to single scenes as well as links to clips showing those scenes, or manuscript pages describing them. We may even find annotations and memories from dancers and other members of the company, from spectators, and perhaps also comments from researchers who found interesting particularities in the performance. Exploring, reading, and viewing this material about the performance with the help of appropriate tools will support the emergence of a picture that sheds light on many questions. Among them, how it took place, how it was produced, and how it was perceived, what dancers and spectators thought of it, and perhaps even how it was influenced by preceding performances, and how it influenced those that followed.

Status of the Archive Experimental setup. To investigate whether a linked data approach was a suitable base for the digital archive of the Pina Bausch Foundation, we set up an experimental system architecture as shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7: Basic architecture of the system. Data is collected from various data sources and transformed to linked data. With the help of a model, the aggregated data is classified, and then rendered in HTML.

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Data is aggregated from many different sources. For example, the Filemaker Bento database contains data about costumes. It’s also contained in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, the video annotation tool (see Fig. 6), or plain linked data files that are written in RDF13 or Turtle14, e.g. to enter the description of a model. The triple store itself is implemented with the OWLIM lite15 triple store in conjunction with the OpenRDF Sesame Workbench16. HTML rendering is done with a simple data browser developed within the project (see Figure 8). With the help of this browser, one can view, enter, and delete data in the archive. It serves as a tool for internal use only, and is meant to support proofing the data and their linkage with other data. The current data browser can be imagined as a scaffolding to construct the digital archive that will later be replaced by an appropriate facade (see e.g. Fig. 6).

Figure 8: Data browser for the digital archive showing an example of data about a photograph. By clicking on the corresponding links, one can learn more about the photograph itself, the depicted persons, the piece Die sieben Todsünden, the title or scene Habgier, or the photographer Rolf Borzik.

13 http://www.w3.org/standards/techs/rdf#w3c_all 14 http://www.w3.org/TR/turtle/ 15 http://www.ontotext.com/owlim 16 http://www.openrdf.org/

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Modeling and data capturing process. Since the linked data approach does not need an a priori model to capture data, one can separate the data capturing and modeling process. The entry of bulk data about the material of the archive is currently done with the help of Excel spreadsheets. Within the store, data sets are kept in contexts. In our architecture, each context represents a given set of data uploaded by a given author with the help of a spreadsheet. The data capturing and modeling processes are carried out independently of each other. The design of the spreadsheets is defined based solely on the data itself. They contain no modeling information. The modeling itself is done during the uploading of spreadsheets. This procedure allows for easy redesign of the model. A redesigned model can be implemented by simply changing and uploading the new model and then re-uploading the spreadsheets. In this was, the model can be developed further without losing any data capturing work. Data in the archive. To date, more than 94,400 entities have been captured and described with more than 1.7 million triples, among them: 469 persons 54 pieces with 3,086 scenes overall, and 68 different sequences for the scenes of the pieces 3,052 performances 28,626 objects (606 programs, 2,656 videos, 29,033 photographs) 27,846 physical items (606 program booklets, 3,541 video tapes) 28,369 digitized items (2,798 digitizations of videos, 24,415 digitizations of photographs) 346 venues in 162 cities and 46 countries 1,216 costumes 76 props Much work remains in progress: stage sets, show bibles, stage management cue sheets, audio, oral history, press, administrative files, and awards. Current model. Since the most important use of the digital archive is to give every object in the archive its place, and to find it easily again, we first adopted a library or archive perspective. This perspective was realized using the Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records model (FRBR, [IFLA:2009]). The FRBR model distinguishes four levels to describe intellectual or artistic works. On the work level, the work itself is described. In our case, the pieces by Pina Bausch. On the second level, expressions of the work are described. Pieces by Pina Bausch are expressed as e.g. performances. The third level describes manifestations of expressions, as e.g. a video recording of a performance. The forth and last level describes items, as e.g. a physical videotape containing a certain video recording of a performance. The FBRR model helps us to maintain a clear structure of where to hook data about every object in the archive of the Pina Bausch Foundation and its content into the digital archive. As such, we built the Pina Bausch Archive Ontology using the FRBR model as a starting point, and instantiating as well as enhancing it to fit our needs. Thereby, we tried to use as many established vocabularies as possible to ensure adherence to the principles of linked data, as e.g. Dublin Core Metadata Terms17 or Simple Knowledge Organization System18. About half of the triples of the archive were added using the inference process of the triple store based in the Pina Bausch Archive Ontology.

17 http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/ 18 http://www.w3.org/standards/techs/skos#w3c_all

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Discussion Lessons learned. The results of the project allow for some conclusions. We captured a critical amount of data to prove the feasibility and the meaningfulness of the linked data approach for the digital archive of the Pina Bausch Foundation. In particular, the FRBR model kept its promises and allowed us in every case to find an appropriate place to store data about the material. Furthermore, although relatively young compared to relational databases, the underlying technology of the triple store and its surrounding tools proved to be mature and stable. Hence, the experimental setup has been a valuable first step in developing the digital archive, which might be further professionalized by the use of frameworks such as e.g. Callimachus19. The user interface and the visualization, both to enter data as well as to explore data, turned out to be a major challenge. The linked data approach defies common methods to design user interfaces as we could well experience in the project. This is due to the dynamics of a linked data archive where one resource might be linked to only a few other resources whereas another one of the same type might be linked to hundreds of other resources, as e.g. pieces and their performances (see also (Janik: 2011)). Further work has to put a strong focus on that part of the digital archive. What others do. Currently, many initiatives and institutions are exploring the use of linked data in the context of cultural heritage (see e.g. (Doerr: 2009)), and especially focus on how performance art can be preserved with this technology. A very influential platform is Europeana20. It is meant to be the trusted source of cultural heritage, and is financed by the Europeana Foundation and a large number of European cultural institutions, projects and partners. The platform contains millions of items from a range of Europe’s leading galleries, libraries, archives and museums. It will also include performing art supported by the dedicated platform eclap21 (e-library for performing arts). Both platforms are based on linked data. The Digitaler Tanzatlas22 contains information about the personalities, work, and history of dance in Germany, and enables online access to many sources and credentials. It documents the current creation of dance, and sketches a future knowledge network. Items in the Tanzatlas are catalogued with URIs and described via triples (see e.g. the piece La Chute23 from Susanne Linke24). The Dachverband Tanz Deutschland25 recently finished a study about the feasibility of building their archive on linked data (Christen: 2012). These are just some prominent examples, and not an exhaustive list. Since the idea of linked data is to combine all these initiatives and archives, the vocabularies and ontologies used need to merge and consolidate. There is a window of opportunity to participate, and contribute a viewpoint into an ongoing and vivid discussion.

19 http://callimachusproject.org 20 http://europeana.eu 21 http://www.eclap.eu 22 http://tanz2.tanzatlas-deutschland.de 23 http://tanz1.tanzatlas-deutschland.de/xmlui/handle/10886/202?show=full 24 http://tanz1.tanzatlas-deutschland.de/xmlui/handle/10886/164 25 http://www.dachverband-tanz.de

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Summary The Web of Documents converts to a Web of Data. As with the web of documents, some parts of the web of data will be neat, well structured and organized, other parts will be more spontaneous and chaotic. Therefore, it is possible to build a formally clean structured web of data resembling the rigid structure of relational databases, as well as a more semi- or non-structured collection of data. We may use these specific design options to build a digital archive for the Pina Bausch Foundation. In summary, the linked data approach seems to fulfill the requirements given for the digital archive of the Pina Bausch Foundation. By using linked data, and letting the store complement missing links, it is possible to combine local and distributed knowledge consistently. With the help of vocabularies and ontologies to mediate between them, it is possible to develop different perspectives on and interpretations of the material. The concept of contexts helps to track authorship makes it possible to preserve contradictions, even leveling the case of facts. The fact that it is possible to capture data without a priori models allows it to adapt dynamically to changing requirements and conditions. And as an important last point, adhering to the principles of linked data26 ensures that the archive will be easily connected to other linked data archives in the future.

26 http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html

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How To Create An Archive? Sharon Lehner

In 2010 the Pina Bausch Foundation, only months old, began visiting archives in Europe and the United States in order to gather information about how to preserve and make available the work of Pina Bausch: How to create an archive? The architects of this project interrogated the very nature of an archive: What are archives, who do they serve, and how might an archive function in the creative process of the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch? The search for the archive was both theoretical and practical. In the earliest iterations, the Pina Bausch Foundation conceived of a so called living archive. The archive was imagined as a set of ideas, a concept allowing an ongoing and full discussion about how to document and share the work of Pina Bausch. The project was also practical in positing the archive as location and repository for the arrangement and description of physical objects, also practical because the archive must work as the primary resource for the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch in restaging the pieces. Of course the practical application of best practices in the physical collections are intrinsically tied to the ideas and creative process of the living archive. The descriptive tools and methods of archival practices are linked via numerous webs of knowledge and descriptive tools in a theoretical construct. Performing arts archives are complex – we attempt to describe an event that happened in real-time in the past. Performing artists, conscious of the ephemeral ontology of their work, often hyper-document in an attempt to capture the performance and the creative process. A proliferation of documentation and changing technologies over time also mean that we arrange and describe a staggering diversity of materials and media types. And of course, Pina Bausch’s influence on the contemporary performing arts cannot be overstated. The complexity of the archive, the vision of its founders and the importance of the artist, Pina Bausch, meant that an international team of archivists, computer scientists and subject area specialists participated in creating this new living archive. These kinds of collaborations are challenging (sometimes even contentious) but the desire to imagine a new kind of archive pressed experts to expand their own boundaries and to work outside their applied areas of knowledge.

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In this way, the project required reimagined modes of work between experts in archives, dance and computer science. The collaboration included dancers, directors, artists, designers, photographers, writers, students and theorists, to name only a few. The Pina Bausch Archive project became collaboration in documentation, sometimes perhaps mirroring the documentation utilized by the artist in her creative process. Pina Bausch left specific instructions for the structure and purpose of the Archive, and it is the spirit of her wishes, as understood by those working on the archive, directing this project. The ephemeral nature of dance creates an almost obsessive preoccupation with its ontology, making it difficult to begin any discussion of an archive without recounting how performance cannot be captured. So much so that how-to-document-performance or how-performance-cannot be documented has become a discursive academic trope within many disciplines including performance studies, dance studies, theater studies and history to name a few. Artists also wrangle with the construct of documentation of the ephemeral. Art and academic knowledge production circulate in their own economies and archives get formulated as the well where archivists serve up goodies – the primary documents. What are the primary documents of a performance? Nothing lasts forever. Performing artists attempt to capture their work utilizing whatever technologies and methods are available, fully understanding the limits of representation. The anxiety to document creates a dizzying array of material – a proliferation of documents that are already understood to fail. The Society of American Archivists defines archives as: “Materials created or received by a person, family, or organization, public or private, in the conduct of their affairs and preserved because of the enduring value contained in the information they contain or as evidence of the functions and responsibilities of their creator.” Archives, as defined here, are the organic by-products, or traces, of the activities of their creators; the processes of preserving and describing these materials is done after they have been identified as an archive. In a records management model, this process is understood to be a life cycle at the end of which records with “enduring historic value” are accessioned into the archive. In performing arts archives, such as Pina Bausch’s archive, documentation of the work is a deliberate and organized. Documentation for Pina Bausch, and many other performing artists is a tool for creating work technologies utilized for practical purposes. Performance disappears but the process of creating and remembering leaves a mountain of material in its wake.

1 Society of American Archivists, “Statement of Principles” – http://www2.archivists.org/standards/DACS/statement_of_principles [correct at Dec 30, 2013]

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Documentation Strategy and the Living Archive

A recent Google search for “living archive” brought up millions of hits.2 There are multiple projects in institutions as diverse as Stanford University and The Living Archives project at Malmö University. The term is also appropriated in numerous disciplines, everything from open data projects in computer science programs to Asian Art Museums. While the use of the term Living Archive is applied differently across these projects, all of them seem to share the impulse to differentiate their projects from a static repository model for the archive. These living archives claim that theirs is not a “dusty” “locked” or inaccessible repository, somehow not relevant and in service to arcane models of scholarship and institutionalized academic projects. A Living Archive is often characterized as open, collaborative and creative. The Living Archive, as an applied term, seems a bit of a moving target at the moment, a big tent holding many different kinds of collections from dissimilar organizations and individuals. Currently, a Living Archive is more descriptive of what it is not than what it is. Information architects have recently revisited Paul Otlet and the work of the International Institute of Bibliography originating in Brussels in 1895. Otlet, a visionary far ahead of his time, imagined  “discursive information” (Foucault) practices that included linked databases, scholarly communication networks, multimedia hypertext among many other technologies. In the late 19th century Otlet imagined webs of knowledge that current information specialist and scholars are, only now, portraying as tectonic shifts in the way that information is disseminated and compiled. Helen Samuels, and other proponents of Documentation Strategy in archival appraisal practices, challenged the notion that archives were somehow neutral, indifferent and therefore objective repositories, pristine entities with minimal intervention and interpretation from the archivist and creators who interpret them. Documentation Strategy is “a plan formulated to assure the documentation of an ongoing issue, activity or geographic area.” It presupposes that archives are created within systems and that multiple collaborators are needed in order to represent the functions of that creator or institution. Documentation Strategy claims that archivists, creators, subject area specialists, and others may narrate, curate and guide future users of an archive though collections. Documentation Strategy hopes to make all of these processes transparent. In borrowing from two formulations of “documentation” we might better understand the approach to conceptualize the Pina Bausch Archive, and the ongoing work in this project. Otlet will allow us to examine how documentation theories drive the creation of networks of discovery tools in order to illuminate the processes of creating a dance. Archival strategies for documentation might help gather a multifocal and dynamic representation of the collaborators in creating a Pina Bausch work. Taken together, these concepts help us to visualize a performance archive that comprehends both the limits of representation while at the same time reaching beyond what is normally achieved in a more traditional approach to an archival repository.

2 A Google search on ‘living archive’ brought up more than 682,000,000 hits. [correct at: Dec 30, 2013]

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Archival Practice and Documentation Strategies at the Pina Bausch Archive The collaborators working on the Pina Bausch Archive project understood the complexity of “archiving” the work of Pina Bausch from the start. Guides and other documents that described the collections were created employing documentation strategies. These guides and descriptions endeavored to portray not only the physical items held in the collections but also to show how they related to performance in all of its involvedness.  A documentation approach served as a guide toward inclusion, openness and the creation of descriptive tools that highlighted the complexity of the experience of a performance. In this way, a fuller picture of the performance and the creative process would be possible. The hope was that a dynamic archive of Pina Bausch would give artists the tools to restage the pieces, and scholars, students and fans would experience a more nuanced understanding of the work. In an essay published for the 1985 BAM Journal “On The Next Wave” Pina Bausch was quoted as saying: It sounds funny to say it, but our work is a mixture of elements. I don’t know what it is. They dance; people talk; others sing. We use actors, too. And we use musicians in the works. It’s theater, really. For us, the stage – the settings – are important, too. We aren’t just dancing in a room, in a space. Where it is, the location, the atmosphere where the movement happens, that matters in my works. Pina Bausch stated clearly that she did not know how to reduce the work to a genre description. On the one hand, the performance exists as a temporary experience embodied by an audience member. What does the “audience” grasp: A set of ideas, images, feelings, liminal unspoken, transient notions that cannot be captured in an archive. Pina Bausch also described some of the performance elements such as stage settings and music. Some of the elements of the performance such as costumes, props, lighting plots and so on are more easily accessioned into a physical or digital archive. For example all of the costumes from each of the productions were expertly photographed, cataloged and uploaded into a linked data discovery tool. In order to complete the documentation of this particular physical performance element, metadata was created utilizing existing and local standards. This metadata and the digital surrogates were uploaded into the database and related though numerous connections to other performance elements. All of the performance elements will be documented in this way. The physical collections, performance elements, used onstage during performances include, among other things, sets, costumes, props, puppets, and live animals. Capturing these series for the archive is further complicated by the fact that many of them are still in use by the Tanztheater. It is easy enough to claim that the experience of the performance is lost. However, at the heart of the documentation approach techniques and technologies are employed in order to capture what is embodied. Participants, performers and audience should be documented. Again, Pina Bauch tells us: “It is an environment, and atmosphere.” Memories, with all of their limits, are being taken using oral histories and interviews. Written and personal narratives literally flesh out the record.

