Pina Bausch's Dance Theater - by Gabriele Klein (Paperback)

About the Book

This volume provides new perspectives on the Tanztheater Wuppertal and its iconic founder and artistic director--Pina Bausch. This is the first book to focus on the artistic research conducted for the Tanztheater's international coproductions, featuring interviews with dancers, collaborators, and spectators as well as ethnographic insights.

Book Synopsis

This volume provides new, groundbreaking perspectives on the work of the Tanztheater Wuppertal and its iconic founder and artistic director--Pina Bausch. The company's production development and performances, the global transfer of its choreographic material, and the baffled reactions of audiences and critics are explained as complex, interdependent, and reciprocal processes of translation. This is the first book to focus on the artistic research conducted for the Tanztheater's international coproductions, featuring extensive interviews with dancers, collaborators, and spectators as well as first-hand ethnographic insights. Introducing a praxeology of aesthetic translation as a key concept for dance research, this unique volume argues that Pina Bausch's lasting legacy is defined by an entanglement of temporalities that challenges the notion of contemporaneity.

Review Quotes

A book [...] which represents the character of a benchmark study on the legend and the phenomenon of Pina Bausch and which refutes, supports and documents many of the previous second-hand publications.--Peter Dahms (translated from German) "Tanzinfo Berlin"

An informative and personal as well socially relevant reading pleasure, not only for a specialist audience, but for a broad readership.--Miriam Althammer (translated from German) "Tanznetz"

Klein [embeds] the artistic creation and work of the entire ensemble in complex cultural, sociological, but also intertextual contexts. The result makes a decisive contribution to being able to view the long-term impact of the artist in a new light ten years after her death.--Rico Stehfest (translated from German) "tanz"

This book [is] designed to suitable for introducing all those interested in culture to Bausch's cosmos, and yet contains sections that provide informative nourishment even for sophisticated specialists.--Helmut Ploebst (translated from German) "DerStandard"

This volume provides new, ground-breaking perspectives on the globally renowned work of the Tanztheater Wuppertal and its iconic founder and artistic director, Pina Bausch.-- "UP TO DANCE"

An enormous research achievement, incorporating archival, ethnographic, literary and sociological analyses, Gabriele Klein locates Pina Bausch and her oeuvre in constantly mutating relations with their socio-political surround. Offering a brilliant excavation of the artistic process, each chapter unfolds a new perspective on Bausch and her collaborators and on dance itself as a social practice. Klein implements a methodology that emphasizes the complexity of dance as a collaboration among all the different constituencies who participate in its creation, and as such the book provides a powerful model for dance analysis.--Susan Leigh Foster, Distinguished Professor, UCLA

As the first scholar to gain access to the inner workings of Tanztheater Wuppertal and its rich archival resources, Gabriele Klein illuminates the multidimensional creative process of Pina Bausch and her artistic collaborators. Interconnecting rehearsal and performance, revival and reception, Pina Bausch's Dance Theatre highlights the dancers' diverse national identities, the intercultural dimensions of the works they created together, and the transnational partnerships that afforded the company's truly global influence. Gabriele Klein innovates a distinctive methodology premised on translation as cultural practice, which has far-reaching implications for dance studies.--Susan Manning, Herman and Beulah Pearce Miller Research Professor, Northwestern University

The ultimate book on Pina Bausch, creator of one of the most impactful dance aesthetics of our time. Truly global in its scope, meticulously researched, and groundbreaking in its methodology of a praxeology of translation, the book speaks to all aspects of Bausch's choreographies, her unique process and company, and the continuing impact of her work. Klein asks provocative and productive questions as she illustrates how dance is both a knowledge system and an artistic research practice which can make sense of our perilous contemporaneity.--Jens Richard Giersdorf, Professor of Dance Studies, Marymount Manhattan College

About the Author

Gabriele Klein is professor of dance and performance studies at Hamburg University. She leads the master's program in performance studies and the research network »Translating and Framing. Practices of Medial Transformations«. She is a member of the Hamburg Cluster of Excellence »Understanding Written Artefacts«. Her research fields are the social and political theory of dance, choreography, and performance, body politics, and transnational popular dance cultures.