Trains heading north from Paris enter Germany, and the first major stop is undoubtedly Cologne. Cologne Cathedral and Cologne Philharmonic Concert are planned, and Bonn, the former capital of the Federal Republic of Germany, is not far from Cologne, and Beethoven's house is naturally one of the must-visits. There is also a small town that is overlooked. Interesting to say. Once chatting with a few entrepreneurs who had regular business dealings with Germany, when they talked about The Upatal in the Ruhr industrial district, they threw strange glances, not only a small train with tracks hanging upside down, or a pharmaceutical factory in Bayer. When asked about the modern dance master Pina Bausch, the hearers looked at each other and were dazed.
Author Cao Liqun
Pina Baush (27.7.1940 – 30.6.2009)
As I checked before the trip, the dance theater performance where Pina had lived for more than thirty years ended on September 16, and on that day, I was still in Avignon in the south of France. Cologne is also due to September 20 at the earliest, and it will not be able to catch up in any case. For quite some time after September 16, the theater did not perform. In fact, I have seen a performance by Pina Bausch with her dance troupe at the Tianqiao Theater in Beijing in 2007. So it is not a pity to miss a performance, just to be able to see the theater. In that case, what time is not a problem. If you can get into the theater, even finding a poster is a bonus.
The phone dialed the theater number found in advance, followed by a recording of the call in English in German. Routines were told of ticket sales times from Monday to Friday and no other information. Obviously, this theater is not like other famous performance venues in the world, such as the Golden Hall, where you can buy sightseeing tickets on weekdays, and only sell performance tickets here. As you can imagine, other times it is possible that the door is closed. Subconsciously, it feels like it's going to be a punching trip. Going or not going, of course, is not a problem.
From Cologne to Upatar, the express train takes only twenty minutes (be sure to see the number of trains clearly, otherwise the slow train will be twice as slow). Out of the train station, you also have to take a short train that starts with an S. It takes only seven or eight minutes, after two stops, to reach the Upatar Theater. Exit the station, follow Google Maps and feel like it should be nearby. But after turning around twice, I didn't find it. However, he stumbled upon the Engels House in a small forest not far away. When we turned back and stumbled upon the inconspicuous theater door, thanks to the performance posters plastered on the door. It turned out that this theater was interconnected with another building, and the slightly dilapidated gate was easily missed. Imagine those internationally famous theaters, which are not modern buildings located in the downtown area. In contrast, in the Eastern End of Upatar, pina's dance theater base camp is a bit shabby. The entrance of the theater is anti-locked, and the sunlight reflected by the glass door makes it impossible to see inside, which is obviously not open on weekdays. This almost suburban place, where there are almost no people on the street, can not imagine such a closed place, but it has given birth to a dance master who has impressed the world. I really don't know how Pina has cultivated her dance theater concept for more than thirty years, making an obscure ballet company an enlightened place to convey and interpret her unique dance concept and life concept. Sadly leaving, he walked back to the station opposite to see if there were any pina books, but saw that the station convenience store only had drinks, food and pornographic magazines.
The return trip was indeed a slow ride. It is difficult to calm the mind. "Upa" is the german name of a river that runs through the city, and "Tar" means hilly, highland. A hundred years ago, the Upa River is surrounded by some villages and towns scattered in small valleys, although the Upa River is narrow and shallow, after all, it brings inconvenience to the movement between villages and towns, so someone designed a 13-kilometer-long monorail suspension train along the river, and after the train ran, the city of Upatar was established in 1929, becoming a German industrial town, and the locally produced textiles were exported to the surrounding areas and countries. Today, in the center of the city square, a metal sculpture of a female weaver is erected, indicating that the textile industry here has long since declined, leaving a large number of factory buildings and bare workers' living areas. With such a scene and atmosphere, how does Pina open up her own dance world?
I always remember her slightly narrow, virgin-like face, and on the day of the performance at the Flyover Theater, she walked slowly past me until she sat in the last row. It is said that at the Upatar Theater, whenever a new dance is performed, she is like this. When the interviewer quoted the famous phrase from Waltz, "One more glass of wine, another cigarette, don't go home for a while," Pina responded that it was the situation, "all of us stayed home late at night." I'd rather stay in a theater or café than go back to a lonely hotel. Since 1973, she has never slept a solid night's sleep since the transformation of a top dancer into a choreographer. She doesn't care about how people dance, but what they dance for. All creations are about the human heart, especially the different levels and degrees of harm that women suffer. Love and fear, longing and loneliness, frustration and decadence, childhood and death, memories and forgetting. Audiences accustomed to traditional ballet were also victims, but this naked expression of the heart on stage horrified them. They walked to the last row and protested to the choreographer who had subverted the dance order, spitting at her and even pulling at her hair. On the streets of Upatar, seeing locals in dark dark costumes, it feels like people's perceptions are as difficult to change as clothing. Old audiences accustomed to elegant ballet could not accept the new concept of dance theater in any way. It wasn't until these audiences got older that the empathetic young people entered the theater and opened up a new face.
