How to Re-View Things with Words?Dance Criticism as Translation—Pina Bausch

In her review of the Bavarian State Ballet's restaging of Für die Kinder von gestern, heute und morgen, dance critic Malve Gradinger writes that "as far as the dance is concerned, [Pina] Bausch is absolutely contemporary" (Gradinger 2016).² But what exactly does "contemporary" ["zeitgenössisch"] mean in this context? Why is it mentioned as an attribute and consequently given the status of an "aesthetic assertion"?³ Conversely, in what way is Pina Bausch no longer contemporary, and what is she instead? Furthermore, in declaring Bausch's work to constitute "important dance heritage"⁴ within that same review, Gradinger also implicitly describes it as being the opposite of "contemporary" (in the colloquial sense of "current"), namely, from the past or of a different time. What are we to make of this? Is Bausch to be considered contemporary or part of our heritage and therefore, historical? For are not these adjectives mutually exclusive, and does their simultaneous use not constitute a contradiction in terms? And what role does dance criticism play; what position does it occupy within this web of (temporal) relations in its retrospective translation of dance into language?

I will consider these questions with specific regard to reviews of Bausch's work,⁵ along with a general theoretical reflection on the concepts of temporality and contemporaneity. My hypothesis is that the contradictoriness mentioned is symptomatic of dance journalism's perspective on Pina Bausch's work. Reviews of even her earliest pieces remarked on their respective positions in time although the reviews were by no means consistent in their ascriptions. Moreover, comparisons drawn over the years between her latest choreographies and previous ones prompt critics to speculate on possible future developments. For instance, in his review of the Tanzabend (subsequently given the title Bandoneon) printed in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on December 31, 1980, Wolfgang Stauch-von-Quitzow writes that "in a way [it] seems to be a new version of a retrospective on past performances of the Tanztheater Wuppertal" and his article ends with the prediction: "Yet after this performance, it is certain that only something new or nothing at all can follow" (31).⁶ The author of this early review clearly asserts the necessity of a timely turnaround in the series of Bausch's pieces. At that point in time (end of 1980), Bausch had recently completed her seventh year as director of the Tanztheater Wuppertal and would continue in that capacity for almost another three decades. Rolf Michaelis expressed a similar view to that of Stauch-von-Quitzowin his review of Nelken, printed in the German weekly journal Zeit in February 1983, which reads: "Though Pina Bausch may, finally, have arrived in Wuppertal (in more senses than one)," the "critical observer" is "wistfully awaiting the new, the old Pina Bausch" (Michaelis 1983).⁷ Here, the author clearly differentiates between an "old" and a "new" Bausch; yet, in the same breath he demands that they somehow coalesce, meaning that, in his opinion, the artist should henceforward go back to whatever she had done in the past.

Throughout the following decades, thematizations of the contradiction between or fusion of the old and the new (and even the future) became a veritable topos in reviews of Bausch's work. Critics perceived the artist as being progressively contemporary and somehow outdated at the same time or even as iridescently oscillating back and forth in (and out of) time. Such explicit, albeit diffuse, attributions of temporality are astonishing in their early accumulation; of course, later this had to do with the fact that Bausch's pieces were continuously being produced and even restaged. On the occasion of the restaging of the 1974 dance opera Iphigenie in 1990, Michaelis states: "Finally, a performance has once again been fortunate enough to meet with success. And yet it is not of our time" (Michaelis 1990).⁸ Similarly, in his review of a guest performance of Nelken given in London twenty-three years after its world premiere, Ramsay Burt remarks on a corresponding incongruity: "When it...