Interview with John Giffin, 22/1/2020

Coming to dance, and then coming to Juilliard School, if you can tell us about something about that.

Surely, I come from Akron, Ohio, which is a city like Wuppertal, in that it's a very industrial part of Ohio. I always laugh and say that people from Akron can do three things: they can tap dance, they can twirl baton, and they can do magic tricks. So I'm a triple threat: I do them all. So, I started off as a tap dancer aged four and, stayed in it for many years. Then, in the early 60s, I was already starting high school, I saw on TV a dancer by the name of Rudolf Nureyev. He was dancing Le Corsaire. And when I saw that, that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to jump like him. I wanted to turn like him. So, it changed my view. There were not many opportunities to study ballet in Akron, but I found a teacher and I was able to go once a week. Somehow I had the courage to audition for Juilliard, which is one of the premier music academy with a very good dance department. So, I went to New York all by myself and auditioned for Juilliard. Thanks to a woman by the name of Martha Hill, who was the director of the Juilliard dance department, I was accepted into the program, and that was the first thing that changed my life. Without Martha Hill, none of this subsequently working with Pina Bausch or anything else would have been possible. So, I came to ballet rather late, but nonetheless I worked very hard. While at Juilliard, I also studied modern dance, needless to say. Because I was a ballet major, I could do both Graham and Limón. I didn't have to declare a major in modern, which was a good thing for me. So, it was a very good time for me. From 64 to 68 I was at Juilliard.

So, that was just about right after Pina Bausch left?

I think Pina was there 59, 60, something like that. So there was only a few years. Now and then I heard the name of Pina Bausch. It was mentioned, and maybe I saw a film or two of some of the pieces she danced there.

So, you probably had some of the same teachers.

We did indeed. And when I did my audition for Pina at the Folkwangschule after she watched a little of the audition, we talked a little bit. We talked about having some of the same teachers at Juilliard, and I think that made an impression on her, in as far as she understood some of my training and where I was coming from and thought that this would be good for her company. So she took me.

At Juilliard there were opportunities to perform, I think, weekly. There were the composition classes. Can you tell me about, something about what did you study?

I studied everything. I did the undergraduate degree there, which is the BFA, the Bachelor of Fine Arts. And we studied, of course, dance technique, and repertoire. We had dance notation, production, dance history, music, and of course, composition. I took several composition classes. I think, my first one was with Lucas Hoving, who is an important person also for Pina because he was her sponsor at Juilliard when she came over as a special student. So, Lucas was a wonderful man. I was very young, and I thought to do be a choreographer, you had to be a genius, you know? And people were born with it and people were not, and I was definitely not born with it. So, I had no idea of creative process. None at all. It took a while to bring me into the fold, because I had no patience with myself. No self-confidence. Any of those things that you need to create: creativity as a kind of play. And if you don't allow yourself to play, if it's so serious, you don't get very far. So anyhow, I learned about that whole thing. And Lucas, certainly, set me on the path there. Then subsequently, I took Anthony Tudor's composition class, and I took Anna Sokolow composition class. So, very different ideas of what composition is, but all with first class artists. And it was really the artistry that came through and I was developed as an artist. I wasn't a fabulous technician, but I found out what it meant to be an artist and what to bring to the stage. Anna Sokolow was incredible. "How you lift an arm?" There had to be with something inside, you couldn't just lift the arm, you know? NO, you had to LIFT THE ARM and she'd come up to you and she'd say "No, I don't believe you!" So I learned very quickly from some very fine teachers: how to have standards, how to work, how to listen, how to see. So, it was a very important time for me.

Anthony Tudor. Pina Bausch always talked about him and how she looked up to him and how happy she was to be able to perform in Lilac Garden. Can you tell us about his work? If you could describe some.

