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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2018

Christina Thurner
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Abstract

Critics described Pina Bausch's work as “absolutely contemporary” and as being “important dance heritage,” which is precisely the opposite of contemporary, namely, historical. This contradictoriness—though productive in its own right—is symptomatic of the perspective of dance journalism brought to bear on Pina Bausch's later works in particular. But even reviews of her earlier works are a far cry from perceiving the artist in a consistent manner, some even going so far as to criticize her for being “outdated.” Apparently, Bausch's art continuously poses a challenge for dance critics because it defies easy categorization in aesthetic terms, thereby undermining the implicit postulates and classificatory criteria underlying dance reviews. There is—at least in the German-speaking area—broad consensus regarding the functions of today's dance reviews as a text genre: as a translation of dance into language, dance reviews describe, analyze, and judge. With a focus on reviews of pieces by Pina Bausch, this essay proposes to investigate how dance is translated (“trans-posed”) by considering the questions: what do reviews do when they put things into words? How are their own seemingly firm categorizations and postulates thereby destabilized or at least opened to debate?

Keywords

Bausch (Pina)contemporaneitydance criticismdance historydance journalismhistoricityTanztheatertemporalitytranslation
Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , August 2018 , pp. 4 - 14
Copyright
Copyright © Dance Studies Association 2018 

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Footnotes

The following text has been translated from German into English by Marcel Behn and is based on a paper presented at the International Conference “Dance Future II. Claiming Contemporaneity,” which was organized by Gabriele Klein and her team and took place from January 26–28, 2017 at Kampnagel, Hamburg.

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