Pina Bausch: Dance, Theater, and German Expressionism

1).She brought dance, theatre and German expressionism together. A blend of raw emotionalism, stark movement, earthly pathos and humor.
She developed a mixture of dance and theatre that was totally unfamiliar at the time (this was around the 1970s). In her pieces, the performers not only dance, but they spoke, sang and sometimes cried and laugh too. But this strange new style succeeded and redefine dance throughout the world. And this global success can be attributed to the fact that Pina make the need for love, intimacy and emotional security the key of her work.
She investigated what brings men and women closer to fulfill our need for love and what distance them from it. This is why the male-female interaction is important in her work.
2) Well, as I said before she was influenced by expressionism. And expressionism is a movement that tries to express meaning or emotional experience rather than physical reality. So the engagement with reality it’s via the inner life of the dancers, the goal is to bring ordinary life to the theater but through the subjects.
She was known for her bleak vision of humanity, with its cruelty, violence and power struggles.
So we have two scenarios; one with this need of love, intimacy, emotions.. and the other with this questions about human existence that the audience its forced to answer. This is what I meant with the earthly pathos because pathos represents an appeal to the audience’s emotions, so people have to face this antagonism between fear and the desire to be loved.
And all of this came with a surreal, dramatic and prominent staging. We have an example.. Vollmond this means full moon.
3) About her philosophy on dance we really liked this quote: Dance, dance otherwise we are lost.
Pina Bausch believed that dance is an opportunity to meet again with ourselves. Like Dancing as an expression that represents our most intimate world. That is its true value, providing that freedom, that release.