Well, Tudor was a unique choreographer. And the interesting thing about the Tudor connection is Tudor was very influenced by Kurt Jooss in the 30s, very influenced. Then later, came over to the Folkwangschule, and that's when Pina danced Lilac Garden here, in the 60s sometime, when they had the company there – the Folkwang Company. Tudor is a very unique man, very complicated personality, but again a very fine artist – and dance wasn't just the presentation of steps. Dance was something that came from very deep. We too danced Lilac Garden, when I was at Juilliard. It's a perfect ballet. It's beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. The man did some masterpieces, they're all different. Balanchine did all like Vivaldi concertos, they're all the same. Beautiful, but kind of all the same. Tudor's ballets aren't like that at all. You wouldn't even know that one is done by the same choreographer. Lilac Garden has this air of ... a lilac garden. You can smell the lilacs. It's spring, and this garden party is going on, and all these things happen at the garden party. Then another ballet is Dark Elegies, based on the Mahler's Kindertotenlieder – Songs on the Death of Children. It's about grieving, and it's about mourning, and is much more expressionistic in its style. So, the man was one of the best choreographers of the 20th century.

If we talk about New York at that time. How much dance was there? What could you see? What was coming new?

Well, needless to say, I was very busy with my studies at Juilliard. So I didn't get out to see all that was there. I certainly saw all the major companies that came through. The Graham Company I saw many times, with Martha Graham still dancing. She probably shouldn't have been, but she was still dancing. Many of my teachers from Juilliard were in the company. So it's wonderful to see your teachers performing – Helen McGehee. There's a whole slew of them that we could see performing, which was wonderful.

Do you remember which venues, which theaters there were?

A lot of the things, at that point, were at City Center because Lincoln Center was just being built. So, it wasn't quite there yet. The Met when I first went was still the old Met. I remember seeing the Kirov at the Old Met. I saw ballet companies. I saw a lot of American Ballet Theater because I love Tudor's work, and that's where it was being shown. Some New York City Ballet, I was never as enthralled with Balanchine as I am with Tudor. It's a little too formal, maybe not quite theatrical enough for me. Anyhow. It's just a matter of taste. And so it is with other modern dance styles. There's some wonderful styles: Cunningham, Twyla Tharp. But again, they're very formalist and to me they may appeal to my mind, but they don't appeal to my heart. So. I'm more of an expressionist, I guess, at heart. Therefore I felt I could do good work in Wuppertal with Pina Bausch, with this expressionist background that she brought.

Juilliard at that time, just to to to come back to that again, was uptown, in the Columbia University Area. Were you living in that area?

Yes, I lived a few blocks away. I had a room in some old lady's apartment for $10 a week. My family didn't have a lot of money, so I just lived on $10 a week and my room cost $10 a week. So that was what I did. You know.

It has a very, European flair that area.

Somewhat. The woman I lived with was from England via Germany, that was an interesting connection. Her name was Frieda Heiligen Stein. Frieda was as big as her name was – a Wagnerian Lady, but anyhow, very kind to me. And I'd probably starve to death without Frieda. You know, we all in the arts have these kind of patron saints. They've come into our lives, maybe even for a short time, but they give us something. Sometimes we're young and we don't think much about it. But now, at my age, I can be very thankful for that and give back. Give back to younger artists. Physically, the neighborhood was very interesting because it was very close. I do not know where Pina lived, but she probably lived in the international house. Which was a place where the international students stayed. So, I think maybe she lived there, but I have no idea where Pina lived.

She was probably going back and forth downtown. She talks a lot about working with Paul Sanasardo, we'll get to that. So, after New York, then you moved to Europe?

