The use of Scenography in Pina Bausch's work

This essay attempts a connection between the scenographic elements and their use by the dancers in the works of Pina Bausch. I will examine the relationship between the scenic design of the choreographies and their potential intentions and interpretations. Furthermore I will try to explain how the use of objects, as scenographic elements, are used in connection with certain gestures and the dancers’ movement in order to present human relationships and social constructed roles of the sexes in the society. Objects and scenography are being used in such a way during Bausch choreographies that they are open to interpretation as well as emotional and psychological connection.

Bausch has always used elements of nature as part of a mise en scene where all her choreographies take place. Many accused her for this persistence in naturalism and her obsession in often bringing actual nature onstage. She responded to such criticism with comments like “I think that this is beautiful: real things onstage- earth, leaves, water” (Hoghe, 1980:73).  In “Rite of Spring” dancers move in a dirt filled arena, in “Nur Du” big trees are brought onstage, in “Vollmont” there is a huge rock and water raining down and in “Nelken” the stage is a field of carnations.  In all her choreographies elements like dirt, water, rocks, trees, flowers, icepicks are not used for the purpose to integrate with the dancers’ bodies but rather as obstacles, independent units that are brought onstage to challenge the dancers’ movement, to wear them down, to make them experience certain situations and emotions (Jeschke and Vetterman 2000).

  

All these situations and emotions arise when a series of elements start to come together. Very often, the starting point is the relationship between objects and dancers. The scenographic elements are used or treated in a peculiar way; the dancers move around them or “use” them in a way we can only describe as symbolic. In “Café Muller” tables and chairs fill the stage. The dancers stumble on them while moving in a sleepwalking trans, they pump on the walls and are always in contact with the materials. This continuous tactility with the objects, walls and floor in a “blind” state, lasts throughout the performance and makes the dancers physically and psychologically weary. As viewers, watching the continuous collisions of people and objects, we experience similar emotions of unfulfillment and pain.  Personal memories and experiences are communicated without the use of speech. This communication is established through a symbolic language (Langer, 1953,31).  

Naturalism and realism of space are a starting point, a base for us, the audience, to first feel comfortable and familiar with, to attach to something we all share, something we can recognize and are able to connect to. But this does not last long. There comes a turn and elements chosen to make us admire or detest in some cases the obvious, become a part of a blurred image, an impossible but also deeply familiar dream. In “Nefes” we see a man coming onstage carrying a common chair. He places it onstage and goes out again. A beautiful woman in a silk dress appears then and we expect her to sit on the chair. Unexpectedly, she crawls gracefully under the chair and away from it without touching it at all. The man comes onstage again placing another chair on top the first one, gradually building a structure that looks like some kind of unstable tower or scaffold, built out of chairs. During this continuous balancing of chairs the woman and another man (who has joined her) slide numerous times under and between the gaps created between chairs with remarkable ease and sensuality. There is also a relaxing music playing in the background as the absurd construction increases in height. The rigidness of the chairs balancing, in relation to the dancers’ smooth flexible bodies intensifies the paradox of this “collapsing” image of rigidness and instability versus flexibility, elegancy and sensuality. Bausch uses the inherent and adhere history of the individual body and its relationship to common objects to represent individual but at the same time social human situations, human needs and cravings commonly shared (Kirchman, 1994:42).

Common objects and their repetitive use by     the dancers also represent situations of gender and socially constructed behaviours that we recognize and define as gender. These situations are at the same time questioned through the use of scenographic elements in terms of the effect they have on the body. In “Two Cigarettes in the Dark” a woman in a white long silk dress and high heels stands in the middle of a white room. The space could be a common living room. A man in a black suit appears and starts to undress her as if she was a soulless mannequin. She leaves her naked and exposed onstage and then returns with a red dress and again dresses her, lifts her, moves her around and then places her in a corner of the room. Behind her there is a glass case with sand and cactuses and across the room there is similar glass tank with goldfish as part of the proscenium wall. He leaves her sitting, with her feet lifted from the floor, in an uncomfortable tormenting position (after awhile, while other things happen onstage we can see the dancer’s feet trembling from exhaustion still not touching the ground). The second part starts with Dominique Mercy onstage wearing the exact same dress and high heels. Again a man in a black suit comes in, undresses Mercy and leaves him in his underwear and high heels. Mercy stands uncomfortably still for a while and then starts to walk slowly, carefully. He opens a door in the left of the proscenium and goes in. There, he changes his high heels to flippers and enters into the water tank filled with goldfish. Price argues that in Bausch’s work “her repeated movements signify that behaviour between men and women is learnt, culturally coded and determined, and just as inadequate as it is inept”. Gender for Bausch is not a fact. Objects and scenography become gender acts and circumstances that men and women are tested on. The repetition of the same movements and the repetition of a counteraction with the same objects and scenographic elements suggest that human situations may or may not necessarily be a matter of gender but a matter of how people treat each other. As Bausch says “You can see it like this or like that. It just depends on the way you watch[…] You can always watch the other way” (in Hoghe:1980:73). 

In Bausch’s works the objects and scenographic elements are used to expose a childlike behaviour. Both men and women re-enact situations from their personal childhood to explore the human body map from childhood to adolescence and show us how and when they started acting as adults (Wright 1989, 116). As Price mentions: “Bausch’s work is about relationships, childhood, fear of death and how much we want to be loved” (1990:325). The use of scenographic elements for playing is always coming back in Bausch’s work probably because it’s an important part of human nature, a creative element that we never abandon, a spontaneous need that rushes out every time the conditions are favourable.

