By Rachel Straus<\/p>\n
\u201cYou just have to get crazier.\u201d These words came from Pina Bausch, the late choreographer, whose dance troupe made the industrial city of Wuppertal, Germany an avant-garde theatrical destination for 36 years. In Wim Wenders\u2019 3D documentary \u201cPina,\u201d screened on October 15 at Alice Tully Hall\u00a0for the New York Film Festival, audiences got a taste of what Bausch\u2019s crazy looks like. In one scene, a Bausch dancer walks through a park in a floor-length dress like a zombie queen. The woman careens to the ground, flat as a board. Right before smashing her face, her suitor scoops her up like a crane lift. Then she falls again, and again. The effect is part amusement ride, part suicide watch.<\/p>\n
Bausch\u2019s surrealistic collage-structured dances revel in the frightening, funny, fragile inner states of the human psyche. On Bausch\u2019s stage compulsive disorders, misogynism, sadism, and run-of-the-mill cultural oppression cavort like lunatics at an insane asylum. Fortunately, Bausch chose her inmates well. Her cadre of dancers resemble one-of-a-kind flowers, grown in places as far afield as Brazil and Tokyo. Before one\u2019s eyes, their limbs uncoil, tendril-like, always searching for something to grasp. Inevitably they fall. The metaphor is an obvious one, but Bausch won die-hard fans around the world with this trope in her 40-plus works. Her dances evoked desperate perseverance, in all of its illogical inanity. Her singular message was digestible because she made human effort, and failure, look beautifully irresistible.<\/p>\n
Pina Bausch, 68, died June 2009, the night before Wim Wenders was to begin shooting their long-postponed film collaboration. Since 1985 Wenders, whose films include \u201cBuena Vista Social Club,\u201d \u201cParis, Texas,\u201d and \u201cWings of Desire,\u201d had been discussing with Bausch a project featuring her choreography. On stage Wenders explained that it wasn\u2019t until he saw 3D film technology, he felt he could do Bausch\u2019s work justice. Regular film, Wenders said, creates an \u201cinvisible wall\u201d between the dance and the celluloid image. \u201cSomething,\u201d he said, \u201cdid not work.\u201d With that comment, Wenders invited the audiences to consider whether his 3D \u201cPina\u201d does.<\/p>\n
When Wenders\u2019 3D segments captured Bausch\u2019s dancers on tramcars and busy roadways, in parks and glass houses, the film became bigger than life. The dancers\u2019 gesture-driven performances in these hyper-pixilated landscapes grew mesmerizing with the sharp, glistening quality of the film. Among the rush of cars, swaying of \u00a0trees, and presence of pedestrians, the dancers became absorbed into a heightened but familiar reality, a piece with Bausch\u2019s style of magic realism.<\/p>\n
When the dancers were shot in the theater, however, Wenders encountered less success. His close-up camera work felt intrusive and aggressive. In one segment, Wenders\u2019 camera closed in on a woman’s squirming back in Bausch\u2019s 1975 \u201cRite of Spring.\u201d By zeroing in on her struggle, Wenders made the moment personal instead of archetypal. In \u201cRite,\u201d the cast resembles primitives. Their landscape is a dirt-strewn stage. The proscenium frames them the way an icon painting is framed by an architectural portal. The dancers become effigies; their individual features are abstracted through their unison, slicing movement.<\/p>\n
Though Bausch\u2019s performers occasionally saunter through theater aisles looking glamorous and talking to regular folk, when they represent universal beings, they do it on stage at at remove from the audience. Bausch didn’t offer ticket holders intimacy. She created a theatrical portal for her vision to be perceived. Her method was simple: She distanced the performer from the spectator. She created just the kind of wall that Wenders wants to permeate.<\/p>\n
Whether 3D films like \u201cPina\u201d will fan the flames of the American dance audience is much in discussion. Thus far a handful of 3D dance films have been produced, including The Kirov’s \u201cGiselle,” Matthew Bourne\u2019s \u201cSwan Lake,\u201d Michael Flatley\u2019s \u201cLord of the Dance, and \u201cStep Up 3D.\u201d Turning a dancing body into a 3D piece of digitalia is fascinating, but whether it can compete with the power of live dance performance isn\u2019t a slam dunk. When Wenders’ camera gave Bausch performers the space to disport themselves, he captured their beautiful craziness. He transmitted their quality of dangerous freedom. He didn’t come in for a close up. At these moments, I think, Pina Bausch would have been pleased.<\/p>\n