I had been living in New York and doing work in and out of the city. I was with the New Haven Ballet. I was with the Pittsburgh Ballet. I was for a little bit with the Grand Ballet Canadian in Montreal. I jobbed with various modern dance companies. I did the Hanukkah festival for Israel with Sophie Maslow. I did a lot of a lot of work. But I wanted to come to Europe to study at the summer school of the Royal Danish Ballet. I really like the Danish style, so I wanted to learn something about it. I went there. While I was there, a woman offered me a job teaching at her studio in ... – Denmark isn't a small enough island – where she lived was even a smaller island. So her name turned out to be Nini Theilade, and she's a very famous dancer. She danced for Léonide Massine in the old Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. I met and taught for Nini for a while, but I was too young to teach, so I got restless and then went on. I had met a ballet master from Amsterdam, so I went there and worked with him for a while. Worked, worked, worked, ran out of money, and found out the place that had a lot of work for dancers was in Germany. So I came through Denmark into Amsterdam, and then finally into Germany. My first season was in Nurnberg, in a very big theater – Stadttheater, and I was in maybe 23 productions that year. This operetta, that operetta, this opera. Sometimes I didn't even know the choreography, because I've maybe done it twice and never done it with the orchestra or with the costumes. I found myself in Orpheus and Eurydice – the ballet is in the underworld. We're in black costumes, the lighting's very dim. I can't see anybody. So, all I heard was "John, John!", and I'd run whatever direction that was and lift the girl. It was terrible, I hated that feeling of not being well rehearsed in something. Then, I went in my second year to Freiburg im Breisgau, which is a beautiful city in the Schwarzwald, as a soloist there. But again, it was pretty much the same thing: a lot of operas, a lot of operettas, a lot of hopping around, wearing wigs, always wigs. I never knew what was the matter with my hair, but always wigs. So, I heard that there was this crazy woman in the north of Germany who was looking for dancers, and this came through the Zentralstelle für Arbeitsvermittlung . The man's name was Biko von Larsky, and Biko is another of my patron saints, because Biko steered me toward Pina Bausch. So, I got on the train, I came up to the Folkwangschule. I auditioned for Pina, and that's how it happened. Pina was my third season in Germany.

So you come to this company? And they're mostly people who actually knew each other there? People who were already working in the Folkwang. How were you received or how did you feel in it?

I felt like a like a total stranger. But that was okay for me. At the time, it was just perfectly fine. I did my work. It wasn't that I didn't love my colleagues, but at the same time, we worked so closely together that when you have free time, I'm out there doing something else. If I had more than 24 hours, I was out of Wuppertal so fast: on the first train to Amsterdam, to Cologne, to Dusseldorf; anyplace but Wuppertal. It's a fine place, but thank God for trains! So, I was easily able to kind of work that. Because that was coming from Amsterdam, I still had friends there. So, I could go back and see them.

And we have a first season of the Tanztheater, eventually you start knowing Pina and seeing the work. Can you talk about the very first evening?

Oh, the very first evening, yes? That was very interesting. Pina did a piece called Fritz. Fritz is the dour story of this little child Fritz, and his nightmarish seeing of his environment. The grandmother was somebody sitting on Hans Pop shoulders. Huge. I think, Charlotte Butler played that. Did Malou Airaudo also do that? I think so, the grandmother. Anyhow, it was very interesting in kind of a strange way. I remember the set was quite amazing, because it kind of blew up, or grew somehow. I don't remember much about it, but I just remember that it kind of grew. The room got bigger, and these strange characters started coming in: one had a huge nose, the other had just a hat on. There was a kind of a he/she creature. I was part of a team with another dancer in a costume where we were connected (shows), the arm was connected. And we did this parade to the Gustav Mahler music (sings): "Dah, dah, dah dah, dum." All these strange people coming in. But what I remember most: there was a window, and at some point, the chorus had to be there, look at the window for 25 minutes. Stay still, on stage, looking out the window. As a dancer that didn't make me very happy. As a young dancer, at that point, that did not make me very happy. The other two pieces on the program were The Rodeo of Agnes de Mille. Which is a very strange choice, but very fortunate for me, because I went with my tap dancing training I was able to take over one of the lead roles: the champion roper. I don't know what Pina was going to do if I wasn't there, but I was there. So thank you, Jesus! So, I danced that with Agnes, and met her there for the first time; this crusty old little woman, feisty, with her little pink ballet slippers, in her house dress. She was a legend, a legend. Subsequently, later on, I did a lot more work with Agnes. I think Pina wanted to open with Rodeo and then do Fritz, and of course the third ballet is The Green Table. That had to be, but Agnes said: "No, Rodeo was not an opener." So we had to open with Fritz. This dour is little piece, in the opera house for all these people: subscription audience who was used to Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty, and all those things that the Wuppertal ballet had done before. And then, the very first thing they see, on the very first evening is Fritz. Well, they weren't happy. In the old days, they still have the doors in the back of the theater. "Bam bam bam." As they left and slammed the door behind them. And that went on for quite a while. Maybe for most of the first season, you heard that, but after 20 minutes it got quiet and you had an audience. So, that's just the way it goes.