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Performance Documentation Programs and playbills, considered ephemeral publications in most archives, play a critical role in a performance archive. The data captured from programs become a kind of backbone within a discovery tool such as a database, or in this case a linked data environment, creating a timeline of events providing information about collaborators, performers, venues, geographical locations and other important information. This data was modeled according to existing and local standards but built primarily on FRBR (Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records). The conceptual entity-relationship model developed by IFLA, provides the logical structure needed to catalog performance. The FRBR model consists of three groups of entities. Group one are the foundation of the FRBR model. They comprise the products of intellectual or artistic endeavor and are best suited to describe performance records (cit). These entities are work, expression, manifestation and item (WEMI). As stated above, performance cataloging involves a series of interconnected records. By utilizing the FRBR group of entities, the cataloger can express the relationship between the interconnected records hierarchically with the work entity as the top of the hierarchy followed by expression, manifestation and then item. Essentially the FRBR model is a holistic approach to discovery and access. By associating a performance record with an appropriate entity, the relationships between the entities provide links that can facilitate navigating through the hierarchy (cit). This model becomes particularly important when applied in a linked data environment such as the discovery tool developed for the Pina Bausch Archive. Promotional materials such as programs, brochures, posters, photographs, and performance video are among the most heavily requested and heavily used. Because they are created as forward-facing, publishable materials are often polished, high-quality and considered more or less official representations of the performance. Materials that document the performance comprise the bulk of many collections held within larger institutional repositories. These materials, as the official record of the performance, are the most likely to be saved by the creators and to be transferred into other archives. In the Pina Bausch Archive, these collections have been re-housed, digitized and cataloged. Digital surrogates have been uploaded into the database and are related to the backbone created by metadata entered from the program series. However, because a documentation strategy drives this project, these materials are being curated, narrated and interpreted as they are being processed. For example, a video annotation tool is being developed that will utilize a relational database to enter annotations directly into the linked data tool. The annotation process itself precedes the development of a tool. For several years, dancers, selected by Pina Bausch, have been screening video according to several criteria. Their annotations will be the first but additional collaborators and other dances may add comments that can be included in the archive. In another instances, members of the Tanztheater identify dancers pictured in images.

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The Creative Process as Documentation Much has been written in this volume (and elsewhere) describing Pina Bausch’s creative process, how the pieces were constructed. While some of her work reinterprets existing scripts or scores, often her pieces were built from the ground-up exploring questions about life. I won’t recount the mechanics. However, it is important to note that Pina Bausch employed documentation strategies and archival principles throughout her creative processes. Pieces were meticulously recorded employing many media formats including written notes and notebooks, video recordings of rehearsals, photographs and other images that were used both to inspire and as performance elements, dancers notes, notebooks created by assistants to record the process of building a piece, music and much more. Moreover, these documents were arranged according to the wishes of Pina Bausch. Again, artists understand the ephemeral nature of their work and know how to best describe and preserve it. Archives are an essential part of their creative process. So, what are the primary documents of a Pina Bausch piece? A three-camera shoot, a program from a Japanese premiere, a rehearsal video on super 8, a review from The New York Times, a Fado love song, a poodle, a flower, water, a stone, a shoe, a multi-purpose room. Is it too easy or obvious to say that performance is documentation: A long list of material objects, and sounds and smells and feelings. Objects are about story-telling. I am giving you this because I love you. Or because it was given to me. Because you will care for it. Because it will complicate your life. Because it will make someone else envious. There is no easy story in legacy. What is remembered and what is forgotten?3  

3 Edmund de Waal: The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss, New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2010.

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Reconstruction as a Creative Process. Pina Bausch’s Tannhäuser Bacchanal: 1972 – 2004 – 2013. A Report from the Rehearsals Stephan Brinkmann

The 1972 Bacchanal for Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser is one of two choreographies which Arno Wüstenhöfer, director of the Wuppertal theatres, commissioned from Pina Bausch. He wanted to see, “whether she could create forms on a large scale for a large space”. (Arno Wüstenhöfer quoted in Schlicher 1987: 108)1 A year earlier, Wüstenhöfer had commissioned Aktionen für Tänzer (‘Actions for dancers’), featuring the Folkwang Ballett for the first time in Wuppertal. Pina Bausch already knew the Bacchanal music from Act I, Scene 1 of Tannhäuser, set beneath the ‘Venusberg’. During her time in New York with the Metropolitan Opera House Ballet, she had danced one of the three graces in a Tannhäuser production. (Linsel 2013: 45) Pina Bausch’s version of the Bacchanal, which she created with the Folkwang Ballett and dance students from the Folkwang School in Essen, finally convinced Wüstenhöfer to give her the post of ballet director at the Wuppertal theatres. Despite wavering for a long time, in the end she took up Wüstenhöfer’s offer. “I might as well give it a try,” she apparently said to him. (Linsel 2013: 56) Arno Wüstenhöfer wasn’t the only person impressed by the Bacchanal. The Kölner Stadtanzeiger claimed Pina Bausch had produced her best choreography yet, and according to the Frankfurter Rundschau the performance “stood out a mile from the rest of West German opera-ballet – and not just in terms of the technical quality”. (Reinhard Beuth in the Kölner Stadtanzeiger, March 21, 1972; Ulrich Schreiber in the Frankfurter Rundschau, March 25, 1972) Although the Rheinische Post saw “lots of gymnastics but little eroticism” (Heinrich von Lüttwitz in the Rheinische Post, March 15, 1972), people were now talking about Pina Bausch outside the Folkwang School context. She had made an overwhelmingly positive impression.

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The Bacchanal vanished from the repertoire when the new Tanztheater Wuppertal was founded; the opera production had reached the end of its run and the dancers who had performed the Bacchanal were not all Tanztheater Wuppertal members. The ten-minute choreography was too short to be performed on its own and with twenty-three roles it could only be realised with a larger ensemble. It was not till 2004 that it was performed again, as part of the NRW International Dance Festival, twice in the new auditorium at the Folkwang University and once at the Schauspielhaus Wuppertal. Why did Pina Bausch revive this piece, thirty years later? “She liked to challenge herself by confronting her previous work,” says the Tanztheater Wuppertal dancer Barbara Kaufmann. “She was often curious to see things again.” She adds that Pina Bausch always saw the Tannhäuser Bacchanal as the forerunner of her Sacre du Printemps, the choreography which since 1975 has played a significant role in shaping the Tanztheater Wuppertal’s image, and one of the pieces most often performed during the company’s forty-year existence. The first reconstruction, with students from the Folkwang University and members of the Folkwang Dance Studio, took a whole year, from 2003 to 2004. Using blurred, thirty-year-old videos, handwritten notes by Pina Bausch, and the notes she had made in the Wagner score, the Bacchanal was recreated with Barbara Kaufmann leading the rehearsals. Former Tanztheater Wuppertal member Marigia Maggipinto had already begun deciphering the old videos and making initial notes. In 2003 Barbara Kaufmann was able to take advantage of this preliminary work and continue it, assisted by Folkwang alumna Nina Dipla. At the beginning, Barbara Kaufmann said that everyone was taught movements from the piece before roles were allocated. Then, using the video recordings, the trajectories and positioning of each dancer were determined and the students were given individual roles. There were two videos they used mainly, she recalled “On one of them you could more or less see something but you couldn’t hear much; it was fuzzy but better than nothing. On the other you could hear the music pretty well, but you really couldn’t see much.” Later on during the period of deciphering and piecing together, Pina Bausch joined them, showing them movements and helping them with the music, constantly saying either “yes I recognise that” or “I don’t recognise that”. She then took a third video out of her bag, Barbara Kaufmann recalls, grinning. In the process Pina Bausch remembered all her movements and then focussed on explaining the details to the dancers, giving them the chance to learn the movements personally from her and then continue rehearsing the piece together. The idea of reviving the Bacchanal in 2013 and performing it on stage for the third time arose during initial preparations for the fourth Biennale Tanzausbildung, (‘dance education biennale’) which took place in February 2014 at the Paluccaschule für Tanz, Dresden. Each of the state-run educational establishments participating presented itself in public with a short programme relating to the biennale theme and to itself as an institution. The theme chosen for the 2014 biennale was “Education – a creative process”, which the Tannhäuser choreography clearly illustrates. The Bacchanal is a symbol for Pina Bausch’s entry into the professional theatre world, with all its potential – and its limits. And back when it was originally premiered, dance students were involved, giving them the chance to experience the professional world of a municipal theatre. The Folkwang Dance Studio (Folkwang Tanzstudio, then known as the Folkwang Ballett, involved both in 1972 and 2004) is a company of ten dancers, based for fifty years at the Folkwang University (previously the Folkwang School). It assists Folkwang graduates and other young dancers in entering the professional world of dance as well as supporting their creative development. Individual creativity is an issue here as any reconstruction both fuels and demands creative energy from its dancers. Asked about the question of creative processes during a reconstruction, Barbara Kaufmann says that it is not only a case of re-enacting movements which already exist using the body, instead, above all, the point is to give them artistic life: “The power of the imagination has to come from within. I think it’s important for young dancers to have the courage to see themselves as artists and create something.” The third-year dance student Lea Benecke described the learning process similarly: “We learned how to make an image, to create an atmosphere.”

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Following her death in 2009, the second reconstruction of the Tannhäuser Bacchanal had to take place without Pina Bausch and with completely different dance students. It was clear that it could not happen without Barbara Kaufmann however. She had directed the first reconstruction and prepared it for performance together with Pina Bausch. Not only had she retained her own personal notes and Pina Bausch’s, she had also acquired first hand information on the piece and the movements. As a long-time Tanztheater Wuppertal dancer she knew all Pina Bausch’s other choreographies as well, had led rehearsals for many pieces, such as Le Sacre du Printemps and Iphigenie auf Tauris, and supervised new productions. She was thus strongly familiar with Pina Bausch’s physical language. I first saw the choreography in October 2004 in Essen, later at the Schauspielhaus Wuppertal, and till then had known it only through hearsay as the piece which had landed Pina Bausch the job of ballet director in Wuppertal. It was shown in October 2004 together with Le Sacre du Printemps in a double bill in Essen, so the dancers performing Sacre, of which I was one, got to watch the dress rehearsal of the Tannhäuser Bacchanal. I was impressed by the composition and musicality of the choreography immediately. “Her grasp of polyphony is perfect. I haven’t seen anything like it anywhere,” Hans Züllig, former head of the dance department at Folkwang University, once said about Pina Bausch’s dance theatre. (Hans Züllig quoted by Kay Kirchmann) Züllig’s description applies even more obviously to her earlier works, to which the Tannhäuser Bacchanal belongs: pure dance pieces in the American and German traditions of Modern Dance and Ausdruckstanz (‘expressive dance’), with sophisticated, highly musical structures. In terms of musicality and polyphony, the Tannhäuser Bacchanal is a prime example, given that it uses twenty-three dancers, all moving simultaneously but very differently to Wagner’s romantic, restless music. Back then, in 2004, I recognised many things familiar from years of dancing Sacre: the round, fluid arm forms, the powerful movements emanating from the centre of the body, the occasional lift, and above all, Pina Bausch’s immense stamina, visible and tangible in this composition. During a meeting in January 2013 between the Tanztheater Wuppertal directors and the Pina Bausch Foundation it was agreed that rehearsals would take place between April 17 and May 14, 2013. These four weeks were the only time available to reconstruct the piece. We – Barbara Kaufmann and I – had to learn it first, then teach it to the students. From mid May Barbara would then be busy with Tanztheater Wuppertal rehearsals and shows, and I was to continue leading the rehearsals for the Bacchanal and preparing it for the stage alone. The first run of performances had been planned for the Folkwang University’s 2013 Tanzabend festival in mid June. Thus we would already have reconstructed and performed the piece before it travelled to Dresden in February 2014.

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Observing and Learning Barbara and I taught ourselves the piece first before rehearsing it with the students, to avoid involving them in the lengthy process of deciphering videos. This saved us a lot of time. We met around fifteen times in February and March 2013 and learned each dancer’s part. Within a unit of eight bars this often meant having to identify five to ten different movement phrases on the video, then learning them and retaining them, as the dancers’ actions are by no means all synchronous. Although there are larger groups who move synchronously for brief moments, these groups soon break up or form new constellations within the group. An immense help, alongside Barbara’s 2004 notes, were the many videos recorded at the performances in Essen and Wuppertal during the dance festival, in which all the dancers’ movements, positions and postures could readily be identified. Occasionally we also consulted the old videos from the 1970s. Everything we learned, we noted down again – each using their own system and their own language, although for some movements we agreed on terms, such as: “Arm-Arm”, “Malou” or “first male position”. These notes helped me run the later rehearsals more quickly and efficiently. Barbara had broken the piece down into eight parts last time, and we used this structure again. Each part was then subdivided again into units of eight, ten or four beats of Wagner’s music, the first part included, for instance: the first to third eight, first four, fourth eight, first ten, fifth and sixth eights, second four, second ten, third four, seventh to ninth eights. We identified the movements for each of these periods of time, whether danced solo or in synchrony. Each dancer needed to know what they were to do when, and where they should be at every moment. It was our job to explain to twenty-three dancers which movements they should make and which directions they should take through the space. In the first part, the action mostly involves the men, while the women rise from the floor then sink again. In Tannhäuser, as in Sacre later, the men often use movements with firm accents at the end, known technically as a ‘terminal accents’. They allow energy and focus to be expressed and Pina Bausch often used them when she choreographed for men. My experiences of Sacre were very useful in understanding and dancing this section, as there too there are lots of accents at the end of the movements and even in this initial phase of observing and learning. I could already feel physically that the Tannhäuser Bacchanal was the forerunner of Sacre. There are six men in the Bacchanal and for the first part we had to learn six different male roles, alongside the isolated actions of the women on the floor and two female soloist roles. Piece by piece we worked our way through it. We spent less time on some sections at this stage, such as the lifts involving five pairs in the third part; we decided not to learn these ourselves but to analyse them with the students and so involve them directly in the process of reconstruction. For the lifts there were also notes, in some cases even small hand-sketched pin-man figures in the relevant positions. Looking back, Just Berger, a third-year dance student, describes the reconstruction of the lifts as equally creative, “because you were never a hundred percent sure where you should hold someone; each body has a different centre of gravity.” The reconstruction was also a learning process for us, the rehearsal directors. The shared process of searching and discovering is an important and dynamic part of the work,” Barbara Kaufmann says about this phase, and the thorough preparation was also important – alongside the dialogue between the people rediscovering the movements. As a final note, when one works on her movements and her pieces, Pina Bausch becomes physically tangible; she is present in the movements and so remains an active force through her work.

