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 tietie made of wool, cashmere or silk threads which are twisted, 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.