It was a very daring piece in that sense.

I think so, completely.

But, right after that, she did Iphigenie auf Tauris, which was in a totally different mode.

Did the fact that Pina Bausch brought a piece which was actually very beautiful and very accessible, pacify the public, and made her more accessible?

Somewhat, somewhat. It still wasn't ballet, and they wanted ballet. So, what are you going to do? Pina was not a ballet choreographer, they were not going to get ballet. So, they're going to be frustrated, they had to go someplace else for ballet. I don't know. In those first two years, she found her audience and it wasn't a Wuppertal audience. It was a German audience from all over, and then now, from all over Europe and the world. So it got bigger and bigger and bigger. You could see it looking in the parking lot, you could see the license plates from so many different places.

Rodeo is a very a strange choice for this program. Do you have any idea or theory about how did she chose that?

I don't know. I know, she saw it in New York and thought the ballet was fun and might be a good addition to the program. I personally think she thought it would be a good vehicle for Marlis Alt, because Marlis was one of the dancers she had worked with before. I'm sure Pina saw a production of the American Ballet Theater and just thought this particular piece would be very good with Marlis Alt in the lead role. Well, we rehearsed with Marlis, but unfortunately she got injured, so she never danced it. It was me and Vivienne Newport. Vivienne was the cowgirl, and I was the man she wound up with.

You as a dancer, but also for the company, going through these three very different styles, how did that feel? Was it a challenge?

I thought it was great fun. There wasn't much of a challenge, except artistically, a little bit for Pina's piece. You know, the challenge was standing 25 minutes looking at the mirror, the window. We didn't have that much to do. The the main characters Hiltrud Blanck, who played Fritz. – It was originally supposed to be Marlis. – Anyhow, Hiltrud took over that role, and so it was about them. We were just there; very much like a corp de ballet: scenic presence, not doing a lot. So, that was fine, then in the intermission I changed to this other thing and did that (shows) and then went, and changed and became the junge Soldat, the young soldier in The Green Table. For a young dancer, it was just fine. I got to meet Agnes de Mille and worked with her as a young soloist, and I also got to meet Anna Markard, and Kurt Jooss himself came and did the coaching, and that was quite wonderful. He was very old at this time, but he was still a very – Oh, what's the word? – a young soul. He was known as Papa Jooss, by this time: he had a certain way about him. Now I remember him telling me that the young soldier was a Stellvertreter für Millionen, that is, I was a representative of millions of this young soldiers. So, it was quite a nice little role in The Green Table. I enjoyed dancing it very much. And that was the first ballet we did.

And then you started to get to know Pina artistically. There was one piece that she did, Yvonne, Prinzessin von Burgund, do you remember seeing that?

I do remember seeing "Yvonne". This was an opera. I think of Boris Blacher, one of the avant garde opera composers. – I think it wasn't in Wuppertal. I might have been in Bochum, or someplace else. – Anyhow, she played the main character Yvonne, Princess of Burgundy it's a non-speaking role. She just sat there, like this queen, she was blind. – I think she was blind. Which she would later do in the in the film with Fellini. Very well. – And she sat there with this Mütze (a cap) on her head, kind of being like nobody else on Earth. Pina was Pina, you know, when she was on stage, she didn't have to do anything. All the eyes were right there on Pina. One of the most fascinating performers. When I was there, she really didn't dance much: she did the alte Mutter the old mother in The Green Table, she alternated that with Hiltrud, I think. We did that ballet evening about 13 times that first season. What else did She do? She did. Yvonne , but there wasn't much else that she danced. I'd like to have seen her dance more.