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Transferring Before the rehearsals with the students began, in mid April, we managed to enlist Irene Ebel as our assistant for the reconstruction. Irene had performed the Bacchanal in 2004 as a Folkwang Dance Studio dancer, then taking the role originally danced by Catherine Denisot. She was one of the dancers who had performed some of the complex lifts and it was useful to have her assistance in rediscovering the pair-lifts. Before we began, Barbara and I already gave some thought to which students should play which parts, so we could allocate roles for the choreography more quickly. The result was long lists of who had danced in 1972 and 2004 and who should take over in 2013: Anna – Lotte – Ophelia, Ivan – Ben – Jonas, Tjitske – Thusnelda – Linda, or Carlos – Jae Won – Just. When they were available, the students were able to refer to their predecessors’ notes. Linda Brodhag, masters student on the dance composition course, said that the notes by Thusnelda Mercy, who had danced her role in 2004, helped her execute the movements much more precisely. To give all the students involved the chance to learn the piece, we cast some of the male roles twice, as there were more men in the group than male roles in the choreography. The rehearsal group included postgraduates and students from the second and third years of the dance degree, from Germany, Switzerland, China, Taiwan, Italy, France, Iran, Brazil and Mexico. The Folkwang Dance Studio was not involved this time. We rehearsed for three hours a day, and the students continued the training and courses required as part of their studies alongside this. We reserved Saturdays for pair-lifts and invited only the dancers who needed to learn them, not the entire group. Although Barbara and I were well prepared, it was impossible to avoid having to check some movements or positions against the videos. Barbara had her computer with her and I had a tablet computer in my hand, which proved very useful, as it saved us all walking over to the video player. Instead I took the computer to the dancers. We tried not to compare the actual execution of the movements and the videos too often, so that the students could gain their own sense of the movements and the scene as a whole. We only showed them a video of the entire piece after the first week of rehearsals. They found the original videos from the 1970s particularly fascinating. “Knowing that this is a reconstruction of a piece first premiered several decades ago made the work all the more exciting to me. Sometimes we were able to see recordings of the original performances,” says Jan Möllmer, third-year dance student. Many of the students appreciated the experience of using dance techniques learned at college in an actual choreography. “Finally we get to apply the things we’ve been learning at the Folkwang to a real piece,” says Linda Brodhag, and Just Berger explained that during the Tannhäuser rehearsals, he realised the point of all the exercises they did in class. “We got the chance to become more familiar with an artistic vocabulary that we used until now just in the normal daily class”, says Maria Giovanna Delle Donne, also in her third year at the Folkwang, describing the opportunity provided by working on the Tannhäuser Bacchanal reconstruction. The techniques they had acquired had become a basis on which to gain new experiences. “From the lessons I’m familiar with the forms and skills most of the movements in the Bacchanal are based on,” says Jan Möllmer on the relationship between dance technique and their work on the Tannhäuser choreography, “and yet putting them into practice proved a very different, new kind of challenge for me.”

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Rehearsing demanded patience too. “The length of the rehearsals often tested my patience. Gradually this encouraged me to occupy myself. I repeated movements quietly on my own, till they were lodged in my body’s memory,” Lea Benecke says. Third-year student Tim Cecatka, also emphasises that you had to be very patient during rehearsals: “Waiting quietly till it’s your turn, and having patience with your own learning process.” The students were thus not only learning pre-existing movements; they also had to discover how they could deal constructively with a rehearsal situation and continue working on the movements self-sufficiently. “The way the work was brought, allowed me to swallow it fast and to get into the feeling of the movement by working on it alone”, says second-year student Leonor Clary, describing the phase during which the choreography was taught. Each of the students had to develop individual strategies for learning and remembering, but at the same time coordinate their own learning process with the demands the group made on the individual. Dancers, says Sigurd Leeder, partner of Folkwang co-founder Kurt Jooss, are above all part of a group, an awareness all the students gained. (Sigurd Leeder quoted by Müller 2001: 19) Working in an ensemble was an amazing experience, says Tim Cecatka, and Lea Benecke also described the choreography above all in terms of the space the group were given. The Bacchanal was taught largely by Barbara and myself, as rehearsal leaders, with the aid of videos, but other people with first-hand experience were also sometimes present. Susanne Linke, who danced in the original production in 1972 and later became head of the Folkwang Dance Studio, from 1975 to 1985, was guest choreographer at the Folkwang dance department during our rehearsals and sometimes visited. She offered suggestions, recalled specific details of the movements and the choreography, and gave us feedback on how well she thought the reconstruction was going. She had rehearsed the Tannhäuser Bacchanal with Pina Bausch forty years earlier, in room 2 of the Folkwang dance department, and so alongside watching the original recordings from the 1970s, the students were able to meet a dancer who had helped create the piece and had danced it on the stage of Wuppertal Opera House. Some of our rehearsals were in room 2, the same space used back then. As well as Susanne Linke, during the rehearsal period I also met Tjitske Broersma, who had danced with Pina Bausch back in Essen at the Folkwang School, and later with the Tanztheater Wuppertal. In the Bacchanal she had danced one of the two solo female roles. During the reconstruction of another Pina Bausch piece, she visited my dance classes, and immediately recognised a small phrase from the Bacchanal I was practicing with the students. Meeting her former dancers makes it clear that working with Pina Bausch was a very long-term experience, creating a close relationship with the work. It only took one re-encounter with a piece to rekindle admiration for it. The only explanation for this is that her works required the dancers performing them to put something of themselves into the choreographies instead of simply executing or repeating movements. “I noticed that there are no static moments within the movements,” Jan Möllmer says. “As a dancer in the Tannhäuser Bacchanal it was always my job to bring life to the movements. At these moments I don’t think you can just copy. Something of me, whether an idea, a feeling, or some kind of energy, needs to be involved so that the movement becomes living. For me it was a very creative task, because at that moment I was really required to give something of myself.” Barbara’s final rehearsal day in Essen was 14 May. Together we had succeeded in reconstructing the Tannhäuser Bacchanal in the four weeks allotted, and had held several run-throughs before Barbara left us. It was also a great help that although the date for the performance was still over a month away, we were able to practice on stage in the university’s new auditorium for two days before she left. This enabled the dancers to get a feeling for the space and practice all the entrances and exits. The rehearsals continued, but the third-years were also creating another choreography, so we worked just two or three times a week on the Bacchanal from mid May to mid June.

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Performance During on-stage rehearsals leading up to the performances – as in the rehearsal room – we sometimes separated out individual phrases and I watched just one group or one pair before we let the scene run in its entire complexity. We often counted along, so that the sequences of movement could be slowed down. All the dancers had to be placed precisely, at each moment, so that the movements in the space and the spatial relationships between the dancers were right and everyone was visible. The videos from 2004 were useful in this situation too. There was always room for improvement, and running through movements and formations repeatedly demanded patience and motivation from everyone involved. “The great thing about Pina is that there is always something you can improve,” Lutz Förster, long-serving Tanztheater Wuppertal dancer and now the artistic director, said of working with Pina Bausch. (Lutz Förster quoted by Anne Linsel) Instead of ‘improve’ you could also say ‘refine’. And a more refined, precise approach is also what working on Pina Bausch’s pieces teaches you, what the pieces themselves teach. Barbara Kaufmann names precision and attention to detail as qualities characterising Pina Bausch’s work. Above all, it is her statement, “feelings are something very precise”, which Barbara applies to her own rehearsal work. The emotional precision Pina Bausch talked about can be achieved through the precise execution of movements. The dancer Gitta Barthel described her emotional bond with Le Sacre du Printemps in an interview in the same terms: “For instance when I dance a movement which is central, goes inwards, and has an accent, I begin to sense a self-destructive energy growing inside me. But not because I have decided, ‘now I’m going to show that I am destroying myself.’ When I do the relevant movement, I enter the state it is intended to express.” (Gitta Barthel quoted in Klein 2007: 77) This relationship between the emotional and the physical is a central experience in Pina Bausch’s work, as Leonor Clary’s answer to the question what she learned from the Bacchanal shows: “It brought me a bigger comprehension of the link between emotion and movement.” Even dancers who never worked directly with the Pina Bausch can experience this intense relationship, because the feelings are retained in the work, held by the movements. Just Berger describes a similar experience: “I’m beginning to understand why everyone who worked with Pina speaks so highly of her – of course I don’t know anything about her personality as I never met her – but her pieces alone get inside you.” In the run-up to the performances the main task was to encourage the students to go beyond simply executing the movements correctly. “The pieces want something,” Pina Bausch once said in an interview about her works. (Pina Bausch quoted by Kay Kirchmann) The Bacchanal must be viewed in the context of the opera Tannhäuser, but it also stands independently; it represents the world of “never-ending amorous pleasures”. (Pahlen 2008: 136) In her choreography for the Bacchanal Pina Bausch does not simply follow Wagner’s musical guidelines, she dramatises the subject. While she doesn’t stick to the figures in Wagner’s stage directions in her version of the scene, she does adopt some of its motifs for her movements, such as the amoretti wreathing on the floor, the bacchantes and youths fleeing and searching, or the leaping faun. Right from the first rehearsal we discussed the choreography in terms of motivation, although initially our focus was on the precise execution of movements. I took a copy of the Tannhäuser libretto to one of the onstage rehearsals. One of the students read the directions for the Bacchanal: “They pair off then intermingle; pursuits, flights and seductive teasing liven up the dance.” (Ibid: 21) Another passage reads: “From the far distance a wild gang of bacchantes approach, bursting through the ranks of amorous couples and inciting them to wilder pleasures. With motions of ecstatic drunkenness the bacchantes inspire the lovers to greater excesses of abandonment.” (Ibid: 23) It continues: “The general tumult reaches a frenzied climax.” (Ibid.) I hoped this information on the content of the scene would help the students engage more with it, filling the choreographic form

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with their own life and establishing a link between this content and their rendering of it as dancers. The students’ comments showed that they were indeed addressing the scene’s content: “I felt the presence of a big symbol hiding behind the story of Tannhäuser auf dem Venusberg and that helped a lot to be convinced by the true feelings that come through the whole body. Not only dancing it but also watching it”, said Leonor Clary, describing her experience of the scene, and Just Berger said: “We were able to enter the roles of the youths, nymphs and other creatures.” It was equally important to keep engaging with Wagner’s music; its sensuality and ecstasy needed to be felt through the dancers’ bodies, as well as its sensitivity. With Sacre Pina Bausch often said to the dancers: “You are the music!” And I used this sentence with the students as it clearly also applies to Wagner’s Bacchanal score. Pina Bausch’s way of working with music was certainly not to count the beats mechanically. She often worked with the libretto to a piece of music, as with Iphigenie auf Tauris, and thought more in musical phrases than isolated bars. Describing the work on Iphigenie auf Tauris, Barbara Kaufmann said that the dancers were asked to give form to the words “ein Laster befleckt” (‘a vice sullies ...’) in the way a singer would sing them. Many former Sacre dancers say they never counted out the beats or worked in separate bars; right from the start the music was treated as a whole and they ‘sung along’ in their heads rather than counting time. This shows clearly how capable Pina Bausch was of understanding and choreographing music not just formally and analytically, but also dynamically and melodically. Following the Bacchanal, scene one of Tannhäuser ends with a chorus of sirens, singing as if from far away: “Come to the strand/ Draw near the land / where in the arms / of glowing love / blissful warmth / will still your urges” (Pahlen 2008: 27). In Pina Bausch’s choreography all the dancers still on stage build a group during the chorus and exit in slow, fluid movements, as if breathing together. Here too it is barely possible to count to the music. The dancers have to listen to it and harmonise their movements to it, above and beyond any metre. Maybe Dagmar Schenk was thinking of this final moment when she described the 2013 performance in Essen: “Music and dance are one. Pure beauty at the Venusberg.” (Dagmar Schenk-Güllich in the WAZ, June 21, 2013) The dance students certainly appreciated the musicality of the choreography. “Working with Tannhäuser was incredibly beautiful for me, because the movements harmonise so well with the music,” Just Berger explained, and Maria Giovanna Delle Donne added: “The connection between the music and the choreography is particularly strong, so the awareness of the first made the execution of the second more secure.” Despite having to conform to its formal, thematic and musical requirements, the piece ultimately also gave the students the chance to learn something about themselves. “What did you learn from working on Tannhäuser?” I asked them a few weeks after the performances. “First and foremost, more about myself,” Jan Möllmer answered. “Who I am, what I can and can’t do, where my boundaries are, or that I could now probably go further than I did during the Tannhäuser work.” Several of the dancers from the original 1972 production came to the June 2013 performances. Among them were Susanne Linke, Catherine Denisot, Frances Carty and Alicia Quarg-Goldfarb. After the performances, they reminisced about who had danced which part forty years earlier. Some former Folkwang Dance Studio members and Folkwang University alumni who had danced in the production ten years earlier also came. It seems that when you have once come into contact with Pina Bausch’s work, the enthusiasm, commitment and the sense of having been part of a special œuvre remain. If we succeed in passing this on to future generations too, then we will have achieved a great deal, above and beyond the work of Pina Bausch. Barbara says she hopes the students have had the experience of discovering something about themselves they didn’t know before. “New territory, above all else.” Pina Bausch’s work preserves this new territory for the future too.

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Conclusion How can we summarise our reasons for viewing reconstruction as a creative process? The description of the Tannhäuser Bacchanal reconstruction above shows that during the working process and while performing to an audience, above all it is relationships which are created. This is a process which can be understood as creative. One of the relationships the dancers establish is the relationship between a dance technique learned in the process of education, and its use in a choreography. In addition, individual strategies for learning and remembering must be developed and coordinated with the demands of the group. Problems must be identified and solutions found. The relationship between past and present is established through the dancers, who use the knowledge transported by the choreography and bring it into the here and now. The dancers are required to establish a relationship between themselves and the role they are to play by addressing the requirements of the piece and fulfilling them formally, emotionally and dynamically. Although ostensibly a reconstruction may seem like a repetition of the past, precisely what it demands is to discover something new in the repetition, and to accept the challenge of extracting something unique from the familiar. The relationship between emotion and movement, between movement and music, and between content and expression, are further links which must be found and formed during a reconstruction. It thus offers the dancers a wealth of potential for imagining, inventing, generating and developing. Of course it is not a case of generating new physical movements, because these have already been provided by the choreographer. The imaginative energy goes into the development of relationships to achieve creativity and freedom. Being creative does not exclusively mean inventing something new. Instead it also means being aware of existing potential and making a choice. Third-year dance student Lola Villegas described this choice as: “Because suddenly you just stand there naked with the option of closing yourself or to expand and feel free.”

