Exceptionally beautiful images can be seen in Florian Heinzen-Ziob's new film "Dancing Pina" of Bausch's perhaps most famous work, the "Sacre du printemps".
In the original version from 1975, called "The Rite of Spring", the dancers with their long, loose hair and delicate, silk-thin short dresses form an enchanting contrast to the dark, fragrant peat of the stage floor, as you can see in the documentary " Dancing Pina” an African ensemble first at Germaine Acogny's world-renowned dance center, the Ecole des Sables, and then by the sea.
The school has a dance studio, the fourth wall of which can be opened completely, and so Heinzen-Ziob shows the rehearsal work inside with the image of nature shimmering in heat behind it.
This is a wonderful homage to those travel-inspired later pieces by Pina Bausch, in which she always incorporated images of the road.
But nature is also present in earlier stage sets, in the form of rocks, flowers, water or animals.
What is danced on turf in theaters around the world, the ritual sacrificial death of a girl, we see at the end of the film on sand, in front of a grandiose sky and sea, in a light that Europe can only dream of.
The director contrasts this with a second setting, that of the studios and stage of the Dresden Semperoper, where the company learns “Iphigenie auf Tauris”, a key masterpiece of European Baroque.
The film tells how different generations of Wuppertal Bausch dancers transmit two of their works to younger people outside of the city.
Watching this work, accompanying this process is a workshop in empathy, communication and artistic expression.
This bodes well for the future of this heritage.
It remains unimaginably difficult to keep the work of choreographers alive after their death.
Her immediate artistic survivors are mostly dancers.
But every ensemble member has different memories, had a different relationship to the work.
How much does a dancer who appears in a piece notice of the others, their roles and the overall impression, how much does the particle know?
After the death of Martha Graham, the great American pioneer of modern dance, a sad time began for her pieces, not immediately, but in the next generation.
Dancers don't like working in a museum.
They need a repertoire with which they can grow, but also choreographers with whom they can invent new things, who inspire them and challenge their movement intelligence.
The Martha Graham Dance Company seemed dull at the time.
Would it have been better to have closed the company back then, in the mid-1990s?
From today's perspective, certainly not.
The Martha Graham Dance Company is a fascinating example of a successful transformation.
Processes like this sometimes take a long time.
Even the New York City Ballet, whose founder George Balanchine died in 1983, has since gone through phases in which audiences and critics not only mourned the choreographer's death, but also shared wistful memories of previous casts.
But the current fabulous generation has forgotten all that.
Film has expanded the possibilities of dance
It depends on the dancers how alive the dances of the deceased still appear.
In the case of Merce Cunningham, the American postmodern master choreographer who died the same summer as Pina Bausch in 2009, those who love his work are going through a very difficult time.
His pieces are best danced by the Ballet de Lorraine, taught by Petter Jacobsson, the director, and Thomas Caley, one of the most commanding Cunningham dancers of all time.
Next spring you can see Cunningham's "Sounddance" there again.
Alla Kovgan's magnificent cinematic tribute to Cunningham hit theaters in 2019, but those who had hoped more ballet directors would include works by him in their repertoire were disappointed.
As early as 2011, Wim Wenders' film about Pina Bausch was a cinema success.
What Wenders had planned as a film with her in 2009 he then had to shoot as a posthumous tribute.
As much as dance shaped the avant-garde at the beginning of the twentieth century as a key art form, film has expanded the possibilities of dance, especially as a memory store.
Thanks to the early moving images, we have an inkling of how Loie Fuller really danced.
Complete choreographies can no longer just be noted down, but recorded from so many different camera perspectives that rehearsing them on Mars will still be theoretically possible in a hundred years.
The New York City Ballet documents on film how dancers pass on to the next generation the roles that Balanchine entrusted to them.
Florian Heinzen-Ziob's film has achieved something similar in its unobtrusive, but always close and sensitive way of capturing dancing together.