Bausch not only uses elements of Brecht’s epic theatre such as Gestus and Verfremdung technique (V- effect) but also a specific application of the comic (Servos, 1981:438).  Through comic situations she manages to create moments of paradox where the audience’s first reaction is to laugh but after a few moments we are invited to reconsider why we laughed or if what we laughed about is actually just funny. Objects and scenography are often involved to intensify this effect. In “Two cigarettes in the Dark” a man in a black tuxedo pulls a carpet onstage. On the carpet there sits a woman wearing a long luxurious dress. She sits there with her arms spread on both sides holding her dress as if posing for someone. Her face expression is one of an infinite cold smile and her posture and manner appears rather unnatural. One could even find a resemblance of the image of this woman sitting, smiling and Gesturing to Velasquez’s painting “La Meninas”. The rug is placed in the back and middle of the stage just in front of a 4x3 glass window. Behind the glass, nature is bottled in a similar way. Woman and nature both look artificial although are in fact very real. Then comes a man dressed only in his floral underwear, sits casually beside the woman and starts performing yoga exercises and stretching. The audience laughs in the sight of this extravagant antithesis. After a few moments the man in the suit comes in again. He places the trunk of a tree just behind the woman and then returns with an axe. He stands on the side, lifts the axe with both hands and in a very demonstrative movement axes the trunk. From where the audience is sitting it looks like the man is actually axing the woman’s head. There is a sense of humour in this image that never fails to make the audience laugh but at the same time there is a sense of paradox as all these selected actions and images insinuate other things. Objects and scenography are used to create this delicate but at the same time strong irony of what is real and what is artificial that no one again this time fails to miss.

 The interaction of dancers with objects and scenography comes to communicate the individual’s needs and cravings and the potency to create one’s world in order to satisfy the need to know and understand the world under the respect of the Cartesian split. Man’s effort to survive the separation of body and mind and the losses entailed in such division. It is pointed out by some that Bausch and Beckett share this idea of the individual’s particular perception and relation to space in which “[…] incomprehensible happenings […] a glimpse of the psychic world that terrifies [him] and is at the same time his greatest hope” (Davies, 1994:45). In “Two Cigarettes in the Dark” a woman comes onstage carrying a bathing towel and wearing a swimming suit while the set remains the same (a room with two glass cases in each side of the proscenium filled with sand and cactuses and water and goldfish and a glass case filled with trees and plants in the centre back of the stage). She spreads the towel on the floor and then lies on it. She then grabs the head and bottom of the towel and lifts them on the air creating a hammock. She lies there with a big smile, pretentiously enjoying relaxation while actually she is supporting her own weight all the time. This effort of Anne Maria Benati trying to create a relaxing condition with “false” means is not only comic due to the paradox of the “where” she performs this action but also reveals a longing, a desire for something that cannot be enjoyed unless there is a different perception of the world. It is argued by Bausch that we posses the ability to create a world in which one understands and perceives in his/her own way (how our world is), and is able to compose and create his own relationship to everything that is not “I” without suppressing his passions and desires (Davies, 1994:200). In Bausch’s own words “people already posses what they need to be happy, they only have to recognize it” (Chilenhaga, 2009:34).

  

                 

The battle of the sexes and the sadomasochistic relationships of men and women are always affected and interpreted through the use of scenographic elements. In “Rite of Spring” we witness a violent ritual of sacrifice that takes place in an earth filled arena.  Men and women separated at first as perpetrators and possible victims. The sacrifice is carried out against one person, a woman, but the dirt on all the dancers’ bodies, in the end of the sacrifice, is a proof of everyone taking part of the crime committed. Bausch was immensely criticised in regards to her work’s content, which frequently involved many demonstrations of women’s violation by men. This is in fact partly true; as one could debate that this relentless exposure of violence could be perceived as an indirect insisting complaint of the position of women in society. One could also notice that violence and mischief are in the end performed or allowed by both sexes as in the example of the “Rite of Spring”. But in the end what is communicated and intensified by the particular use of scenographic elements in relation to choreography is loss on a primordial level. Her work is aiming a reconciliation of the sexes; once the situation is looked at, understood and felt (Kirchman 1990:40). In the example of “Rite of Spring” the need of reconciliation of the sexes is communicated in the form of traces identified on the dancers bodies. Traces of exhaustion, division, traces of pain, loss, desire for love, all disguised as traces of plain earth on bodies.

Scenographic elements although realistic lose their identity and are transformed according to our imagination’s likings and experiences because the dancers do not use them in a conventional way. A different perspective of what things really are is given to us and through that alternative use it is reminded that things are what we make them. In “Ten Chi” a woman dances a solo onstage beside a giant tail of a whale. Snow or flower petals fall onstage and on her creating a beautiful image that is more or less impossible in real life.

 In Bausch’s work the connections and interpretations are always variable and are never forced upon us with the anxiety to translate a specific meaning. The communication in fact relies on the variety of slightly or completely different connections each person in the audience will make. This open to interpretations language dancers use aims to reach in every person using the audience’s personal dynamics, emotions, memories and thus communicate the real human attitudes, exactly as the work itself has been created.

In the end, the use of scenography in Bausch’s works help us reconsider and review the way we see people, the way we see ourselves. And it does so by opening endless possibilities of viewing through different aspects. Raimund Hoghe says “In the theatre of Pina Bausch one can experience many ways of looking, of becoming aware of one’s subjective way of watching humans, relations, situations […] there are many ways of seeing something within oneself as well as within others” (Hoghe, 1980:73).  The interaction of the dancers with the objects and scenographic elements create the alphabet for a non-verbal language, i.e. an emotional and memory based language that is written in our bodies and minds, a language that allows several interpretations.

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