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References Allemang, Dean, Hendler, James: Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist – Effective Modeling in RDFS and OWL, Burlington: Morgan Kaufmann Publ., 2nd ed., 2011 [Allemang: 2011] Barthel, Gitta, Klein, Gabriele: “Intermezzo. Die Performanz des Rituals. Gabriele Klein im Gespräch mit Gitta Barthel”, in: Brandstetter, Gabriele, Klein, Gabriele (eds.): Methoden der Tanzwissenschaft. Modellanalysen zu Pina Bauschs „Le Sacre du Printemps“, Bielefeld: transcript, 2007, pp. 75–81 Beuth, Reinhard: “Schöne Bilder der Scheußlichkeit. Die Wuppertaler Tannhäuser-Inszenierung”, in: Kölner Stadtanzeiger, March 21, 1972 Christen, Michael: Konzept zur Institutsübergreifenden Vernetzbarkeit, Dachverband Tanz Deutschland, 2012, http://www.dachverband-tanz.de/pdf/MChristen-Bestandsanalyse-Tanzfilmarchive%2020120420.pdf [Christen: 2012] Doerr, Martin: “Ontologies for Cultural Heritage”. In: Staab Steffen, Studer Rudi (eds.): Handbook on Ontologies, Berlin, Heidenberg, Springer, 2009, pp. 463–488 [Doerr: 2009] IFLA Study Group on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records: Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, Final Report, International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, 2009 [IFLA: 2009] Janik, Maciej, Scherp, Ansgar, Staab, Steffen: “The Semantic Web: Collective Intelligence on the Web”, Informatik Spektrum 35 (5), 2011, p. 469–483 [ Janik: 2011] Linsel, Anne: Pina Bausch. Bilder eines Lebens, Hamburg: Edel, 2013 Lüttwitz, Heinrich von: “Hugh Beresfords Debüt als Tenor. Sein erster Tannhäuser in Wuppertal vor den Bayreuther Festspielen / Optischer Mischmasch”, in: Rheinische Post, March 15, 1972 Müller, Grete: Sigurd Leeder. Tänzer, Pädagoge und Choreograf. Leben und Werk, Herisau: Appenzeller, 2001 Pahlen, Kurt: Richard Wagner, “Tannhäuser”. Textbuch, Einführung und Kommentar, Mainz: Schott, 2008 Schenk-Güllich, Dagmar: “Zuckende Körper und ihre Geheimsprache. Folkwang Tanzabend mit einer Wiedereinstudierung von Pina Bausch und drei Uraufführungen”, in: Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, June 21, 2013 Schlicher, Susanne: TanzTheater. Traditionen und Freiheiten. Pina Bausch, Gerhard Bohner, Reinhild Hoffmann, Hans Kresnik, Susanne Linke, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1987 Schreiber, Ulrich: “Anriß und Widerstand des Systems. Bergs Lulu in Köln – Wagners Tannhäuser in Wuppertal” in: Frankfurter Rundschau, March 25, 1972

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de Waal, Edmund: The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss, New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2010 Walter, Nataly, Bausch, Salomon (eds.): Progress Report No.1, Pina Bausch Foundation, 2011, http://www.pinabausch.org/assets/Progress_Report_PBF_2011_web.pdf [PBF: 2011]

Films Bilder aus den Stücken von Pina Bausch (1990, Kay Kirchmann) Pina Bausch (2006, Anne Linsel)

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3 It’s Personal – Searching for a Living Archive

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Bausch’s American Legacy Royd Climenhaga

German and American Traditions America has always been a step behind in appreciating the impact of Pina Bausch’s work. Bausch’s American debut was a full ten years after she first started creating work with Tanztheater Wuppertal, and was a world away in terms of the company’s growth from the first more conventionally dance structured Gluck operas, to the beginnings of a new aesthetic formation in pieces like Kontakthof, Arien and 1980, that were shown in the company’s first visits to America. American audiences also lacked the context necessary to assimilate what they saw at the company’s appearance at the Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles in 1984 and subsequent revelatory trips to BAM in New York City in 1984 and 1985. European audiences were able to see how those early works came out of the ballet tradition and yet challenged dance structure (though they did not always respond favorably), and after initial resistance, had come to understand the meticulous crafting of the groundbreaking works of the late 1970s. Americans saw the new work as formless, repetitive, and lacking in the pure movement values to which they had become accustomed. Beyond recognizing Bausch’s own development, American audiences were also unfamiliar with the German dance traditions out of which Bausch’s work grew, and the recent history of German ballet during the post-war reconstruction period. Germany’s ballet boom in the 1950s extended the potential for large-scale concert dance that raised thematic and contextual questions, and established productive homes for innovators through the vast repertory system that was put in place during the post-war years. In America, however, while there were some cross-overs between the ballet world and more popular dance forms by Jerome Robbins and Paul Taylor, ballet and Modern dance remained distinct, with different training programs and vastly different means of production. German artists were also coming out of a different development and production model, and were interested in exploring new forms on stage, while American’s exploratory process was much smaller in scope and far more concerned with form. In short, Germany and Europe in general were in position to accept Bausch’s innovations and build on them to create a new approach to the stage, while American dancers, and audiences, just could not see the potential for the work to take root, let alone flourish on American soil.

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American choreographers and dancers were battling within the contested terrain of the Post-Modern Dance explosion when Bausch’s work first arrived on this shore, and dance audiences were mostly still catching up to that formalist aesthetic. American Modern dance’s break from the ballet world had been complete, and any lingering influence was reduced to a similar formalist aesthetic in the wake of George Balanchine’s enormous impact. A few experimentally minded theater artists took notice of Bausch’s aesthetic, but theater audiences, for the most part did not yet know where to look to appreciate Bausch’s vision. And so, while Europe took a revolutionary turn around the growing influence of Tanztheater, with Bausch at the lead, America checked in on occasion, but mostly tended to our own concerns throughout the early formative years of Bausch’s work. Today’s conglomerate dance and theater world, built on increased availability of forms through ready access on the internet and international tours, has led to an easier assimilation of diverse influences and a growing boundary erasing aesthetic for contemporary performance. But the dance world in both Germany and America in the early 1980s was built on traditions that were passed down through direct involvement and action, often emanating from a singular master choreographer. The path of new work could be clearly delineated, and there were two distinct pathways on both sides of the Atlantic. The American Modern dance tradition grew out of the same cabaret and variety base as German Dance – Loïe Fuller and Isadora Duncan – but whereas the German tradition was parsed through Rudolf von Laban, and from there bisected by Laban’s two closest collaborators into the individualist Ausdruckstanz of Mary Wigman and the balletically informed work of Kurt Jooss, American Modern dance choreographers more fully divorced themselves from ballet, following direct lines from Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn to the mythic work of Doris Humphrey and Martha Graham, who had both been part of the Denishawn Company. Graham’s work in particular dominated American Modern dance from the late 1930s through the 1950s, despite occasional deviations by choreographers like Anna Sokolow. José Limón certainly had considerable impact on Modern dance during that time, and his style borrowed from Expressionist roots and incorporated balletic interests, even if he was directly descended from his work as a dancer with Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman. But Graham came to define American Modern dance of the era, and her work continued to hold a prominent place for many years after, even if she was no longer at the cutting edge. The mantle of innovation was passed on to Merce Cunningham in the 1960s. His lineage was clear as well: a Graham dancer who set out in new directions, and whose work with John Cage helped spur the Judson Church dancers and the beginnings of the Post-Modern Dance movement. American Modern dance of the late 1970s, the prime period of Bausch’s innovation, was still teasing out the ramifications of that Post-Modern tradition of pure movement values. Bausch’s initial visits to BAM, along with works by Susanne Linke and Reinhild Hoffman, felt like a provocative challenge to the very notion of how Modern dance was defined in America, and some saw it as an outright attack on the formalist aesthetic, even if that rigid formalism was in decline.1

1 Ann Daly points out that the lines between formalist pure movement values and the expression of the subjective presence of the individual on stage as seen in Bausch’s work, was never so clear. In her editorial response to the symposium where German and American dancers and critics debated the contrasting values of the two strains of dance, she says “the anti-formalists at the symposium were arguing against a straw man. American formalism today is not the rigorous formalism of the Judson days. Even the Judson Church choreographers – Lucinda Childs, Trisha Brown, most notably – are now making overtly theatrical dances. And rarely do you find a young experimental choreographer dealing with ‘pure form’ (if there can be such a thing)” (Daly 55).

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Bausch’s Reception in America and Americans Abroad Despite a few ardent supporters, Bausch’s work was not well received on her initial visits to America, and the idea that it might influence performers in the U.S. was seen as improbable at best. Deborah Jowitt recognized the potential of this new German dance, but could not see the impact resulting in any kind of change in American dance practice. She said, “I can’t imagine American choreographers wishing to imitate ‘Tanztheater,’ no matter how much they are impressed by the work. It may be instructive to see that extremes of emotion can be dealt with on stage in innovative ways, but I think that American dancers still have faith in the expressive powers of dancing and form” (“What the Critics ...” 81). The notion that Tanztheater somehow escaped “dancing and form” was typical, even from an informed and generally sympathetic source like Jowitt. Arlene Croce was more vehement in her condemnation, describing the work as “Eurotrash” and Bausch as an “entrepreneuse who fills theatres with projections of herself and her self-pity” (82). Her assessment of Tanztheater was that “dance is something it hardly ever shows us,” and she goes on to assault the inappropriateness of the stage setting (considering the dirt floor of Rite of Spring, she concludes that “By getting sweaty dancers dirty, the earth floor adds an element of yuck to Sacre,” and adds, finally, “Naturally, you don’t dance on such stages.” (83)) and the physique of the dancers, who do not match the ultra-thin lines popularized by Balanchine. Croce’s response may have been extreme, but it was not out of line with the general sense of confusion that met the work. As a student, I bought cheap seats in the upper balcony for the performances and was easily able to move down to the center orchestra to take the seat of one of the many people who streamed out of the theater early in the performance. Bausch’s early work did seem to mesh with some theatrical energy at the time, particularly large-scale spectacles created by Robert Wilson and the dance/theater work of Meredith Monk. Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach (1976) was remounted at BAM in 1984, the same year as Bausch’s first visit to the U.S. The premiere of Einstein on the Beach had been a success of sorts, but people still didn’t know what to make of it. It wasn’t until after several years of European tours that the time felt right to remount it at home. Monk’s early dance operas from the 1970s were well known within the theater and dance world, but were not popular with audiences. Still, her work was produced around the country in the early 1980s, and former Pilobolus Dance Theater founder Martha Clarke’s The Garden of Earthly Delights was produced in 1984 as well, followed by Vienna Lusthaus in 1986, both to great acclaim. But America simply could not support work of that scale. Despite the interest in Einstein on the Beach, and even after securing financing from abroad, Wilson was not able to obtain American support for his monumental Civil Wars project, which was to premiere in the same Olympic Arts festival where Bausch made her U.S. debut. Wilson took his work to Europe, where he could get adequate resources for his vision, and even as his reputation mirrored Bausch’s throughout the 1980s and on, his work in America was seen more as a cultural import, brought over from its development in Germany or Norway. Monk’s vocal scores received recognition and were recorded on the prestigious ECM label, but her actual work on stage was more and more limited throughout the years. Martha Clarke, meanwhile, built her work in the few years following the success of Garden of Earthly Delights, but her large-scale piece, Endangered Species (1990), was closed down even before it finished it’s run at BAM, and Clarke went on to work in Europe for several years before ever returning to America.

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Developing New Work Experimental dance and theater in America had become very small out of necessity, and there was no way for dance of the size and scope of Bausch’s work to take root. Larger companies that did exist were established in a tradition and fought to maintain it to build their audience and the potential for financial support, while any work that pushed those boundaries was marginalized under the catch-all term performance art, which may have leant a sense of avant-garde cache to the work, but ensured small audiences and even less funding. Performers like Laurie Anderson were the exception, but she only gained notoriety as a musical act, and built her large-scale performances (particularly United States I–IV) like rock concerts. As a young director and creator of new works at the time, I was looking for a way to incorporate text, character and story into a more inclusive imagistic and bodily centered performance practice. Universities provided the means for experimentation, and University theater and dance departments had become the new training ground for performance, but my theater training was typically centered on interpretation of existing dramatic texts, and my dance training decisively built on formal movement values. Further, although theater and dance may have been housed in the same building at college campuses across the country, they rarely came together, and certainly not in departmentally sanctioned new work. But as students, we were looking for something new, and readily gravitated toward work coming out of Europe at the time, with Bausch as the first and brightest example. In seeing her work, I saw for the first time that it was possible to combine imagistic and bodily centered staging with a more metaphoric and eclectic dramaturgy. I became one of the legions of Bausch imitators, but attempted to adapt her strategies toward my own ends and resources. Simply seeing what Bausch was able to accomplish gave me license to try something new myself, and to work outside of the boundaries of what was considered the right way to do things. I worked without a script in a theater context, and beyond a movement vocabulary in a dance context, which gave me the scope I needed to try to accomplish what I was aiming for, but also meant I could not get my work produced in either traditional dance or theater venues. I wasn’t the only one who kept pushing, however, seeing in Bausch’s work a necessity that didn’t exist in the conventional theater and dance that was the norm. There was a percolation of possibility engendered by Bausch’s work, and we passed around video-tapes of Chantal Ackerman’s documentary film, while a few continued our pilgrimages to BAM and soaked in as much as we could from this “Next Wave” of performance. A few students with an experimental mind-set weren’t the only one’s taking notice, however. Bausch’s appearances at BAM had become fashionably chic, but as a cultural oddity more than anything. It still felt outside our experience, and certainly beyond our capabilities to achieve. The question became how to incorporate this large-scale aesthetic into the small world of American experimental dance and theater. We certainly would never have the space and resources to create these large theatrical visions, nor the classically trained dancers to execute them. But Bausch’s developmental process offered another way in. We might not be able to emulate the product (nor would we want to, really), but the process offered the opportunity to create new work along different parameters, utilizing the resources we did have at hand and taking advantage of the skills and lives of performers themselves. The possibility of creating a world of the stage rather than on the stage felt more real, and more connected to our lives.

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Beginning to Incorporate Bausch’s Vision By the time of Bausch’s trip to the American West for the creation of Nur Du (1996), there was a new energy in American performance, a new interest in devised and physical work, and the possibility to integrate dance and theater along new lines. Bausch’s developmental tour made four stops (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, TX and Phoenix, AZ), and was produced not by a theatrical entity, as has been true of Tanztheater Wuppertal’s other stops around the world, but by a consortium of university presenters. The work was not commercially viable, but was able to be presented because of the impact it would have within the academic training ground. The necessity for the work in America became the potential for a new language to be handed down to the next generation of theater and dance artists. My own initial revelations were now a part of a lesson plan, as I was now teaching within the academic world, and every time I dragged out that Chantal Ackerman video tape, or created a gesture circle in a physical theater class or rehearsal, I would see the same light of recognition I had experienced then and now thirty years before. Here was a new possibility for performance, grounded in my own ability to be present (as a body) and to ask questions about my experience. Bausch’s legacy in America begins with that light of recognition, carried forward now not only through direct exposure to the work, but in the way in which Bausch’s process has seeped into the fabric of how new work is made by so many companies here in America and around the world. The idea of performance has broadened to include genre-breaking events that defy disciplinary boundaries, particularly as evanescent qualities of live presence are more fully engaged through the present body. The training we provide younger artists now reflects that shift in performance practice, moving beyond developing a movement technique or interpretation of dramatic text to include strategies for devising new work and exploring physical approaches to the stage. Bausch’s influence has been instrumental as a generation of artists who did appreciate the work through the 1980s and 1990s enter the professional world as leaders of new theater and dance companies, educators and performers. But despite the growing interest in creating new works, and the way in which the potential for devised practice is now embedded in our training, the reality of producing work in America prioritizes conventional theater and dance, especially on the scale at which Bausch works. We still struggle with funding for creative performance in this country, and have no real way to support innovation, fostering a dynamic that once again limits the scope of new work and often sends our best choreographers and directors to Europe. Audiences are not trained to see artistic explorations of this sort, and presenters cannot sustain performances outside of a few days at a festival, and are more often drawn to the marketability of European imports rather than supporting American work.

