Jan Minarik had worked with Pina Bausch in Wuppertal since 1973.

Engaged there since 1970, the classical soloist was one of the few dancers who stayed when the serious young woman, radically searching for a new way of expressing herself through dance, started in theater there and gave up ballet.

Your ideas must have made sense to Minarik immediately.

He stayed for decades.

He created 33 roles in 36 productions for Pina Bausch, among them the magnificent, eerie, possessed Bluebeard, 1977.

Jan Minarik's build was that of a muscular, well-trained athlete.

If he wore a bathrobe on the dance theater stage, he looked like a boxer in the break between two rounds.

He looked elegant and charismatic in every attire, but especially in the tailored shirts and suits that Wuppertal's draper's masters knew how to make, as if the opera house were on Savile Row.

Minarik could play the craziest, funniest scenes without the slightest twitch in his beautiful, masculine features betraying the silent laughter that must have shaken him in truth.

He was the man who moved a woman slowly, tenderly across the floor, as if they were newlyweds in a bar full of smoke and the smell of whiskey, a couple who can't pull themselves away from each other to go home.

Except that he was reading a book in one hand behind the woman's back.

Another indelible image is him calmly setting up an ironing board on stage, but then frying ground beef on the hot iron.

In hindsight, the roles he created seem like performances in one great work.

Looking back, one has to say that his presence shows how every movement, when performed by a classically trained dancer like Minarik, is filled with an energy that gushes out from years of training as if from an inexhaustible source.

Minarik was born on August 25, 1945 in Prague.

After training as a chef, he became a dancer, which enabled him to avoid military service.

He danced at the National Theater in Prague and then in Brno (Brünn).

In 1969 he managed to escape to the West.

As has only just become known, he died on June 26th on the Czech farm to which he had moved in 2000 at the age of 55, after the end of his dancing career.

His wife remains, the Bausch dancer Beatrice Libonati, with whom he has been married since 1981, and their two children remain.

A world audience of Tanztheater Wuppertal mourns with them, having lost one of the most lovable and interesting of its former protagonists.