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By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2004 The Dance Insider

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PARIS -- "What is the source of your imagination?"

The question comes at the end of Pina Bausch's Wednesday press conference at the Theatre de la Ville - Sarah Bernhardt, which tonight sees the French premiere of "Nefes" (Turkish for "Breath"), Bausch's latest site-created work for the Tanztheater Wuppertal, this one developed in Istanbul, where it premiered last year. Bausch, seemingly forever clad in black, leans her chin on one palm, her eyes rolling upwards -- not in exasperation, but as if searching her head for the words -- as long tendrils of smoke spiral from the long cigarette held in her long fingers. (Only Pina Bausch can imbue cigarette smoke with drama; one could swear the smoke is lit with its own follow spot.)

"Desire," she answers. Then: "The desire to find the essence of a thing."

The essence of Pina Bausch, much imitated but never replicated, is not to be found in a press conference or in the morsels that one out-of-practice reporter can salvage from such a group interview, which Bausch has consented to so that she doesn't have to grant additional interviews; ""I'm not a big talker," she says. "I do all my things to not talk." (Contrast this restraint with the increasing number of choreographers of the current generation, here in Europe anyway, who seem to create "dances" so that they can talk.) But for the true Pina (and Tanztheater Wuppertal, let's not forget those droll performer-collaborators) groupie -- for whom even a three-hour spectacle, sans intermission, is not enough -- the press conference can and does flesh out the process behind the work, if only a little, and amplify the artist's motivation and creative universe.

This being France, where the schools until recently have discouraged interrogation, your humble correspondent was obliged to get things going, which he did by reminding Bausch of her remarks at the end of Chantal Ackerman's 1983 documentary (screened at the Centre Pompidou recently), "One Day Pina Asked me to...." "What do you want for the future?" the filmmaker asks. Bausch's shoulders slacken, as if under the weight of the world, and her head dips, as she repeats gloomily, "What do I want for the future? There are so many problems in the world....Strength." Noting that some would say the world has even more problems now, I ask her how she would respond to the question today.

"When she asked me that question, I had more time to think of an answer," says Bausch, dressed in black slacks, turtleneck, and jacket (discarded halfway through the 75-minute encounter), her long hair in the signature loose ponytail. "I feel still very similar because we all need a lot of strength to continue and to do and make positive efforts, and not give up. Our desire doesn't stop, to build, create, make friendships. It doesn't change."

What does change for Tanztheater Wuppertal is the locale in which it creates a new spectacle. Istanbul, however, felt in one respect like a homecoming. The troupe had been there before, with "Der Fensterputzer" (The Window-Washer). "This was one of the most wonderful performances we ever had -- I will never forget it," she recounts. "There's a scene where a dancer takes out pictures of herself when she's small, showing them to the public; later on, all the dancers do this. And suddenly, the public also took their family pictures out and started showing them to each other."

One might be skeptical about whether an artist, even one of the intuitive capacity of Pina Bausch, can come to know a country and city well enough to create a piece about it after a three-week residency. But the premise would be wrong, because in these site-created works, the ville is not so much the subject as the canvas, or even the wind, inflected gestures of place subtly affecting the gestures of movement and the landscape of story. "Nefes" -- which uses Tom Waits as well as the Istanbul Oriental Ensemble, among other music, and even retains tango in the shape of Astor Piazzolla -- is "not only about Istanbul, it's about us in this time -- what we want to express," says Bausch. "Each time" the company creates in residency, the resulting spectacle draws "only a tiny bit from where we are working." But material assimilated in one milieu might show up later in another piece.

"Material" might be too crass a term to describe what Bausch retains from her residencies. For instance, asked about working in Istanbul, she recalls the joy of the Wuppertal performers excited to practice their Turkish -- they crammed before the trip -- with the local technicians after the first rehearsal. And the interaction she wants to talk about did not involve a cultural heavy-weight, but her driver. The morsel he gave her whose essence we might find in a future work -- that's my conjecture based on how it seems to have affected her, not her promise -- is the sadness of this older man when they drove past his house, which he'd sold, and around which the new owners had put a fence. Is that a feeling of loss? Is it a feeling of regret? Of finding it difficult to accept change? Is it a theme that could be expressed to sum up a libretto? Probably not, but this is precisely the matter that Bausch deals in, the inchoate; if we can't (well, I can't!) reproduce a linear "plot" after we see a Bausch ballet, we know there was a story, we know it took us from a to b to c (if not z), and that if we're not changed for life -- "What we do is so little," Bausch acknowledges sadly -- we're re-oriented, or at least emerge askew from the orientation we had before the curtain went up. Before I knew -- before I really knew -- I wrote a clever item simply listing all the props that Bausch had utilized in a show (in fact, "Der Fensterputzer," seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music), but these are a diversion because the drama of a Bausch spectacle comes not from what was seen, but from how it alters your view, whether globally or on an intimate scale.