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Building a Legacy And so now we stand in the wake of a generation of pioneering performance, and the question becomes, how do we move forward with the collected impact of this work behind us? There is no written record of the work outside of fragmentary reviews and occasional essays on developmental process, and no real technique to be formalized and taught. The tradition of pivotal works handed down in ballet as ballet masters recreate master choreography on new dancers has only limited potential here, as there are very few companies who have the capacity to take on Bausch’s earlier, more traditionally dance centered works, and transferring more recent works to another company feels like an empty experience (despite the revelatory transformation of Kontakthof for senior citizens, and teenagers. It’s important to recognize that those productions were developed and produced by Tanztheater Wuppertal, and so in essence they are new Bausch works more than a reproduction that carries on any sense of legacy). Modern dance has always been more a product of the original company that created the piece, and any lasting legacy remains in the influence of the work or the transference of a technique to future generations, just as the lasting impact of Stanislavsky in the theater lies in the ubiquity of his techniques in training new actors rather than in any attempt to recreate the productions of the Moscow Art Theater. If we are looking to maintain a sense of legacy in this arena of performance, we need to look in a different direction. In America, the question of legacy in Modern dance comes down to Martha Graham again. Graham led her company well into her nineties, though the company concentrated on reviving classics from the repertoire more than developing new work toward the end of that tenure. Upon her death, the company had a template to carry on with the repertoire, and enough institutional memory to keep those repertory pieces alive, but the enormity of Graham’s influence on Modern Dance required something more to help preserve her legacy. The Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance had long been in place as a means for carrying on the technique, and Graham technique is a common component of much modern dance training in this country, but without reference to the work itself, the technique had the potential to become a dead replica of what was once so vibrantly new. Those works existed in documentary form on film, and current and former dancers from the company have regularly recreated works from a variety of companies and with students, but nothing seemed up to the task of keeping the connection to Graham’s work current, and maybe that is the nature of a legacy, to fade into a more general influence and historical record. The company carries on, and has made more recent efforts to collaborate with artists on new works that explore Graham’s influence and significance, but Graham’s legacy has nearly fully entered into the historical record at this point, with little to offer those interested in creating new work. Merce Cunningham picked up the challenge of maintaining a legacy for a single artist centered company, instituting a plan for his company to create a farewell tour upon his death, offer transitional support for company members and staff, and establish a foundation to help preserve his vision through historical documentation and a digital archive to keep his work alive for future generations (see http://www.mercecunningham.org/history/). The plan has been somewhat successfully executed, though the resources to more fully implement transitional strategies have not met needs at times, and the period of transition and active performance of Cunningham’s works felt all too short. The Merce Cunningham Trust has attempted to catalogue existing materials, donating written and documentary resources to the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library, and preserving

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elements of Cunningham’s many collaborations with visual artists at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, MN. The Trust has also embarked on interactive digital projects to help preserve Cunningham’s legacy, including a directory of available media sources, and a web series of interviews and documents (Mondays with Merce) that catalogs Cunningham’s work with students, interviews with long-standing company members, collaborators and other artists, and Merce himself. The latest component of the legacy project is Merce Cunningham: 65 Years, a multimedia exploratory iPad app that presents written and visual material as an extension of the written project, Merce Cunningham: 50 Years created by David Vaughan in collaboration with Cunningham. We have yet to see if these elements will help to enhance the living legacy of Cunningham’s works, or whether the ephemeral nature of those performances will fade quickly. Robert Wilson is taking another approach to establishing a legacy project, by constructing a center not only to house his own considerable archives, but also creating a contextual museum of artifacts from around the world, and establishing a series of residency programs to provide a haven for young and emerging artists to develop new work. The Watermill Center (http://watermillcenter.org/) was established in 1992, but has grown especially since completion of the 20,000+ sq ft flexible working spaces and grounds, to become an active working environment for the next generation of artists from around the world. The Center is also at work on a plan to help resident artists to connect them to a growing network of New York City and international institutions and venues that embrace interdisciplinary approaches. Although the archives include documentation of Wilson’s work, his legacy of developmental process is maintained through the creative atmosphere and breadth of approach that envelops the participants, and which they bring back to their home communities. The center attempts to create a context in which to work, and “supports projects that integrate genres and art forms from diverse view points and that break traditional forms of representation” (http://watermillcenter.org/about). The Center’s primary mission is to support artists in residence, through one to four week individual residency periods for up to 15 artists or groups throughout the year, and through an International Summer Program that brings together as many as 70 early and mid-career theater, visual, dance and multi-disciplinary artists from over 30 countries to participate in intensive workshops and offer presentations under the guidance of Robert Wilson. The Center also supports connections to NYC presenting organizations, offers Science and Art workshops and presents a lecture series on a wide range of topics of interest to the artists in residence and the larger community. Wilson describes his founding vision for Watermill as an attempt to recreate the fervent creative environment he encountered when first coming to New York. “I came to New York in the 60s and lived and worked with a group of like-minded artists and other people. Every Thursday I had an open house inviting the community, guest artists and intellectuals from all fields of study. (…) I first imagined Watermill as going back to the SoHo of the 60s, a factory of ideas, a haven and a platform, a shell and an incubator, something that encourages people to have an exchange.” Wilson’s highly visual works have left an indelible mark on the history of theater practice, spawning a new style of theater dubbed the Theater of Images by Bonnie Marranca, but his greatest legacy may be in his attempt to establish this productive laboratory for new works. His presence helps to animate the work and drive his vision toward completion, but the structure is in place to continue the process long after Wilson is able to be there. The Watermill Center offers a way in to Wilson’s developmental process, and the means to make it your own.

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Bausch’s legacy as an historical figure is secure, even if America is still warming to the enormous impact she had. But keeping that impact and presence alive and active remains the concern. The Pina Bausch Foundation provides a fitting home for Bausch’s extensive archives, and digital resources provide ever greater means of distribution to allow for research and study. The difficulty will be in maintaining that visceral shock of recognition that came with seeing the pieces live, and providing the means to build from that resource to continue the conversation and keep Pina’s world alive. Current plans to expand connections through digital access promise to sustain Bausch’s global reach, but will the center in Wuppertal attract the kind of dynamic workspace necessary to keeping the underlying spirit of the work alive? Wilson’s Watermill center takes advantage of its remote location in Eastern Long Island to develop a concentrated working environment, but it lacks the kind of bustling activity that a location centered where artists live and work would generate. Bausch had already turned the unlikely site of Wuppertal into a destination for theater-goers from around the world, but will the center that is planned bring in the same kind of artist traffic necessary to generate a legacy with a living pulse? Any lasting influence is bound to be fragmentary, but the combination of research material and active practice will perhaps be more vital than a handed down technique. The potential is there for Bausch’s work to continue to inspire new generations of dance and theater artists to create radical approaches to the stage. Bausch herself was inspired by her work with Kurt Jooss and the generative influence of her time at the Folkwang School in Essen, and she continued to inspire wave after wave of new artists during her tenure as director of the school in the years that followed. That same influence is felt beyond the location of an archive or work center. I still see the shock of recognition when I introduce Bausch’s work through video documentation in class, and the added benefit of Wim Wenders’s film, Pina, is that it offers a glimpse of Bausch’s world in stunning visual splendor. Merely hearing about Bausch’s early work and seeing small sections on video was enough to break the formalist grip on American dance, so perhaps these expanded resources will inspire current artists anew. The potential is there for a new kind of legacy apart from the archival quality of artists long past, and the hope is that the next generation will be able to take advantage of those resources to create something that astounds us all. We are waiting for the next great innovator to pick up the creative mantle and open a new world of possibility on stage, although even if that were to come, Bausch’s imprint will remain for years and years.

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Work in Progress. A Schools Project of the Pina Bausch Foundation Katharina Kelter


The questions never end, and the searching never ends. There is something eternal, and that’s the beauty of it. When I look at our work, I still have the feeling that I have only just begun. Pina Bausch Every movement is new, every day. Safet Mistele

An archive in the conventional sense makes the “past accessible through materials (which are) objectively tangible, mostly original and authentic” (Wegmann 2001: 54)1. It is an institution that attends to the “selective collection and accumulation of documents of all types” (Wirth 2005: 17). In his Archaeology of Knowledge Michel Foucault describes what he does not call an archive with similar words. For Foucault, the term archive neither describes “the sum of all texts that a culture preserved as documents of its own past, or as documentation of its maintained identity”, nor “the facilities that allow a given society to register and conserve the discourses that it seeks to memorialize and make freely available” (Foucault 1973: 187). In the sense of Foucault, an archive is not a static storage, but rather “the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events” (ibid.). For dance, too, there can be no archive in the sense of static storage. Although conventional dance archives obviously do exist, traditional media like film cannot capture important aspects of dance, a fact that merits a few initial thoughts about the nature of dance itself.

1 This essay including all quotes was translated by Monica Gonzalez-Marquez.

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Whatever it is that actually needs to be preserved in dance archives is conspicuous for its consistent absence (see: Schulze 2010a: 149). The presence of dance is ephemeral. Movements vanish the moment they are executed, becoming mere memories “of that moving body that cannot be kept present” (Brandstetter 2000: 103f.). What remains are traces (film recordings, photographs, texts, etc.) of once dancing bodies that now serve as mementos to reconstruct the dance event as an archived substitute. The dance movement itself is not drawn into a material vehicle; it remains bound to the place and time of its performance. But it is exactly this supposed loss that bears the productive energy of a dance archive. The lack of something, the blank space, becomes the starting point of a productive activity. Transpositions and translations derive from this potentiality as a “work of absence” (DidiHuberman 1999: 66), which produces and continues the actual events intended for preservation in the first place. In the course of its archiving and media transfer, the dance event passes through different stages of mediation, is subject to interpretations, analyses and contextualization that productively affect the contents and alter it (see: Schulze 2010b: 11).1 Every form of rehearsal or re-doing, also involves change and continuation. Every examination of past events or their archived representatives is marked by the perspective and selective choice of the archive user, resulting in a productive exchange between present interests and the archived past. What Foucault describes for discourse analysis can be applied to the field of dance: The archive is not a static past, nor an “inactive matter” (Foucault 1973: 14), but instead “generates an eternal practice that is motivated by the presence of the conveyed matter rather than by its past” (Thurner 2010: 14). In the sense of a “presence of the conveyed”, the process of archiving and of dealing with archive contents is not a domain that is disconnected from the dance event or its production process, but a central component. The end of a performance, the passing and absence of the dance movement, do not at all mark the end of a dance production. Rather, beyond comprising only rehearsals and performance, it also includes the archival process as part of the production. By “production” I mean all those aspects of dance that deal with emergence, such as dramaturgical work, dance gesture, deployment, as well as the process of archiving. In what follows, I would like to elaborate on the idea of the productiveness of an archive, and the related openness and inconclusiveness of a dance production process by using as an example the project Work in Progress: Das Pina Bausch Archiv entsteht in Wuppertal by the Pina Bausch Foundation.2

1 On archiving as translation also see the essay by Gabriele Klein and Marc Wagenbach in this volume. 2 The following descriptions were developed within the scope of monitoring the project and my research study “Materialität und Produktion” (“Materiality and Production”) in the DFG-Graduiertenkolleg (GRK 1678) from January 2013.

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Work in Progress. A SchoolS Project Pina lädt ein. Ein Archiv als Zukunftswerkstatt. This is the name of the project where the Pina Bausch Archive is currently being created. Along with the selection, classification and recording of the artistic heritage of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, the Foundation’s work on planned enhancements and co-operations as a continued production of Pina Bausch’s artistic work and as a part of the production process is particularly interesting. An example in practice is the project Work in Progress: Das Pina Bausch Archiv entsteht in Wuppertal in cooperation with Städtische Pina-Bausch-Gesamtschule Vohwinkel – a comprehensive school in Wuppertal. Led by Marc Wagenbach (Pina Bausch Foundation) and Julia Bögeholz (Städtische Pina-Bausch-Gesamtschule Vohwinkel), 20 pupils in grade 12 dealt with their own sensual experiences and the possibilities of archiving them in a one-year project course during the 2012/13 term. Beginning with reflections about their own personal and everyday lifearchives – Facebook, diaries, etc. – we discussed questions about the possibility of archiving dance. The teenagers’ aim was to establish archives of their own and thus deal with the techniques of archiving by reflecting upon their own processes. Personal stories and memories as well as their very own (aesthetic) experience of body and space were explored through movement and dance. Memories were translated into movements, movements were analysed, improvisation techniques were attempted and choreographies were developed during workshops with Tanztheater Wuppertal dancers. After every session, the students were encouraged to reflect on their experiences and document the events of the project in large notebooks (Kladden). The results were videos, photos, reports, sketches, drafts as well as a film that were presented in an exhibition in Wuppertal at the end of the term. By dealing performatively with questions of production and archiving, the students of the project course came to see an archive as not only a depository for materials, but as a creative process in its own right, as impetus for future productions, and as part of the production process. The work produced during the course was awarded first place in the category “dance” (grades 10–13) in the Kinder zum Olymp! contest held by the Kulturstiftung der Länder (Cultural Foundation of the Federal States).3

Memory as Movement Material During workshops, the students worked with two dancers from the Tanztheater Wuppertal, Clémentine Deluy and Anna Wehsarg, as well as with Safet Mistele, a student at Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen and also known from Pina Bausch’s Kontakthof Mit Teenagern ab '14'. The dancers highlighted different aspects of dance for each workshop and offered different approaches both to dance and to Tanztheater Wuppertal. Under the instruction of Clémentine Deluy, the students dealt with personal memories and their impact on the production of dance movements. They sought movements that could stand for certain memories, that could represent them. The memories were translated into dance movements, resulting in short choreographies. This conscious translation process from memory into movement took the students’ everyday life as a starting point where it became part of the choreography. The teenagers came to understand their bodies as living archives, and their personal memories as potential sources for motion. As a dancer with Tanztheater Wuppertal, Clémentine Deluy was molded by Pina Bausch’s aesthetics and modus operandi. Every dancing technique, aesthetic, function, experience, etc. is impressed into the body as a memory.

3 For information on the schools project also see: Progress Report NO.2 by the Pina Bausch Foundation. http://www.pinabausch.org [correct at Nov 14, 2013].

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The individual corporeality and dancing biography, as well as the particular social and cultural context stored in the body’s memory, are mutually dependant, permeating each other and forming a “cultural archive of possible dance movements” (Schulze 1997: 219). These body memories materialize – consciously and unconsciously – at the moment a movement is produced, repeated, interfused, altered, updated and at the same time archived again. As with the above-mentioned dance archive, here, too, we can see a productive exchange between current interest and archived past, a movement between possibility and eventful manifestation. With her ritual of improvised questioning, Pina Bausch consciously used this inevitable memory reference as a production strategy to generate movement material. She focussed on producing material that was explicitly based on her dancers’ past experiences and feelings.4 As part of this rehearsal and staging practice, Clémentine Deluy has continued the production process both consciously and unconsciously. In the context of her work with the course project students, memories were examined in three spheres: through Deluy and the students’ body- and movement memories, through the students’ personal memories, and through the Tanztheater Wuppertal’s work practices. Safet Mistele was also molded by his experiences during the production of Kontakthof. Mit Teenagern ab '14', and he has passed this experience and knowledge on to the students in the course.

