A motivation to move: juxtaposing the practices of Ingemar Lindh and Pina Bausch

Abstract

This article investigates an overlapping concern between the tanztheater practice of Pina Bausch and the laboratory theatre work of Ingemar Lindh: that, whether called ‘movement’ or ‘action’, a performer's work needs to be motivated by one's personal input (memories, thoughts, images, and other mental processes) rather than executed as a dictated, and often estranged, vocabulary of movement. This premise was largely a result of two major influential figures in Bausch's and Lindh's careers: Rudolph von Laban and Étienne Decroux. The work of these two practitioners is indispensable to an optimal understanding of Bausch's and Lindh's work on embodiment. This article thus starts with a juxtaposition of Laban's and Decroux's reflections on the matter, leading to Bausch and Lindh's overlapping concern with embodiment and of the core difference in their use of improvisation.

Keywords::

• Ingemar Lindh
• Bausch
• Decroux
• Laban
• ‘embodied mind’

Notes

^1. This article selectively deals with the CPR comparison of ‘a choreography of everyday life’ between Bausch's and Lindh's work and not with the description of ‘sensuality’ and ‘eroticism’.

^2. By the term ‘laboratory theatre’ I refer to the activity that was triggered in the early years of the twentieth century and whose main innovator, Konstantin Stanislavsky (1963, p. 1), described as ‘the actor's work upon oneself’ – a process which tends to present more questions than absolute answers, and as such induces a continuous, open-ended research (for a detailed discussion of laboratory theatre see Schino 2009).

^3. In needing alternative dance and theatre training approaches, both were tapping resources in common. In fact, despite having never witnessed each other's work, due to the cross-fertilisation of practices happening throughout the twentieth century (see Hodge 2010, p. xxii), Lindh and Bausch were essentially operating within comparable, if not similar, influences and were also aware of each other's general contexts. During the early work with Tanztheater Wuppertal, Bausch tapped into European and American theatre traditions, including those of Antonin Artaud, Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor, and Peter Brook. This shows that just as Lindh was aware of contemporary dance practices (especially from his dance training) before he founded the Institutet (Lindh 2010, p. 59), so was Bausch aware of theatrical experiments.

^4. In its fifth decade of existence, the Institutet is today situated in Sweden on the outskirts of Gothenburg.

^5. Joseph Roach (1985, p. 91) shows that even practitioners from within the ballet tradition, such as Noverre, felt dissatisfaction with automatic movement: ‘Although he [Noverre] cheerfully compared the ballet d'action to a machine in which the dancers are cogs, the solitary spectacle of purely mechanical technique left him cold: “When these parts [arms and legs] are managed without genius, when [the dancer] does not direct these different motions, and animate them by the fire of sentiment and expression; I feel neither emotion nor concern. The dexterity of the dancer obtains my applause: I admire the automaton, but I experience no further sensation”’.

^6. For a more detailed discussion of Lindh's ‘collective improvisation’ and ‘mental precision’ see Camilleri (2008).

^7. Although Bausch also led her dancers to embody their personal motivations for movement rather than follow the given vocabulary and storylines of ballet, she never did so as an improvised mode of performance. This major difference between the work of Lindh and Bausch will be discussed later on in the article.