The company, at that time, started as a regular dance company in a theater in Germany, like many other. So did you do other things like musicals or operettas?

Yes. Thank heavens, we didn't do as many as in other places. Which appealed to me because being a young dancer, it's great to be on stage. In Nurnberg, I think we are on stage 250 evenings a year: we were on every night, with 16 operas, operettas. But, it was nice not to have to do all that. I think we did Zigeuner Baron , we did The Apartment, which is the German version of Promises, Promises, the Burt Bacharach musical. Which was kind of fun.

Talk a little about that.

Yes. And several other things I know we did, and I did some operas also. But usually small ensemble stuff. I remember Vivienne Newport and I danced Andrea Chénier, with Hans Pop's choreography. I did something with Héléna Pikon and Luis Layag as a faun. I had a marvelous costume. I was young and weighed much more than I do now. So, I looked pretty good in that costume.

And there were also special evenings in the foyer, where there was the possibility for the dancers to present other choreographies ...

Somewhat. It was usually a kind of Tingeltangel: an informal evening. I remember dancing a soft shoe there. Since being new, and I was a tap dancer, so it was easy for me to do something like that. When I came back to the company, we also did I'll Do You In… [Ich bring dich um die Ecke...] her first Schlager ballet. I got to dance there. So, now and then we would do these kind of things, and they were fine. Actually, in the first year she had a whole evening of choreography by people in the company. I did a piece with Jo Ann Endicott and Colleen Finneran. At the time, I thought it was a good piece. A lousy piece, terrible, terrible, but anyhow, Pina let it happen. I don't know why ... Anyhow, Pina let it happen.

So, you mentioned right now that you were in the first season there, and then you left ...

Yes. I wasn't the only one who left. Of the ten men in the first season, maybe seven or eight left. We just were not very satisfied, as dancers, with what was happening there. So, I came back to New York, and I worked with Agnes de Mille, that's where that went. I don't know. I guess Pina had a vision, but I didn't really feel it in the same way. And you know, you have to put your Kündigung or whatever it's called in April. You have to tell them whether you're going to stay or not by the 15th of April, and that's kind of pretty early. So anyhow, I heard that a lot of the men were leaving, so I thought: "Well I'll try something else too. Maybe this is not for a dancer like me. I was a Dancer, anyhow, that's how it went.

But something pulled you back.

Oh, yes, it did indeed. I went and worked with Agnes de Mille in her company and that was fine. Then she had a stroke right in front of me, you know, during a rehearsal. So, I quickly saw that that wasn't going to be continuing. Then, I came back to Germany, back to Nuremberg for a year. Kind of followed my heart back to Nuremberg. That didn't pan out. So, I thought: "Well, what's happening in Wuppertal? What's happening with Pina?" I saw Pina at the large audition they had for dancers in Frankfurt. Kind of like a cattle call, you know? Pina happened to be there, and I told her I'd be interested in coming back, and she said she'll think about it. So, I got a call from her: "John, you can come back." And that's the second best thing that ever happened to me in my life: there was a Martha Hill, and then there was Pina Bausch taking me back. So, I came back for three years, and those were very important years. She had already been making great progress. Certainly, because of the Kurt Weill evening, because of the Stravinsky evening. But, then I came back just in time to do "Bluebeard", Come Dance With Me and Renata Emigrates. Some of the big, big pieces that she is really known for ... Kontakthof, Arien.

Before we get into that, I think I skipped Zwei Krawatten.

