Experiencing Pina

 

Pina (directed by Wim Wenders) - a film that fascinated and moved me. When my friend invited me to watch the movie about Pina Bausch, I expected an ordinary biography about a modern ballet dancer and choreographer. 

Modern dance is not something I can easily identify with. I love the nostalgic, the classical, the romantic. Opera is my world, where I prefer the sceneries that let me live in another century for a few hours. If I want to see today´s tragedies, I certainly don´t go to the opera, I just open a newspaper or watch the news. If I want to see today´s minimalism, I go to an exhibition, where I can admire a plain canvas with one red line and the imaginative title "The red line" - in "La Boheme" I expect a bit more of adornment than a single chair and a watch. 

I see a huge digression emerging, back to my topic, before it´s too late. When it comes to classical ballet, I admire the graceful moves, the fragility of the dancers, and their lightness. Nevertheless, I was always more for the temperamental dances (maybe because me and my stature can cetainly not identify with the tiny ballerina-body). Flamenco, Salsa, Tango, and even the "cool" hiphop-moves - I could watch them for hours. Watching a ballet perfomance, I was wishing for the dancers to open their mouths and sing for the whole three hours. Well, with modern ballet it is different, I agree. But after my first and unsuccessful contact with the classical ballet, I decided that anything with "ballet" in its name just is not for me. I proved to be wrong. 

The beginning of the film, that is, the first choreography shown, is disconcerting, disturbing even, and I didn´t really know what to think about it. The moves are very edgy, the story is about violence, sacrifice, grief and fear. And about a whole group of people plotting against one person, without mercy. The music is powerful and lets the scene go even deeper under your skin. Already in the second scene, I was completely banned and dragged in Pina´s world. It is literally the world, she is creating in her choreographies, the world in all its facets. I was deeply impressed, how powerfully she managed to express every human emotion and to combine it with the elements of nature. Somehow Pina returned to the roots of dancing to achieve that effect. Original forms of dancing were dances of conjuring, rhytmical and simple labour moves and moves expressing joy, hope, grief and desires. And that is exactly what Pina´s choreografies are about. She doesn´t moderate the expression with too rigid guidelines, she leads her dancers more to the competence and self-confidence necessary for a free and artful performance. And her dancers mentioned exactly that, that Pina had the talent to tell them exactly what they needed to free themselves. To make the performances even more powerful and interesting, their setting is mostly a natural one. I will never forget the dance in the water, or another in the sand on the top of a hill and at the brink of the abyss. In other scenes, there are wonderful contrasts, for example a ballerina in ballet shoes in front of an old factory. Through this freedom of expression and natural settings and locations from everyday life, the audience loses track of time and melts with the dancer himself.

The film "Pina", for me, is a highly recommendable masterpiece. Even if it doesn´t contain any biographical detail about Pina herself, it couldn´t create a better impression about her person. She lived for her art. And she was her art.