Movement and Space. Places of Memory The motion sequences created with Clémentine Deluy have been developed into short video clips. The students designed small stage sets for their choreographies with cardboard boxes, colours, various handicrafts and natural materials. Costumes and music, too, were chosen to fit their movements – and memories. The motion sequences were video recorded and projected (or cut) onto the similarly videoed stage sets. The group then talked about and reflected upon the video clips they produced and the perception of their movements. Some of the students were uncomfortable watching themselves in a video clip, others thought that their video had not met the desired expression. One student was not content with the technical implementation, others emphasised the challenge in feeling and expressing their memories – the basis for their choreographies – at the moment of recording. What happens to the dance movement when it is translated into a different medium? The making of the video clips confronted the students with questions about the archivability of movement. Media such as film and photography are not passive instruments limited to the objective recording of movement, instead, their materiality and observation level have a decisive effect on the contents. They develop an impact that “influences the modalities of our thinking, perception, experience, remembering and communication” (Krämer 1998: 14) and as such essentially add to the construction of our understanding of reality. Media influence the constitution and impression of the conveyed phenomena and thus create new realities: “New possibilities of experience and action evolve from the existence of media that would not be here, could not be grasped, would not be accessible otherwise.” (Seel 1998: 254). The filmed stage sets, the projected movements and the film technology have an impact on one another, altering their respective effects and realities. Not only were the proportions adapted, the colours of one stage design had to be changed in order to make movement visible. Another stage design featured a stairway that had not been originally included in the choreography, and that made the student

4 For Pina Bausch’s operational practice see Servos 2003, Hoghe 1986, and others.

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appear to float in the air, or run through the stairway at times. In other videos, the movements are out of line with the set framework of the stage design, moving through walls, for example. The students experienced the difference between design demands, personal perception and memories to be expressed in the choreographies, followed by their translation and transfer into a video recording. They experience how movement itself may appear alienated by the double framing of stage design and camera. Other videos, on the other hand, showed a harmonious interplay of stage space and movements. They complemented and supported each other. The movements seemed to instantly react to the opportunities offered by the stage design.

Skizzenbücher. A Film The students worked with Clémentine Deluy again during the making of the film Skizzenbücher (sketchbooks). The movement material previously acquired was recalled and developed into new solos and group choreographies. The first variations from the “original” choreographies began to emerge with the first memories. Some movements had been forgotten. Others were altered or updated, either consciously or not, as a reaction to the analysis of the video clips. Clémentine Deluy supported the students in their movement production. She singled out movements, suggested new elements and specific props and materials in order to support the intensity of the movements. The students were free to instantiate the suggestions or to implement their own ideas. Costumes and props were chosen, and the choreographies were further modified and adapted to the materials used. In addition to the further development of the solos, single movement elements were selected, and developed into group choreographies. A shove against the shoulder for example becomes a chain reaction: in pairs, the students stand scattered across the room, facing each other. One pushes the partner against the shoulder, propelling him in the opposite direction until he reaches an open space and continues the chain reaction with another partner. In another group movement, the students learned a movement and then performed it synchronously while sitting in a row. Often, the movement sequence had to be altered in order to perform it as a group effort. Filming took place in an abandoned factory building. The hall was divided into three sections of different sizes that were openly connected. At the head end was a steel grid balcony. The walls were covered with large, colourful graffiti. Old cars stood at the entrance, and electric devices lay about in a corner. Wrapped and covered, large wooden furniture stood in a small storage room, with large wooden pallets stacked against a wall. The students’ choreographies were recorded in different locations within the hall. For some of the group scenes, the entire hall was used. The movements were altered again and adjusted to the conditions and options that the space offered. The space itself changed the movements. The film produced was entitled Skizzenbücher. It begins with a scene in which the students are sitting on a staircase in the factory building and leafing through their sketchbooks. The books are loudly snapped shut over and over again only to be opened and skimmed through again. In the following scene, a student stands alone in the middle of the hall and slowly moves her arm from her side upwards over her head. Her own and the camera’s eye follow the movement. The solos and group scenes are edited in the manner of a montage, a formal collage that recalls the working practices of Tanztheater Wuppertal. Scenes from the videos of the stage sets are part of the film as well. The same as the choreographies and the student notebooks, they take on new contexts and use that entail change and development. Editing for the single scenes is harsh and reminiscent of the scene where the students are turning pages in the sketchbooks. Overlapping sounds, and various songs and melodies connect the single scenes. The film ends with a loud bang: the sketchbook is slammed shut.

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We exhibit!. An Exhibition At the end of the project, the students presented their experiences, findings and artistic works during a one-week exhibition.5 It opened with a performance by the students that showcased their movement work, as well as exhibiting, involving, and integrating the objects that had been generated during the project. One student, Keziah, shared an anecdote from a workshop with Safet Mistele in the film. It was a personal memory that continuously recurred throughout the project. The story changed, developed and turned into a starting point for movements again and again. Ending her story, Keziah unlocked the Archive Shop and invited the visitors in while beginning again. Some of the students stood amongst the visitors. Their faces turned upwards and covered by their notebooks. After a short time they removed the notebooks, took a new position within the room and replaced the notebooks on their faces, exhibiting them. Meanwhile, other students were running past the shop windows, throwing blank pages into the air. In the Archive Shop, different stations presented and represented the one-year work process of the project course and invited the visitors to the discussion and exchange. The exhibition was characterised by a dense sequence of activities: A long panel of fabric was filled with writing. It included thoughts, stories, notes and quotes from the students’ notebooks. Afixed to an assembly line, these thoughts presented themselves in permanent motion. Scaffolding and wooden pallets were erected at another station. Several laptops in and on the construction showed various videos from the course of the project. A film showed scenes from the dance lessons with Clémentine Deluy, a monitor showed a making-of for the film Skizzenbücher, another film documented the students’ work with water as a means of movement and acting. Countless photos taken during the project lay jumbled in a big box that could be taken out and viewed with white archive gloves – according to the general practice in archives. The students exhibited their own life-archives in the form of small altars. They contained objects and small items that were of personal importance or carriers of important memory. So as to be easily understood by the visitors, each item was documented in an inventory. The students’ notebooks were exhibited on shelves; abstracts hung on the walls as pictures. Another station offered the option to listen to acoustic material on several laptops. These were stories and discussions that recorded when the project course visited a bunker together.6 The film Skizzenbücher was shown in a room that was partitioned with black cloth. The video-clips of the stage designs could be viewed on yet another monitor. Furthermore, the students developed two games especially for the exhibition intended to playfully familiarise the visitors with the examination of archiving, memory and movement, and to encourage thinking and reflection. A sort of memory game depicted the volatility of memory, and explored the effects of movement. Another game compared the archiving and materials of the project course with the work process and materials in the Pina Bausch Archive. The exhibition not only presented the work of the project course and its “products”, but was a part of the work and production processes in itself. The presentation of film, notebooks and stage designs in the context of an exhibition resulted in new translations, new contextualisations and evolution; a new context for use and meaning developed.

5 The exhibition took place within the anniversary season of Tanztheater Wuppertal – PINA40. http://www.pina40.de [correct at Nov 14, 2013] 6 The visit to the bunker was meant to examine the question of what darkness felt like.

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Experiencing – Documenting – Reflecting. Archiving as Production The students dealt with dance, movement and memory both theoretically and practically during the project course. They came to know strategies for staging, and forms of documentation; they built their own archives and compared them to the material, work processes and structures in the Pina Bausch Archive. They experienced a dance archive – the Pina Bausch Archive in particular – as a “place of constant motion” (Schulze 2010a, 147). The title of the schools project characterised the Pina Bausch Archive quite accurately as a work in progress, as permanently developing, as a “memory of movement into the future” (Brandstetter 2000: 110). The significance of a dance archive does not arise from its collectable contents alone, “but from the new perspectives it is viewed in, and from the contextualisation that comes with it” (Schulze 2005: 121). Actualisations and new constructions arise from every interaction with the archived material. “Recollection does not exist through memories in particular” (see Hardt 2005, 39), but through acts of movement – like transfer, translation and reactivation – by which the archived events are generated in the first place (see: Schulze 2005: 123). The act of archiving is an event in itself; an event is generated in the act of archiving (see: Hantelmann 2007: 152): “Archiving generates the event to the same extent that it records it.” (Derrida 1997: 35). The tension between the eventfulness of dance and dance movement on the one hand and their “documentation” on the other hand particularly reflects the characteristics of every work in an archive (see: Schulze 2005: 18). But the Pina Bausch Foundation project does more than introduce students to theoretical and practical reflection on the archivability of dance by helping them examine the process that makes archiving possible. It is an excellent example of the performativity and productivity of an archive itself. Examining the Pina Bausch Archive and Tanztheater Wuppertal aids the translation and transfer of the archived body of knowledge, especially through exchanges with the dancers and staff at the Tanztheater Wuppertal. It produces its own events and “products”. And it is here that the productive potential of an archive can be found. Through the direct exchange of (body-) knowledge, the Pina Bausch Archive does not remain a mere storage place for dance-historical relics, but becomes a part of the production process of Tanztheater Wuppertal itself – a part of its own history.

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“If it’s your own, it’s alive.” An Interview with Students in the Schools Project Keziah claudine Nanevie, Linda Seljimi, Michelle Urban

The following text contains reflection from students of the one year high-school project Work in Progress. Das Pina Bausch Archiv entsteht in Wuppertal. The project is the result of a cooperation between the Städtische Pina-Bausch-Gesamtschule in Wuppertal and the Pina Bausch Foundation during the 2012/13 school year. The aim of the course was not only to create personal archives and to compare these materials with the collections in the Pina Bausch Archive, but also to find a methodological approach to bringing the work of the archive – and dance history – to young people. How do the needs, dreams and desires of adolescents figure in the future of the Pina Bausch Archive? To what extent do the collections of the archive have something to do with the individual needs of young people? And how can we create an archive for tomorrow – an archive for the future? The interview was conducted by Marc Wagenbach.

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Marc

What does memory mean to you? Keziah Memories are very important to me. They were already important to me before the project course, but not to this extent. You remember the last holidays or something that happened recently. But you didn’t really realize it. During the course I realized that they play a major part in life. On the one hand because I also use them constantly in my everyday life. And, because now I know how I can reflect on something and how I can express myself throughout my memories. This is why I believe they are of major significance. When something goes wrong, it influences who I am so that I do things differently the next time. Or I try to do it better the next time because I relate it to these memories. Memories are a fundamental aspect of identity.

Linda Throughout the whole project-course I was thinking about what memories are. What do they mean to me? They are part of my life. Everything is captured by them. Sometimes like flashbacks. They’re not just positive things but also often negative things that are important to you. They are you. They reflect your own character. The person you are. Or perhaps the person you once were. You can recognize your life, its course, in memories. For me in this project-course there were many moments that were very important. I’ve learned so much, done so many things that I wouldn’t have done otherwise. Tests of courage – single experiences – together. I’ve seen that, yes, we are a group. The exchanges with each others were very important for all of us. Your whole life is a search for yourself.

Marc

And what about oblivion? Should one also forget? 

Keziah Yes, oblivion plays a big role, too. It’s difficult. Some of the memories you’d like to forget, but you can’t. Other things, you think it would be better to forget. Also oblivion plays a part in memory. If you don’t dare do something because it might go wrong, then you’ll never get anywhere. That’s why you have to forget that something went wrong, and try again.

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 ow is it actually possible H to capture a moment? Keziah I don’t think you can capture a moment in itself. Of course, you can remember a certain situation again and again. But you will never experience it in the same way. That’s all I can say. Feelings and smells you experienced, you can remember. But the situation itself and the way the feeling was, you can’t capture it or get it back. If I, for example, reenact a situation, it wouldn’t be exactly the same feeling. When I think, for example, think about our dancing. The first time I was maybe still a bit shy. But after a while I became more and more relaxed. Every time it was different. The circumstances really matter. I don’t think you can really capture a moment.

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 hat do you think W changes when you try to document a moment? Michelle I find it difficult to document feelings. I think it’s much easier to express feelings using, for example, movements. Movements like we did them. But then it is difficult to film them in the right way, if you film them. It’s important to write down what you experienced in great detail. In general to document everything. You have to do it in many different ways so that you can put it together like a puzzle, than you have something new again. That’s different then. My boyfriend always says: „The things you can’t remember weren’t that important“. I see things differently. It can also be that you don’t remember things because you repress them. I liked it in our project-course that we could write down everything, sticking pictures in my scrapbook. I could do it how I want to. Exactly how I felt it. I painted, wrote very personal things about my grandmother. That was difficult. But it helped to deal with it. Through the writing it down I could share it with somebody. Even if it’s just a book. It can’t say anything to you. It can’t answer to you. But it’s nice to let it go. Then it’s not so heavy.

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 egarding the course, R is there a moment that you don’t want to forget? Linda I will never forget how we met Clémentine Deluy, a dancer with the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, in the studio of the opera house in Wuppertal. As usual I was a bit late. Everyone has just enjoyed this moment together. Clémentine shook us up. Everybody was listening. She let us try things out, and we tried to give a form to our own memories. It didn’t matter how we did it.

Marc

 hat do you think of W when you hear the term “archive”? Linda I have always thought archives were dead boring bunkers without life. But then we understood that it didn’t work like that. A Pina Bausch Archive can’t work like that. Because theatre and dance live. It must be alive. So the archive must be alive too, so that people can get into it. Alive means that it’s also your own. It’s always important to bring in your own personality. But you should never loose your centre. Pina Bausch. We build everything beginning with her. For example, we worked together with the dancers. Through them we could experience the work of Pina Bausch. And through our own experience we could understand how all of this is created. What has Pina Bausch built? The process is important. It’s not the point to try to reach the professionalism of those artists. Of course we can’t, because unfortunately we don’t have their years of experience. But it’s not worth any less worth, what we have done. Our memories have their own worth. But these experiences you can’t have alone. We experienced it together. Precisely this type of common experience is very important.

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 nd what does an archive A mean to you? Keziah What’s most important is to show what archives are not – like we said before – old boxes and places full of files, where things lie around covered in dust; more than that, it’s possible to work with archives. In general, I think it’s important to bring the archive’s work to young people. I found it important that you could establish a connection to the Pina Bausch Archive. I didn’t know about the archive before. Of course, everyone knew about Pina Bausch, but not that there was also this archive. I think it would be great if more people knew that something like this exists. That there is a place to keep these memories alive. That there is somebody to take care of it.

Marc

What should an archive of the future look like in your opinion? 

Michelle An archive should be an open space for everyone who is interested in it. One should keep, of course the materials like the old scripts. It’s not the same to simply type it up on the computer. First I want the archive to be open to everyone and to have what they make also be kept. On the one hand, you the material that already belong to the archive should be maintained. But on the other hand, special care should be given to those things are invisible. What you feel while watching the pieces by Pina Bausch. Our feelings as spectators. Everybody in our course has told me something different. “Have you seen this in the piece?” “No, I didn’t notice it.” I think what you experience is very unique to every person. It is kept in the memories of each person. Then we pass our memories on to each other. I think Pina Bausch’s work will be maintained because it has enriched so many people. Like us now. And I hope it will go on like this.

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 ow do you think H can you maintain the legacy of Pina Bausch? Keziah I think by trying to keep this archive alive, for example. That future generations also experience it. That in 20, in 30 years there are people who also keep it alive. For example, in the present, we discuss Shakespeare in school – and its so old! It was kept alive. I think, Pina Bausch was also an important person. And the things she did, and how she did them. For example how she got there. Her whole career is something really special, that – in my opinion – I would like to hear about in school in 30 years.

Marc

 hat would you tell your children W or friends about Pina Bausch? Keziah I would tell them Pina Bausch started from scratch. And her story, I’ll never forget it. She took ballet classes. There was an instance when she couldn’t do something, she just wasn’t able to. Or at least she thought she wasn’t able to do it. And so she said: “I can’t do that.” And after that she left the course. But the teacher brought her back. And from that moment on, she decided to never again say that she couldn’t do something. This isn’t specifically about what happened then or about having a certain personality, because as long as you know, and you believe in something and are ready to fight for it, it is also possible. It’s actually a point that I understood better as the course progressed. You can always overcome your limitations, if you stop worrying so much. You have to try out new things.

