PINA BAUSCH: MEN LIKE ANY OTHER

Without a doubt the greatest European choreographer of the second half of the twentieth century, Pina Bausch showed bodies like no other. Between theater and dance, Bausch invents a new form. Each element becomes a gesture: beating, hair, cloth.  

If Bausch preferred the ascetic anonymity of the black Yamamoto for herself, she made daring use of clothing on stage. In The Rite of Spring, ample black trousers; then, from Café Müller onwards, wide shirts, drooping shoulders, morning trousers. 

With Kontakthof begins a focused reflection on the suit. Often double-breasted and charcoal grey, Bausch turns men’s clothing into a set of gestures: undoing a knit tie, tying one's shoes, doing the inner button of one's jacket, tucking in one's shirt, loosening one's belt. Tails, heeled loafers, poulaines, a boiled-wool admiral's coat. 

Bausch looks for breaking points: waists, screams, ankles, cries, wrists, flights. Battered waistcoats, rolled-up sleeves. Braces and round lapels, dry bodies and ample signs.  

Shortly before her death, Pina Bausch chose to stage Kontakthof at a secondary school. Most of the boys had never worn suits. One of them confesses: "My body is too big for me". Pina Bausch offers this vast fitting room: mending one's body like a suit, one's suit like a body.