Pina Bausch : Dancer as a 'Public Intellectual'

Pina Bausch: Dancer as a Public Intellectual.

The germ of this essay comes from a very basic and simple preposition, rather a question that, Can a dancer be considered a, in terms of Edward Said, public intellectual at all? Can a person so immersed in his or her own body as it's sole instrument of expression, be accorded with the status of any type of intellectual at all? Edward Said, the great admirer of Theodore Adorno and his profound work on music probably comes a little close to feebly touching upon this quesion in his essay called 'The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals' 2002, when he mentions about the public role of a writer, artist and even a theatre-maker. I believe that is the most closest he comes to when I strive to place intranets as an intellectual. But can not the boundaries of understanding a functioning intellectual also include a dancer, a choreographer, or a Performance artist? Theatre , for a lot of time, has engaged itself into a mode of social reflection and critique. But then again, even Dance and Movements have in their very being, contained possibilities to social change. A dancer knows her body is capable of many things, of many feats, and of reaching very many directions of imagination. dance is imagination. Imagine is what intellectuals do too. They strive to imagine a better critique of the society, or against the state oppression and injustice based on rationality and a critical worldview.

 Dance or Movement, then for me, present immense potentials to become a medium of how we may begin to look at the conventional perception of the intellectual. The idea is to open up the blinds and see for ourselves that movements, not necessarily in terms of dance always, can generate accurate interventions towards social change and justice. However, just like not all scholars can be termed as intellectuals, similarly I raise this case not for all kinds of dancers and choreographers, but specifically the ones who consciously take the onus of their craft towards achieving and raising relevant questions about the self and the social, and not merely to serve the purpose of non serious entertainment, as has mostly been. On these terms, I believe then that a dancer or a movement artist is more of a Public Intellecual, like any other, if not more, because unlike others who may use media, text, sound, etc as their mode of interventions, a dancer is present with herself into the space to unsettle and yet engage the viewer/reader. she becomes the text herself.  The dancer then is a mystic and all the more an intellectual. This arguement partly stems from a critique of the Cartesian mode of understanding knowledge and critique and therefore to assert that the embodied intervention holds a much deeper resonance with the conditions of society and politics. Having said that, there is no negating of the fact that writers and academicians and other artists have undoubtedly played a major role in bringing about major changes in how humans function with the ideas of equality and justice. Then perhaps, the ground set by the witers and artists only makes it inevitable to propose that Dance and Movement practices, in their own right, must be taken seriously as capable of remarkably relevant utterances.

From here we can now enter into how exactly Edward Said imagines a Public Intellectual along with taking the special case of world reknowned Dancer-Choreographer, Pina Bausch. The intention is to unravel before the readers how a dancer-choreographer-artist, taking a lot from her very own psycho-physical being attains a stature that becomes immensely capable of impassioned critique to what she saw around herself. Further I shall illustrate how, and not as a large lofty claim, that even in not mentioning Dancers in his list of intellectual occupations, Said was inherently hinting towards an impactful realisation akin to how a choreographer like Bausch would.

Royd Climenhaga, a Performance Studies scholar from Northwestern University states in his book, Pina Bausch, "It is a pure moment of performance that reflects back upon the the audience and makes us aware of our own complicity in taking in the worlds that are presented to us." He calls the impact extremely visceral. He further mentions that, in the field of theatre it was Bertolt Brecht, the pioneer of Epic Theatre, who had realised that the self conscious presence of the performer was required for an effective purpose and he drew immensely from the moving bodies of his performers. Her work was greatly inspired by the agerman expressionist dance and operated along the lines of Brecht's idea of Gestus or Gesture, "which is replete and full of the intent from which the action derives". It was her first choreographic piece, as the director or Tanztheatre Wuppertal, Germany, called The Rite of the Spring, an avant-garde adaption of Igor Stravinsky's work that her depth and the capacity to unsettle the viewer emerged. This piece was about that violence of beauty which proclaims the arrival of spring. The performers achieved this through the magnanimity of their bodies moving, shaking, shivering, falling, and then re-situating themselves again on the earth spread across the stage.

But even before Pina achieves this feat, it is in her sheer decision to break away from her strong ballet trained background, under the influence of the likes of Laban, Martha Graham and Antonin Artaud, that tells us that she was constantly thinking through for her mode of an artistic dialogue. She did not want to be part of a museumised portrayal of dance. She wanted her dance to communicate and express much more than what she could have by remaning in the strict grammar of her ballet trainings. There is a comprehensible and rational being that fules her overtly emotional expressionistic dance style. When asked about what technique she employes to bring forth her art, she utters her iconic career defining statement, "I am not so much interested in how my dancers move, rather what moves them".  Said centers his imagination of a Public Intellectual in a similar fashion. He explains that a sense of "outsider-hood" or "otherness" is essential for a Public Intellectual. He draws this from his own experience as a child of being 'out of place' as a Palestinian exile. From the vantage point of this outsider-hood, one must be able to look at the issue not with apathy but with sympathy and with humanism. This is where he understood his own subjectivity and therefore could look and raise relevant questions. This is similarly very true of how Pina began to break away from traditional ballet practice and was eventually able to overturn all of the dance and theatre world and its understanding.

