# CINEMA /// The Weight of the Body Dancing by Pina Bausch as filmed by Wim Wenders

It has been said many times that the most beautiful ballets are the ones that makes us forget the weight of the dancers’ bodies. With Pina Bausch, on the contrary, dance becomes a vehicle of celebration of this weight in its interaction with itself, the others’ and the environment. The film Pina by Wim Wenders (2011) is remarkable in this regard. It offers to the spectator another point of view on four of the German choreographer’s main pieces (The Rite of Spring, Cafe Muller, Kontakthoh and Vollmond) as well as introducing her dancers in various open landscapes thus perpetuating the emphasis on the relationship dance creates with a terrain.

This new point of view is highly interesting as it focuses on details that are almost imperceptible from the audience’s traditional situation. However, all those details are what composes the atmosphere of P.Bausch’s ballet and are beautifully emphasized by W.Wenders. The sound of the bodies, in particular is fascinating whether they inhale, breathe, run, fall on the floor or hit itself. Bodies are celebrated both in their superb as well as in their fragility. There is a violence in Pina Bauch’s work that is fascinating and frightening in its crudeness. One more time, the film recounts well this dimension of dance, whether it is by those two female bodies which repeatedly encounter the power of a wall in Cafe Muller, or the group of women ritually hitting their bodies in Le Sacre du Printemps, or else the rope that retains this young girl from escaping of the room, or again, this couple, in Cafe Muller, who can’t stop repeating the same action over and over between embrace and fall. Each time, the sound produced by those bodies reminds us of their weight i.e. their factor of attraction for gravity and shocks us in its coldness.
Depending of the matter it is composed of, the environment reacts more or less visually to those encounters. Earth, sand and water are found regularly in the movie as good examples of such visible interactions. Indeed, these materials embody expressively the effect that the environment has on the body and vice versa.

This article registers itself in a series of short posts questioning this notion of weight of the body:
– 01/ The Weight of the Body Falling (Sept 11)
– 02/ Spinozist Collision (Sept 11)
– 03/ Gravity Dances (Dec 11)