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References Bausch, Pina: Etwas finden, was keiner Frage bedarf. The 2007 Kyoto Prize Workshop in Arts und Philosophy, http://www.inamori-f.or.jp/laureates/k23_c_pina/img/wks_g.pdf [correct at Oct 6, 2013] Brandstetter, Gabriele (2000): “Choreographie als Grab-Mal. Das Gedächtnis der Bewegung.” In: Brandstetter, Gabriele, Völckers, Hortensia (eds.): ReMembering the Body. Körper-Bilder in Bewegung. Osterfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 102–134 Climenhaga, Royd (2013) (ed.): The Pina Bausch Sourcebook: The Making of Tanztheater. London, New York: Routledge Croce, Arlene. “Bad Smells.” The New Yorker. July 16, 1984: 81–84 Esposito, Elena (1998): “Fiktion und Virtualität.” In: Krämer, Sybille (ed.): Medien Computer Realität. Wirklichkeitsvorstellungen und Neue Medien. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 269–296 Daly, Ann, (1986): “Tanztheater: The Thrill of the Lynch Mob or the Rage of Woman?” TDR. Spring: 46–56 Derrida, Jacques (1997): Dem Archiv verschrieben. Eine Freudsche Impression. Berlin: Brinkmann und Bose Didi-Huberman, Georges (1999): Was wir sehen blickt uns an. Zur Metapsychologie des Bildes. München: Fink Foucault, Michel (1973): Archäologie des Wissens. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Hantelmann, Dorothea von (2007): How to Do Things With Art. Zur Bedeutsamkeit der Performativität von Kunst. Zürich, Berlin: diaphanes Hardt, Yvonne (2005): “Prozessuale Archive. Wie Tanzgeschichte von Tänzern geschrieben wird.” In: Odenthal, Johannes (ed.): tanz.de. Zeitgenössischer Tanz in Deutschland – Strukturen im Wandel – eine neue Wissenschaft. Berlin: Verlag Theater der Zeit, 34–41 Hoghe, Raimund (1986): Pina Bausch. Tanztheatergeschichten von Raimund Hoghe. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Krämer, Sybille (1998): “Was haben die Medien, der Computer und die Realität miteinander zu tun?” In: (ed.): Medien Computer Realität. Wirklichkeitsvorstellungen und Neue Medien. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 9–26 Macián, José Enrique, Sue Jane Stoker, Jörn Weisbrodt (2011) (eds): The Watermill Center: A Laboratory for Performance – Robert Wilson’s Legacy. Stuttgart: Daco Verlag Schlicher, Susanne (1987): TanzTheater. Traditionen und Freiheiten. Pina Bausch, Gerhard Bohner, Reinhild Hoffmann, Hans Kresnik, Susanne Linke. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt

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Schulze, Janine (1997): “Erinnerungsspuren – Auf der Suche nach einem gender-spezifischen Körpergedächtnis im zeitgenössischen Bühnentanz.” In: Öhlschläger, Claudia et al. (eds.): Körper – Gedächtnis – Schrift. Der Körper als Medium kultureller Erinnerung. Berlin: Schmidt, 219–234 ------------. (2005): “Tanzarchive: ‘Wunderkammern’ der Tanzgeschichte?” In: Baxmann, Inge et al. (eds.): Deutungsräume. Bewegungswissen als kulturelles Archiv der Moderne. München: Kieser, 119–131 ------------. (2010 a): “Lücken im Archiv oder Die Tanzgeschichte ein ‘Garten der Fiktionen’?” In: Thurner, Christina, Wehren, Julia (eds.): Original und Revival. Geschichts-Schreibung im Tanz. Zürich: Chronos, 147–153 ------------. (2010 b): “Einleitung: Tanzarchive sind perpetuum mobiles.” In: (ed.): Are 100 Objects enough to represent the Dance? Zur Archivierbarkeit von Tanz. München: epodium Verlag, 8–17 Seel, Martin (1998): “Medien der Realität und Realität der Medien”. In: Krämer, Sybille (ed.): Medien Computer Realität. Wirklichkeitsvorstellungen und Neue Medien. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 244–268 Servos, Norbert (2003): Pina Bausch. Tanztheater. München: Kieser Thurner, Christina (2010): “Tänzerinnen – Traumgesichter. Das Archiv als historiografische Vision.” In: Tanz und Archiv. Forschungsreisen. Biografik. Vol. 2. München, 12–21 Wagenbach, Marc (2012): “Next Generation. Interview mit Safet Mistele.” In: Pina Bausch Foundation: Arbeitsbericht No.2. Wuppertal, 46–47 Wegmann, Nikolaus (2001): “Archiv.” In: Pethes, Nicolas, Ruchatz, Jens (eds.): Gedächtnis und Erinnerung. Ein interdisziplinäres Lexikon. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 53–55 Wirth, Uwe (2005): “Archiv.” In: Roesler, Alexander, Stiegler, Bernd (eds.): Grundbegriffe der Medientheorie. München: Fink, 17–27

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4 Our Dreams, our Future – the Coming Archive 154

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An Invitation from Pina. Review Marc Wagenbach

We do not see the Pina Bausch Archive as a depot or a repository but as a centre for the continual generation of knowledge, as a living place, a reservoir of ideas and experiences, a laboratory for transfer, a place “where people meet, speak, experiment, investigate, debate and live”,1 where all the many perspectives, rifts and discontinuities are visible, where memory can be experienced as a creative process. 1 Pina Bausch Foundation (ed.), Pina lädt ein. Ein Archiv als Zukunftswerkstatt, (Wuppertal: Pina Bausch Foundation, 2010), p. 16.

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How Do We Write History? Translating Processes

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Reservoirs of Memories The œuvre of Pina Bausch is deeply connected with the embodied knowledge and experiences shared by her dancers and staff members at the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. This information represents an enormous pool of knowledge, which developed and has grown over decades. A living reservoir without the archiving of Pina Bausch’s work wouldn’t be possible.

Storytelling. Rehearsal processes. Dispositions. Atmospheres. Interviews with dancers, members and alumnae of the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. With audiences. All over the world.

7x7x7. Seven Interviewers. Seven Interviewees. Seven Minutes. For seven minutes, seven audience members interviewed seven members of Tanztheater Wuppertal. The interviews are recorded. Memory fragments.

Timelines – Tänzer recorded! In 30-minutes interviews dancer and former member of the company are interviewed about their time at the Tanztheater Wuppertal. Snapshots of the work. Of processes. Subjective remembering.

Collecting Information. Creating Transmissions Documentations of sets. Documentation of costumes. Documentations of rehearsals. Documentations of oral histories. Practices of documentation.

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Dance heritage in the 21st Century Strategies for remembering

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Constructing Constructing the physical archive and uniting various collections. Inventory, cataloguing, describing.

Digitalisation Digitising videos, photos, choreography notebooks, working papers and programmes etc. Saving problematic collecting like early video formats. To preserve. To retain. Digitised materials are used for reconstructions and restagings. Presenting first results.

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It’s personal. Searching for a living archive

Designing and Realising Designing and realising a digital archive with a particular information architecture.

Transferring Methodical conception and execution of the initial dance-history education concept, and collaboration between the Pina Bausch archive and local schools.

Collaborations with schools. With universities. Workshops. Searching for an individual approach. For yourself. For a living archive.

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An Archive as a Living Space. Future Prospects salomon bausch

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Why a Pina Bausch Archive? Pina Bausch began keeping an archive of her artistic work long before the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch was founded – even if she didn’t think of it in these terms. Comprehensively and systematically, she always preserved materials from the creation, rehearsal and performance processes of her work: notes and manuscripts, photos and video recordings, role descriptions and notes by dancers, programmes and posters, reviews and interviews. Likewise, the sets and costumes for most of her pieces are also still intact.

Why a Pina Bausch Archive? This reality renders the question ‘why a Pina Bausch Archive?’ initially irrelevant because the archive has been in existence since she first began to work as a choreographer. It has been used, maintained and expanded ever since. And right from the beginning, as shown by the materials preserved, the items were collected with the aim of ensuring that her work would be kept alive and seen on stage in the future as well as the moment of its inception. It was always orientated towards performance; the documents were meant to help revive her work. One of the characteristics of the archive is certainly the sheer quantity and diversity of the materials. Given their overwhelming abundance, the temptation simply to talk statistics is enormous. It is also important to note that the significance of much of the material retained can only be understood by someone with a detailed knowledge of Pina Bausch’s work, and the precise structure of her working methods. Her manuscripts and collections of notes, for instance, on white hole-punched paper organised provisionally with paper clips, notes taken as scenes were created, fragments in flux from the creative process are all impossible for a novice to interpret. The experience and specialist knowledge needed here, the key to understanding it in its entirety, is so crucial that it too has to be incorporated into the archive. In contrast to other collections, a significant proportion of this knowledge is not contained in archivable documents. It is carried by Pina Bausch’s peers – dancers and staff of the Tanztheater Wuppertal, along with many

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other people – as lived experience in their bodies and minds. Thus the fundamental difference between this and other branches of archiving is that this knowledge is tied to individuals. It represents information linked to a consciousness that does not lend itself easily to documentation or to unmediated archiving. Very much in contrast to the widespread view of archiving as largely bureaucratic and staid, at best technical and abstract, the Pina Bausch Archive has shown itself to be highly lively. Alongside collecting and preserving physical objects, its role is to record personal experiences and generate a culture of handing down knowledge – from person to person, from direct participants to future generations. The archive’s brief is clearly defined. Above all it is there to keep the pieces alive in the long term, to allow them to continue being realised as performances. It also aims make the œuvre available and accessible, allowing a detailed insight into Pina Bausch’s work to a wider public than just experts and people already fascinated by her art, including new target groups who would not have had access to a performance without the existence and work of the archive. The archive itself, at its location in Wuppertal, aims to be a lively environment, a space for personal encounters between everyone who loves dance theatre, a space to be creative – in an academic or artistic sense.

Collective Experience In the next few years, the Pina Bausch Foundation, the organisation that owns the archive, will need to finish assessing and archiving the remaining physical items. All objects are preserved under archival conditions, and are also described and digitised. This information is then incorporated into the Pina Bausch Archive’s ‘linked data’ structure, designed in collaboration with the communication and media faculty (ikum) at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. This will create the basis, the ‘hardware’ as it were, for one of the archive’s central aims. Using the digitally accessible inventory, people who were part of, and participated in Pina Bausch’s art, can pass on their experience. With the aid of the video annotation tool, also developed by the Darmstadt team, the dancers can use their profound knowledge to evaluate and annotate the video sequences from many thousands of performances, scene by scene, to the second. The technical infrastructure allows information to be added to each moment precisely, and from the perspectives of an unlimited number of participants, who may well have had differing experiences of the artistic activity represented. Everyone involved in creating a piece, those who performed or assisted in its production, may have had strongly divergent points of view and may have retained very different memories. As such, this process focuses as much on the ‘facts’, and on the clear evaluation of each scene from an artistic perspective, as on personal experience, on ‘soft knowledge’, which is not however any less specific, no less real than an object that can be held in one’s hands. Different protagonists will have different views of the past. In its entirety, the information recalled and recounted by various people may be contradictory, fragmentary and sometimes imprecise. Not only can contradictory statements co-exist in this structure, they are what characterises this archive. It represents nothing less than the nature of collective human experience. How does individual experience become collective? How do people convey their experiences and memories? What laws does oral tradition follow? Under the title 7x7x7, in 2011 Marc Wagenbach designed an experiment that was conducted after the revival and performances of Two Cigarettes in the Dark. Seven audience members each interviewed seven members of the ensemble for seven minutes; all 49 conversations were recorded and transcribed. The dancers recalled very personal experiences of working with Pina Bausch, the creation of their roles in the piece and the premiere. They talked about how their personal growth and experience of life over the years had changed their perspective on the piece. Who could be better qualified to report? Who could possible provide more precise information? In a playful atmosphere, it was possible to see how ‘oral history’ is created, how people pass on their experiences.

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Living Art The resulting comprehensive wealth of knowledge and experience of Pina Bausch’s art serves above all to keep it alive. Just as it did during her life, the archived material is used to ensure that her pieces can live as performative experiences in the future as well as the past. The point and consequence of collecting this knowledge is to pass it on – to new generations of dancers at the Tanztheater Wuppertal, as well as to other companies. One example of the Pina Bausch Foundation’s work is the reconstruction of Wind von West in 2013. Premiered in December 1975, this piece was reconstructed under the artistic direction of Dominique Mercy, with project funding from the TANZFONDS ERBE (Dance Heritage Fund) in the form of an international collaboration with the Juilliard School in New York, the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen and the Tanztheater Wuppertal. The rehearsals were led by former members of the Tanztheater Wuppertal, some of whom had performed at the original premiere. Now it was the students’ turn to perform the work. The premiere of the reconstructed piece took place in November 2013. As in 1975 it was part of the Stravinsky triple-bill Frühlingsopfer (Rite of Spring). And the success of this work was due to more than the former dancers’ knowledge and experience. Access to material from the archive was also essential to the reconstruction: video recordings and photographs of performances, historic programmes and press material. Using the videos and the pre-existing plans, new stage plans could be developed, and deductions about the construction of each element of the sets could be made. The remaining original costumes were used as patterns for recreating new ones at the Wuppertal Bühnen costume workshop. The reconstruction of Wind von West demonstrated another aspect of the foundation’s work: establishing a culture of handing down knowledge from one artist to the next; the teaching of Pina Bausch’s art to younger dancers. A further example of getting young people excited about dance theatre is the project Work in Progress: The Pina Bausch Archive is created in Wuppertal, a collaboration with the Wuppertal school which in 2014 changed its name to the Pina Bausch Gesamtschule. The pupils involved used unconventional methods to examine both Pina Bausch’s œuvre, and the nature and practice of archiving itself, in a way closely linked to the realities of their own lives. How do young people collect memories? How do they document their everyday lives? When are they ‘archiving’ without realizing that is what they are doing? The Pina Bausch Foundation will undoubtedly work with other schools in the future, although the Pina Bausch Gesamtschule will still remain an important place to develop projects in the long term.

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The Archive as a Garden of Inspiration The archive plans to make Pina Bausch’s art visible in other ways, however. It aims to bring it out of the digital database back into the light of day, to make it something tangible which can be experienced in real time and space. At the permanent location in Wuppertal in particular, the goal is to create new formats for visualising the digital archive, using exhibitions and installations for instance. From 2014 onwards, the Pina Bausch Archive will be open to the specialist public – to academics, artists and the media. Eventually it will also be open to the general public in Wuppertal, as in other locations throughout the world. Although the physical objects in the collection are of course tied to the Wuppertal location, the digitalisation of the archive makes it possible for people to engage with the Tanztheater Wuppertal from anywhere. There are already lively relationships between Pina Bausch’s company and other international institutions arising from personal encounters and developed over decades. Since 1984 the Tanztheater Wuppertal has performed solely at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) when appearing in New York. Twenty-three touring productions have been seen on its stage. To date a massive wealth of material relating to it is stored in the BAM archives. It is thus natural that there has been a friendly and intensive exchange between Brooklyn and Wuppertal over the last three years – not only in order to view archive materials, but also to reflect together on how the multifaceted, genre-busting art-form ‘dance theatre’ can be archived. The connection between Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal and Japan goes back nearly as far, with over twenty touring productions in recent decades. Pina Bausch had been friends with Kazuo Ohno since the 1980s. In Yokohama, an archive is under construction to also preserve his life’s work. The Pina Bausch Foundation is in ongoing dialogue with this archive as well as with that of the other great proponent of Butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata. The collaboration with Japanese archives will take place on two levels in the future: the concrete level of historical material and documents demonstrating the exchange between these two dance cultures, and the theoretical level in which the nature of archiving will be reflected upon and developed for the future. New York and Yokohama will thus undoubtedly be among the first locations where the idea of a ‘hotspot’ will be realised, a centre for international engagement with Pina Bausch’s work. Relevant areas of the digital archive may be made accessible, athough a variety of different events could also be held. Pina Bausch’s art can thus expand its international influence, and conversely, the many international perspectives can enrich our view of her work. Back home in Wuppertal, the Pina Bausch Archive will evolve into a living archive. It will be a place people want to go to, which welcomes visitors with an atmosphere of hospitality. It will stimulate exchange and communication. It will allow very different perspectives on the archival material and as such allow us to (re)focus our view of Pina Bausch’s art. It will connect her contemporaries and colleagues, experts and novices, guests from far and wide and from Wuppertal itself. And the archive will be an inspiring place; inspiring both academic research and, more importantly, artistic work – in the field of dance, but also in very different genres, including new media and technologies. A place resembling a garden, which invites you to stay, promotes exchange and stimulates the imagination.