Pina also seemed to harbour a lot of this outsider-hood to devise her choreographic pieces but it was evident that she looked at it from the perspective of a lot of passion and sympathy. she states in one of the balle school's 1989 yearbook, "I only know that the time in which we live, the time with all it's anxieties is very much with me. This is the source of my pieces." The plight of the woman, suffering, as an object of beauty and exploitation was hiw Pina explored and interpreted in The Rite of Spring. Around 1976, she had begun to look at Brecht for inspiration from works like Don't be Afraid, and The Seven Deadly Sins. These Brecht works were adapted by Pina but unlike The Rite Of Spring, they were not well received, certainly because Pina 's foresightedness could not be communicated to the masses. This left her disillusioned for some time with dance yet she returned with another kpiece called Bluebeard in 1977, which was again a violent piece depicting a trapped female subject under Duke Bluebeard.

Pina and her group undertook what were known as the Residency Pieces (1980s) to expand further on their form. The intention was to travel and gain more from the dancers living in those specific places. To again discover what moved them. Pina travelled to America and witnessed revolution in dance called The New Dance, which was very formalistic in nature and was viewed in complete contrast to German expressive movement style, which she herself was part of. She encountered the different space that the Americans inhabit, like Los Angeles, and one member from her troupe had remarked "Los Angeles seemed very poor to me in the spiritual sense, so full of illusions" yet Pina maintains that she would love to see, learn, meet new people and dancers and then see what happens. They go on to travel to many cities like Hong Kong, Lisbon, Madrid, Vienna, Palermo and most recently, New Delhi, and just before Pina's demise where they performed Bamboo Blues for the Indian audiences.

Similarly, Said dismisses the extra wordly, private and ethereal contexts of intellectualisation and urges to enhance the critical capacity by being "in the world". Thus Said maintains this explicitly "situating critique at the very heart of humanism, critique as a form of democratic freedom and as a continuous practice of questioning and accumulating knowledge that us open to the constituent historical realities of the post Cold-war world". He invokes the term 'Weltliteratur' by Goethe, 1827, whereby the essense of what is alien and the Other, here specifically in the field of Literature and Literary criticism, is to be sympathetically understood and owned, without exoticising or subordinating it. In other example, he also pointed mentions Eric Aeurbach's critical work "Mimesis" where he is recollecting and comparing two seminal texts like Homer' Odyssey and the Bible, and traverses throughout till modernism, from the viewpoint of an exiled German Jew. Obviously the outsiders perspective works here to defy the canon of history.

After all these stated arguments, I believe it is clearly visible that the idea of  public Intellectual that was imagined by Edward Said in his essay, Pina Bausch seems to fit the bill quite well. When Pina earnestly seeks from each of her individually different dancers what really their emotional core is, I believe, even the Public Intellectual of Said does a similar introspection to then stumble upon a narrative which is deeply rooted into a humanist perspective. Perhaps, Pina does this in a much better way, if at all there is only one.

Nevertheless, there are certain critiques that are hailed towards Said's conception of Weltliteratur, as the basic quality of a Public Intellectual. He is accused of being a traditionalist, anti western and euro-centric in his attitude towards postmodern. He even goes on to call Derridas work as being "fruitless standing aside". He fiercely guarded his stand as a pragmatic entry point towards a, let us face it, a utopic possibility of combining tradition and rationality. nevertheless, this criticism Said faces with regards to his total body of life's work. I do not know how ridiculous it might sound but, to my undrstanding, Pina would escape this criticism to a large extent. probably so because being an artist and not limiting one's way or working and looking at world allows widening of horizons. I don't not see most writers and theoreticians ready to disengage with their set thoughts and beliefs so easily, and thus, chances are that they might fall in a similar trap as Said. Despite the inevitable belief that role of the public intellectual, as defined by Said, is very significant, the details seem to lag behind to a large extent when contextualizing in present times. Having said that, there seems to be no denying of the fact that The role of Public Intellectual has now to be delimited from the definition of Said and brought out in the open. This is so because, one needs to immanently recognise that the artist community, is not only a self conscious group with a motive but that it also wants to be free to choose their vantage points, be it from tradition or from rationalism. Perhaps, exmples closest to home are that of Chandralekha and now Maya Rao.

Bibliography.

1. Climenhaga, Royd. "Pina Bausch". Routledge: New York, 2009

2. Said, Edward W. "The Public Role Of Writers and Intellectuals." The Public Intellectual. Ed. Helen Small. Oxford: Blackwell      Publishing, 2002. 19-39.