Let’s talk about the elephant in the stark, dirt-covered room of modern dance: Pina Bausch. A recent piece in *The Spectator* dared to voice what a silent chunk of the audience sometimes thinks but rarely says aloud at intermission: this can be… excruciatingly tedious.
And you know what? It’s a critique worth engaging with, not dismissing.
For the uninitiated, Pina Bausch is a titan. Her *Tanztheater Wuppertal* revolutionized performance, blending raw movement, spoken word, surreal imagery, and repetitive, often mundane tasks into epic emotional landscapes. To her devotees, she is a seer, excavating the profound from the banal—the ache of longing in a woman endlessly trying on shoes, the weight of memory in a man slowly moving a chair across a stage.
But to the critic (and to that quiet attendee shifting in their seat), this excavation can feel like watching paint dry on a canvas of deep, Germanic angst. The repetition isn’t hypnotic; it’s numbing. The emotional rawness isn’t cathartic; it’s indulgent. The two-and-a-half-hour runtime isn’t an immersive journey; it’s an endurance test. When a performer methodically smears cream on their face for the tenth time, you might find enlightenment… or you might just desperately wish for a wet wipe.
So, who’s right?
Perhaps both. The "tedium" might be the entire point. In a world of 15-second TikTok dances and hyper-edited spectacle, Bausch forces a radical deceleration. She asks us to sit with discomfort, with awkwardness, with the unresolved. The boredom we feel might not be a failure of the work, but a mirror held up to our own evaporated attention spans. The repetitive action isn’t about the action itself, but about the subtle shifts in energy, the flicker of exhaustion or defiance in the performer’s eyes that you only notice on the seventh repetition.
Yet, the spectator’s experience is sacred. Art that requires a PhD in theory or monastic patience to "appreciate" risks becoming an elitist ritual. There’s a difference between demanding engagement and demanding submission. Sometimes, a man staring at a wall is just a man staring at a wall, and your growing urge to check your phone is a valid response, not a moral failing.
Here’s my take: Pina Bausch’s work isn’t entertainment. It’s an environment. You don’t go to *Café Müller* for a pleasant night out; you go to have your nervous system gently, relentlessly rearranged. The "tedium" is the soil from which moments of shocking, fragile beauty suddenly erupt—a fleeting gesture of tenderness, a burst of chaotic laughter, a body collapsing under an invisible weight. If you wait for "something to happen" in a conventional plot sense, you will be devastated. You have to tune into a different frequency: the poetry of bodies in space, the archaeology of emotion.
Does it always work? No. Even for admirers, some pieces resonate more than others. But dismissing it as merely tedious is like calling a storm "just wet." It misses the atmospheric pressure, the charged air, the transformative chaos.
So, the next time you find yourself in a Bausch performance, feeling the slow creep of restlessness, ask yourself: Is this work boring me, or is it making me *confront* my boredom? That confrontation itself—that itchy, uneasy, profoundly human moment—might be the most Pina Bausch thing of all.