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Dance in the Present Pina Bausch’s work is inspiring, rich and multifaceted. It is well worth trying to learn from it, and much of what it holds also points the way forward for the archive. The structure of the digital archive is based very closely on Pina Bausch’s working methods and her own systems. In this context, we now have to preserve the materials generated – and still being generated – during the evolution and performance of her pieces. Even the festivals she herself curated included artists from other fields alongside her pieces, and work by other dancers and choreographers. This interdisciplinary approach is reflected in the goal of promoting her artistic work using new types of events, as well as the aim of opening her work to younger people, as shown by the version of Kontakthof performed by teenagers. The international orientation of the archival work is infused on the one hand with the spirit of decades of the company’s international tours and co-productions. On the other, it simply continues to spread the spirit of Pina Bausch’s choreographies around the world. By putting these ideas into practice, the Pina Bausch Foundation is following its vision of a living archive. It will not only be a meeting place for specialists, regionally and internationally, but also for anyone curious. Not only a site for information, but also home to a creative spirit, inspiring visitors to engage in creative work themselves. Central to the work of this living archive is the goal of ensuring that Pina Bausch’s art remains a performative phenomena in the present. It is not our task to mummify Pina Bausch’s art; we wish to make her œuvre the centre of a creative cosmos. It is our aim to keep her pieces alive, by making them real again each time, in the moment, on stage, in space and in movement.

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The questions never end, and the searching never ends.

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There is something eternal, and that’s the beauty of it.

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When I look at our work, I still have the feeling

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that I have only just begun. pina bausch

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about the authors

Salomon Bausch

Salomon Bausch studied law at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and commenced with his doctorate in 2008. In 2009, after the passing of Pina Bausch, he set up the Pina Bausch Foundation as a non-profit organisation, according to her will. He endowed it with her entire artistic estate which includes all copyrights on her pieces and choreographies among a vast stock of archival material, as well as copyrights on Rolf Borzik’s stage sets and costumes. Since 2009 he has been a Trustee and Executive Director of the Foundation and has been heading the archive project An Invitation from Pina. An Archive as a Workshop for the Future since 2010.

Stephan Brinkmann

Stephan Brinkman is Professor for Contemporary Dance at the Folkwang University of the Arts. He is a dancer, choreographer, dance teacher and dance scholar. He studied dance at the Folkwang University of the Arts and Theatre, Film, and Television Studies, German Studies and Sociology at the University of Cologne as well as studies in the field of dance pedagogics at the Folkwang University of Arts. He was a dancer at the Folkwang Tanzstudio and at the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. He has created his own choreographies and has taught contemporary dance internationally. He completed his PhD in the field of Human Movement Studies at the University of Hamburg. The title of his doctoral thesis was “Remembering in Dance”, published as Bewegung erinnern. Gedächtnisformen im Tanz (2013).

Royd Climenhaga

Royd Climenhaga is a member of the Arts Faculty at Eugene Lang College/The New School University in New York City. He writes on contemporary performance and the historical avant-garde, with particular interest in intersections between dance and theater. He is currently writing 20th Century Performance: A History of Interdisciplinary Artistic Practice for Routledge. Recent book publications include The Pina Bausch Sourcebook: The Making of Tanztheater (2013, ed.) and “Pina Bausch” in Routledge’s Performance Practitioner Series (2009). Royd also works as a grant writer and development consultant, and develops and produces new performance work as Co-Artistic Director of “Human Company”.

Katharina Kelter

Katharina Kelter holds a DFG Fellowship (German Research Foundation) since 2012 at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf within the Post Graduate Program “Materiality and Production” (GRK 1678). She studied Media and Cultural Sciences (B.A.) and Media and Cultural Analysis (M.A.) in Düsseldorf, and from 2008 to 2012 she worked as a project collaborator and research  assistant at the Institute for Media and Cultural Studies and at the Institute of Art History at the Heinrich Heine University. Since 2013 she has been working in collaboration with the Pina Bausch Foundation in Wuppertal. Her Ph.D. project outlines a media and cultural scientific perspective on dance and movement, and examines the relationship between materiality and production in dance processes. Publications: “Getanzte Erinnerung. Zur Produktivität der Erinnerung bei Pina Bausch.” In: Skrandies/Kelter/Kollmar (eds.): Bewegungsmaterial. Beiträge zu einer Bildtheorie des zeitgenössischen Tanzes. Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press, 2014.

Gabriele Klein

Gabriele Klein is Professor for Sociology of Movement and Dance at the Department of Human Movement and Director of Performance Studies at the University of Hamburg. Her main areas of research are dance and performance theory, contemporary choreography, popular dance cultures, urban performance cultures, and translation of dance cultures. Her recent book publications include Stadt-Szenen. Künstlerische Produktionen und theoretische Positionen (City-Scenes. Artistic Productions and Theoretical Positions) (2005, ed.), Performance (2005, ed. with W. Sting), Tango in Translation (2009, ed.), Methoden der Tanzwissenschaft (Methods of Dance Studies) (2007, ed. with G. Brandstetter), Emerging Bodies. The Performance of Worldmaking in Dance and Choreography (2011, ed. with S. Noeth), Is this real? Die Kultur des HipHop (Is this real? The Culture of HipHop) (2003, 5th edition 2012, with M. Friedrich), Performance and Labour, Performance Research 18:1 (2013, ed. with B. Kunst) and Dance [and] Theory (2013, ed. with G. Brandstetter). She is currently working on the project Gestures of Dance – Dance as Gesture. Cultural and Aesthetic Translations in the Work of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch (funded by DFG).

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Sharon Lehner

Sharon Lehner has directed the BAM Hamm Archives in Brooklyn New York since 1999. She holds degrees in Performance Studies and also in Historical Editing and Archival Management and has presented at conferences and published in both disciplines. Recent projects include an eighteen month retrospective exhibit of BAM’s 150 year history and an archival book project: BAM: The Complete Works, Steven Serafin, editor (Quantuck Lane Press, 2011). She is currently collaborating with performing artists, subject area specialists and archivists in order build alliances to develop tools that better document the performing arts.

Keziah Claudine Nanevie

Keziah Claudine Nanevie is an 18 year old high-school graduate from the Städtischen Pina-Bausch-Gesamtschule in WuppertalVohwinkel. Her hobbies include modeling, travelling, fashion and meeting people who mean a lot to her. After completing her university-entrance diploma she hopes to model for a year and then study international management. She is not 100% certain, but these are her plans at the moment.

Linda SelJimi

Linda Seljimi is an 18 year old high-school graduate from the Städtischen Pina-Bausch-Gesamtschule in Wuppertal-Vohwinkel. After her university-entrance diploma she would like to study psychology or alternatively business and economics education. She wants a job where she can work and really help people in collaboration with other psychologists or teachers.

Bernhard Thull

Bernhard Thull is Professor for Knowledge Management and Information Design at the University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt. His research areas include Information architecture, semantic technologies, web-based application development. His last relevant publication was Canan Hastik, Arnd Steinmetz, Bernhard Thull: Ontology-Based framework for Real-Time Audiovisual Art. Proc. IFLA World Library and Information Congress, August 17–23, 2013, Singapore, 2013. For more publications see http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bernhard_Thull.

Michelle Urban

Michelle Urban is an 18 year old high-school graduate from the Städtischen Pina-Bausch-Gesamtschule in Wuppertal-Vohwinkel. After her university-entrance diploma she would like to travel a bit and see the world. Afterwards she wants mostly to study psychology or law. It’s important to her to understand and defend other people.

Marc Wagenbach

Marc Wagenbach was Research and Development Manager at the Pina Bausch Foundation from 2009 to 2013, and was involved in the archiving project An Invitation from Pina. An Archive as a Workshop for the Future. In 2007 he became an assistant to Pina Bausch. He studied Theatre, Film, and Television Studies, Musicology and Classical Studies in Cologne and did his PhD in the field of digital culture and aesthetics. His main areas of research include dance and performance theory, rehearsal studies, urban culture and artistic research. His most recent publication is Digitaler Alltag. Ästhetisches Erleben zwischen Kunst und Lifestyle (2012).

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Illustrations Cover handwritten notes by Pina Bausch to the piece Der Fensterputzer. Ein Stück von Pina Bausch (1997) © PBF p 2 + 3 Anne Martin in 1980. Ein Stück von Pina Bausch (1980), photo: Jan Minarik © Jan Minarik p 4 + 5 Pina Bausch and Kurt Jooss, photo: Walter Vogel © Walter Vogel p 6 + 7 Café Müller. Ein Stück von Pina Bausch (1978), guest performance in Nancy, France, 1980, photo: Jan Minarik © Jan Minarik p 14 Wuppertal 2013, photo: Sala Seddiki © PBF p 19 New York City 2012, photo: Marc Wagenbach © Marc Wagenbach p 24 from the program brochure of Palermo Palermo. Ein Stück von Pina Bausch (1989), unknown photographer p 33 from the program brochure of Ten Chi. Ein Stück von Pina Bausch (2004), photo: Robert Sturm p 34 + 35 from the program brochure of Palermo Palermo. Ein Stück von Pina Bausch (1989), photos: Pina Bausch © PBF p 36 + 37 from the program brochure of Ten Chi. Ein Stück von Pina Bausch (2004), photo: Robert Sturm p 38 documenting Peter Pabst’s stage set for Palermo Palermo. Ein Stück von Pina Bausch (1989), photo: Gerburg Stoffel © PBF p 45 digitalisation of photographic negatives, photo: Sala Seddiki © PBF p 46 digitalisation of program brochures, photo: Sala Seddiki © PBF p 49 open-reel video tape, photo: Sala Seddiki © PBF p 50 + 51 developing paper prototype for annotation tool © Hochschule Darmstadt p 52 Clara Bauer processing program brochures, photo: Sala Seddiki © PBF p 53 archive boxes, photo: Sala Seddiki © PBF p 58 data cloud of the Pina Bausch Archive © Bernhard Thull p 62 fig. 1 © Bernhard Thull p 63 fig. 2 © Bernhard Thull, photo: Wilfried Krüger © Wilfried Krüger fig. 3 © Bernhard Thull, photo: Jochen Viehoff © Jochen Viehoff p 64 fig. 4 © Bernhard Thull p 65 fig. 5 © Bernhard Thull, photos: Jochen Viehoff © Jochen Viehoff / Wilfried Krüger © Wilfried Krüger p 67 fig. 6 annotation tool p 69 fig. 7 © Bernhard Thull p 70 fig. 8 © Bernhard Thull, photo: Rolf Borzik © PBF p 74 digitalisation of video recordings from the 1970s, photo: Sala Seddiki © PBF p 80 + 81 photos: Sala Seddiki © PBF p 83 video tapes at Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch 2009, photo: Sala Seddiki © PBF p 84 ensemble of the reconstruction of Pina Bausch’s Tannhäuser Bacchanal (1972) including students of the Folkwang Universität der Künste, Essen 2013, photo: Georg Schreiber © Georg Schreiber p 92 + 93 ensemble of the reconstruction of Pina Bausch’s Tannhäuser Bacchanal (1972) including students of the Folkwang Universität der Künste, Essen 2013, photo: Georg Schreiber © Georg Schreiber p 98 + 99 Jan Minarik and Marlis Alt in Blaubart – Beim Anhören einer Tonbandaufnahme von Béla Bartóks Oper „Herzog

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Blaubarts Burg“. Ein Stück von Pina Bausch (1977), photo: Rolf Borzik © PBF p 100 + 101 in private, photo: Jan Minarik © Jan Minarik p 102 + 103 from the program brochure of “...como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si...”. Ein Stück von Pina Bausch (2009), photo: Pina Bausch © PBF p 104 + 105 Paul Hess, Cagdas Ermis, and Julian Stierle after performing Das Frühlingsopfer (1975) in Moscow, Russia 2013 © Cagdas Ermis p 106 + 107 handwritten notes by Pina Bausch to the piece Der Fensterputzer. Ein Stück von Pina Bausch (1997) © PBF p 108 + 109 Pina Bausch and Ed Kortlandt rehearsing Orpheus und Eurydike. Tanzoper von Pina Bausch (1975), photo: Rolf Borzik © PBF p 110 + 111 chairs from the piece Die sieben Todsünden. Tanzabend von Pina Bausch (1976) photo: Rolf Borzik © PBF p 114 ensemble in Wind von West (1975), photo: Rolf Borzik © PBF p 123 Ed Kortlandt in Wind von West (1975), photo: Rolf Borzik © PBF p 124 + 125 Ed Kortlandt and Jo Ann Endicott in Wind von West (1975), photo: Rolf Borzik © PBF p 126 Hatira Bek during the schools project Work in Progress. Das Pina Bausch Archiv entsteht in Wuppertal! © PBF p 132 + 133 screenshot from the film Skizzenbücher, Nico Lörken © PBF p 134 Archivladen (“archive shop”) in the course of PINA40 (2013), Clémentine Deluy, photo: Marc Wagenbach ©PBF p 135 exhibition: Wir stellen aus! (We Exhibit!), photo: Sala Seddiki © PBF p 138 + 139 screenshot from the film Skizzenbücher, Jacqueline Ribbach © PBF p 140 + 141 screenshot from the film Skizzenbücher © PBF p 142 Leoni Wenzel, Marc Wagenbach, photo: Julia Bögeholz © Julia Bögeholz p 147 Barbara Kaufmann in front of the Archivladen (“archive shop”) in the course of PINA40 (2013), photo: Marc Wagenbach © PBF p 150 Keziah Claudine Nanevie performing during the exhibition Wir stellen aus! (We Exhibit!), photo: Marc Wagenbach © PBF p 151 screenshot from the film Skizzenbücher, Carolin Wagner © PBF p 156 photo: Sala Seddiki © PBF p 158 + 159 Progress Report 2011 of the Pina Bausch Foundation © PBF p 161 photographing costumes, photo: Sala Seddiki © PBF p 162 + 163 (1) Progress Report 2012 of the Pina Bausch Foundation © PBF p 163 (2) Clémentine Deluy and Yamini Varatharajan, photo: Sala Seddiki © PBF p 164 + 165 Kurt Jooss and Dominique Mercy rehearse for Der grüne Tisch by Kurt Jooss with the Tanztheater Wuppertal company, 1973/74 season, photo: Rolf Borzik © PBF p 166 + 167 work on the stage set for Die sieben Todsünden. Tanzabend von Pina Bausch (1976), photo: Rolf Borzik © PBF p 168 drawing by Rolf Borzik © PBF p 169 Pina Bausch, photo: Rolf Borzik © PBF p 186 + 187 rehearsals for Das Frühlingsopfer (1975) by Pina Bausch at Wuppertal Opera House (1975), photo: Rolf Borzik © PBF p 190 + 191 Wuppertal 2013, photo: Sala Seddiki © PBF