Also intriguing for her in Istanbul, as a source of inspiration, was that "the women in Turkey are a big mystery.... You don't see how they look because they are covered, but you have their eyes. And you have a fantasy of how they are...underneath."

The harsh reality for up to half of all Turkish women, according to a report issued by Amnesty International Wednesday, is that they are victims of domestic violence, including so-called "honor" killings, and that while neither the problem nor its scale are unique to Turkey, the failure of the authorities to adequately recognize and address the crime is. As "Nefes" would seem, from the program description, to treat relations between men and women, I ask Bausch if the piece addresses this aspect of their relationship in Turkey.

"There are many ways we can do a work," Bausch begins. "I always try to find something that is similar in us -- what we have together, why we can understand each other. Why music makes us sad, happy. I try to find a way to speak about this language of being together." She never addresses something so specific as, in this case, domestic violence. But regarding domestic violence in Turkey, she says, "We know in any part of the world things like this exist." The local producers who introduced the company to Istanbul, from the International Istanbul Theatre Festival and the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, "didn't show us only the good sides, only the chocolate sides. They showed us where the problems are too, opposite sides. We saw poor and strange things." And regarding the situation of women, she found that apparently, "In Turkey, all the people in important positions are women. I don't remember any other country where women are so strong."

The violence of our times is not confined to Turkey, and many artists in dance and theater, one questioner pointed out Wednesday, have responded to this violence by reflecting it in increasingly brutal work, while Bausch, by contrast, has become more and more positive in her creations. Why?

"It's a reaction to this" violence, she explains. "I react different. There is a reaction because it is so terrible. It's in each one's hands. I thought years ago, If I now cannot once smile, I have to give up, I cannot continue. If I can help how you are with other people, to try to keep a balance.... I feel like even difficult decisions should be taken on balance. I don't know if it's better to all blow on the same horn about 'How terrible it is,' or if we need an effort to remind us it could be different." If she is responding to carnage with roses (my words), "It's not an escape, it's a reaction."

"I did a lot of things before completely different," she adds, "but that was a different time and I felt the opposite. What we try to do is so little, and I'm happy about any result because it's so little in relation to what you want to say. It's never enough, but maybe that's why I don't stop. The past few years I've still felt like I can't do anything, and yet I still tried. It's so little, and I know. So we just try. We are little people making something small....

"I'm like a child -- if somebody does something nice or smiles at me, I'm happy.... When we're travelling, sometimes we think how lucky we are -- we have so many experiences. I would like to spend my life giving back some of this beauty we have received -- that I can only do with my company."

The Theatre de la Ville - Sarah Bernhardt is just across the street from the Seine; across the River on your right, you can see the Eiffel Tower, which now lights up in sparkles for ten minutes every hour after sunset. Cross the bridge just in front of you, and you're on the Ile St. Louis, where after Pina's early evening press conference I found myself a spot on the stone boardwalk facing Notre Dame. A soft wind was blowing, caressing the cheek and making the trees rustle as in a Corot painting. Like the wind, the effects of a Pina Bausch spectacle (or a Pina Bausch press conference, it turns out) may be invisible, but the atmosphere has been altered.

Pina Bausch's "Nefes" (Breath), a co-production of the International Istanbul Theatre Festival and Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, receives its French premiere tonight on the Tanztheater Wuppertal at the Theatre de la Ville - Sarah Bernhardt in Paris, where it continues through June 22. Decor and videos are by Peter Pabst, costumes by Marion Cito, and musical collaboration by Matthias Burkert and Andreas Eisenschneider. For more information, please click here. In the Fall, Tanztheater Wuppertal brings Pina Bausch's 2002 "For the Children of Today, Tomorrow, and the Future" to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Next spring, the Paris Opera Ballet performs Bausch's 1975 "Orphee et Eurydice."

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