Pina . . . Are You There?

Pina Bausch created the fragile ecosystem that is ". . . como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si . . ." (Like moss on a stone) during Tanztheater Wupperthal's 2009 residency in Santiago, Chile, but aside from the music and traditional South American garb that appears midway through, Chilean culture is not the foremost idea transmitted in the piece. Read in hindsight, the work poignantly documents the people and directorial strategies that most interested Bausch during the final year of her life. Its position as her Last Work—noted by many critics and impossible to ignore—renders moot the kind of critique that would summarize its strengths and weaknesses. The piece is stunning and also imperfect, but this seems to me to be beside the point. I prefer instead to consider ". . . como el musguito" as one more artifact of Bausch's still-active gaze.

The piece begins with Silvia Farias Heredia on her hands and knees. Two men enter, assess her position, pick her up and shift her to another location on the stage. As they do so she begins to laugh. Not girlish giggles, but another more guttural and disturbing sound emanates. More men enter and sweep her along in a pattern of lifts. When finally left alone, she dances a poetic monologue, which confers insight into her joys, sorrows, and sighs, expressed in swirling kinesthetic shapes. In a familiar Bausch motif, Heredia's waist-length hair extends her physicality, painting the space around her. Heredia's solo sets up the expectation that ". . . como el musguito" will depict the emotional life of women, for not one but two women are palpably present: Bausch's subjectivity commingles with Heredia's, operating just under the surface to conjure forth her dance.

". . . como el musguito" unfolds primarily through solos, which share this same loving attention between Bausch and her dancers. During Rainer Behr's eventual solo, the white floor of the stage begins to crack apart, creating rifts that he must navigate. Peter Pabst's set is one of the few looming threats in the piece. It may reflect the fault lines running under the country, and Chile's long and fraught history with earthquakes. At several degrees of aesthetic and referential remove, however, the cracking planet and the deaths it causes remain merely allusions. Much of the piece operates in this way, as a beautifully aestheticized translation of forms, an idea of Chile so supremely subjective that it erases the place itself and its history.

Fernando Suels Mendoza's solo introduces another ambiguous image when he dances alone in waves crashing ashore, projected across a moonlit stage. Mendoza's movement is tighter and more muscled than the other Wupper-thal men, yet in this scene he swoons lusciously. This image feels functional: the water augments his flow, which allows his solo to stay very much within the vein of Bausch's relentlessly aqueous style. Perhaps the most important aspect of this travel piece—the last in a series on world cities that began in 1984—is the continued relationship that it fostered between Bausch and her dancers.

If ". . . como el musguito" is not about Chile, but rather Bausch's relationship with her dancers, the question arises: what exactly does the choreography signify? Roland Barthes described a photograph as "an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being . . . will touch me like the delayed rays of a star."¹ A dance can also signify a reality no longer present. But the referent transmitted through the solos and action-images of ". . . como el musguito" is not Heredia, nor the other dancers, nor even their life experiences, as one might first assume. The choreography's ultimate emanating referent, which is also the missing being, is Bausch's gaze.

In her development process, Bausch replaced her body...