Upatar Theater, Pina Dance Base. Photo by Cao Liqun
When performing in Beijing, because "The Rite of Spring" is music from Stravinsky, there is no barrier to understanding. Fear and sympathy, lust and lust, despair, trembling and helplessness at the moment of sacrifice, all in the prescribed context (the sacrifice of spring is still preserved in Russian folklore). Nor did the dance style surpass modern ballet. Café Müller (1978) is quite confusing, the scenes of modern life, the daily interaction between men and women, the plot is fragmented, the movements are twisted and deformed, and it has nothing to do with dance, even modern dance. There were tables and chairs in the simple setting, and a small woman dressed in white entered the café. There were also two women, one of whom was apparently blind. Because of the obstruction of the table and chairs, their march was hesitant. Two men walked around trying to remove the obstacles. Eventually the blind woman and a man stood facing each other. The other woman was held by the man, but slipped from him again and again. We all know that Pina said, I'm sad, so I dance. But it was always unclear where her grief came from. Are they just the traumas of war that all women faced and witnessed during World War II, the material and spiritual ruins? Later, I saw a material that Pina's childhood, her home was next to the café, and works like "Mueller's Coffee House" were not made up, but conveyed her strong childhood feelings. Maybe something had happened there, and the busy parents hadn't noticed the damage their surroundings had done to Pina's young mind. Artists are mostly secretive about the trauma of childhood. In order to whitewash, some writers will also lie that they had a happy childhood. The Austrian writer Bernhard tore open the truth through the mouth of the protagonist Regel in the book "The Master of Art": childhood is a black hole, and children are pushed into the black hole by their parents, and later crawl out of it on their own. In fact, their childhood was hell. The Mueller Cafe is the symbol of the black hole, in the movement of the man and woman cycle, Pina restores and even expands the tragic situation, constantly revealing the weaknesses of human nature, "recreating" the harm of human nature, in order to find ways to reduce the strangeness between people. While the unveiling of the black hole memory causes displeasure to the viewer, it implies that people should respect each other, trust each other, and hope that fear will be replaced by the desire for love. Although Pina has repeatedly stated that she does not want people to be buried by the "heaviness" of her dances, it is undeniable that all good dances are born out of the tunnel of fear.
In addition to the Beijing-staged "Spring Festival" and "Müller's Coffee House", the theme of women's fate is more brutally presented in "Bluebeard" (the one-act opera of the same name by the Hungarian composer Bartók): a man sits on a chair, and the woman kneels at his feet, slowly climbing up along his body, and finally coiled around the man's neck and shoulders, and is pressed to the ground again and again by the man, and so on for twenty or thirty times. In "Two Cigarettes in the Dark", the woman is beaten unscrupulously by a scruffy man, even raped in public, and forced into a box. In the face of these extreme injuries, women accepted them without resistance. The subtext of the dance reveals the plight of modern people, especially women: loneliness and alienation, pain and ecstasy, tyranny and tenderness, the banality and triviality of daily life. The cone of Pina's work does not produce tears, but the tears of the devil. Those who spit and swear, rather than acknowledge the naked reality, cannot face the tearing of the heart.
In 2009 I went to Shanghai to work. It was only when I talked to people about Pina, including asking Pina to perform again, when the news of her death came. For those who have not seen her theater, it is difficult to understand the meaning of "fear". But Pina's sudden death became a special path to connect us. There is a saying that resonance comes from feelings, but the terrible and terrible shock are not another kind of resonance, and this counter-force is always more magical. There is a good passage about Pina, "Only the private is credible, and only the common cognition is understandable." The simple 'I' can only make incomprehensible monologues, and the simple 'we' are tedious and empty lies. The paradox is that we are mostly divided in order to be fully understood by others, and when we are completely honest, we can only end up talking to ourselves alone.
I will not go to Upatar again in this life. The theater is still there, the dances are still there, the heirs are there, but they can't bear Pina's mantle. Wenders interviewed many members of the Pina Company in the documentary, and on the one hand, she saw the courage and power of exploration that she gave to the members of the troupe, but their words were clearly marked with the loss of concentration and uneasiness under the surface calm. The dispensable standing man (Pina) in the background of "Mueller's Coffee House" is actually the needle of the sea god on the Upatar stage. Today's dancers are leaderless.
Experiencing a deep separation and even a split between the self and the world, Pina elevates dance to a highly subversive new realm of expression. The source of these inspirations has a rooted meaning, a challenge to her peers, but more from her inner torture of the ever-changing life. Pina is not a native of her homeland, but a wanderer without borders. Whether it is Szolingen who spent her childhood, New York at the beginning of her career, or the location of Upatar for many years, or even the tour everywhere, she can constantly produce creative inspiration. Ten years ago, someone had narrowly seen the German coldness and toughness in her, and she teased the audience, asking the audience, if I were a bird, "Would you see me as a German bird?" No one answered. If Pina is a bird, it is also a bird that goes around and happens to land in Upatal.
"Dance, dance, or we get lost." Pina's dances are not meant to be "consumed" and "sold", she does not need to explain but merely presents. The world is full of thorns, and Pina is chopping all the way, wanting the world to face it. Pina, who couldn't leave her hands, never seemed to pay attention to her body and mind. In June 2009, she died unexpectedly in less than a week from having to be admitted to the hospital to discovering advanced lung cancer. In the face of this new mother of courage in dance, and her shocking but heart-pounding dances, all words are pale. "Dance, dance, or we'll get lost." These were Pina's last words to the world.
Original title: Modern Dance Master Pina Baush: From Top Dancer to Choreographer The last words left to the world
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