Zwei Krawatten Yeah, we did that the first year, and that was interesting because it was an operetta, that Pina "choreographed". With a lot of help from Carlos Orta and myself, but that's fine too. So, Zwei Krawatten is a Berlin review from the 20s, 30s. Review became a very big thing in Berlin and had some very fine composers. Zwei Krawatten I think it's by a man called Mischa Spolianski, very, very famous, along with Friedrich Hollander, Nelson and a few other composers of this light music form, like a musical comedy. So, we did this and it hadn't been done in years. I think, for the premiere Mischa Spolianski was actually there and we met him. I didn't know at that time who he was, but now, I know that he was a very, very famous composer. So, that was a great deal of fun. I forget who the director was. Carlos Orta was out there dancing in a banana skirt, it was just just a lot of fun. I had my girls behind me in their shorts, dancing and tap dancing. A big kind of American girls thing that was happening. For us, it was that a lot of fun. I helped Pina with the steps and things. Pina was not a jazz dancer, so she had to depend on me feeding her material that could be used. I got very angry in a rehearsal and walked out. That's how young I was. Because I just didn't realize, at the time, that a lot of choreographers do this. They work with other dancers who give them material. I choreographed a routine, I thought that was perfect and she started fiddling with it: "now we'll put this here and put that there." I didn't like that, so out of the room I went. Anyhow, there was always times when you love Pina and you didn't love Pina. That's always the way it is. It has to be, by its very nature, a love hate relationship. Because it just can't be anything else. It's too deep, it's too personal. Being a dancer is a very personal thing. You're up there in front of the audience and everybody else, showing off your body: it's a very vulnerable thing. Dancers are very vulnerable, insecure people. And we look to somebody like Pina as a mother, you know? And you want everything from them. Everything. Of course they can't give everything. So anyhow, that's the way it was and that's the way it is with every dance company since God created dance. It just is that way.

I just wanted to stress that point again: you were saying that this confrontation, this love-hate relationship has to happen for creativity too?
Yes.
If things go smoothly, something, something doesn't happen ...

Right. Right. Pina's work was very personal. So it's going to get personal and to go to those places with a vulnerability that Pina wanted, there's going to be stuff happening. You know, that's just there. After a while, I kind of learned to deal with it. I knew at times I'd be more angry with Pina, but it was kind of okay. You know, in the company, those people who didn't get chosen to go to Bochum for the "Macbeth" project, really felt abandoned here in Wuppertal. And you had to work with other choreographers after all this time, as if it were a repertory project, like in the four choreographers of Café Müller, for us that was very difficult to take. Now, looking back on it, of course, that's what Pina had to do for her own development. She had to go away. She had to work with a smaller group. She had to work with actors and dancers to forge, a new way, a new way of working that became the asking of questions and those kinds of things, which is not a choreographer's way to work. Not at all. So she needed that, and I understand that now, but at the time it was very painful.

Well, we'll come back to that later. Just go back to our chronology: Let's talk about Bluebeard.
Yes.
Bluebeard is also a very special and daring piece. How was the process? Who was in that? Where did you rehearse? How things happened?

I don't remember really much about the process, but as difficult as that piece is, it's one of my most favorite things to do in Wuppertal, of the entire repertoire. I loved it and we did it all over the place. You know, there was something about the demands it made, even though it asked me to be kind of like a beater of women, which is not my nature. But, that's what the piece took, so just got into it. I loved the jumping. I loved everything about it. The music is just superb. Even in its cut up form. It's just superb music and that beautiful set that Rolf Borzik made for us. Even that I loved, even though the leaves on the floor. Sitting there, and sometimes I would be sitting against the wall for long stretches, and you'd see a bug kind of crawling towards you. Okay. You would smell the – Can I say it? Dog shit. You'd smell that because these leaves were just brought over from the park across the street. So, you got used to it all. It was really, really quite a wonderful piece, and I enjoyed doing it very much. It's hard to say that such a difficult piece would be you'd enjoy doing, but I enjoyed it very much. There was a a little something I had to do with Frau Cito, with Marion. We would meet there, she'd take the hand and then she'd start doing this thing (shows), where we should keep using my own elbow as a weapon, over and over and over and over and over. I even like that. I even like that. Maybe it says something bad about me, but at any rate, I liked it very, very much. When I came back, and into "Bluebeard", I didn't know that there was something strange happening in the company: people were not going to rehearsals, and we had to sometimes go to Jan Minařík studio to do stuff. So, something was happening. I don't even remember that. People tell me now and I go: "Oh, that's interesting, because I really didn't know much about it." I do remember. Some rehearsals with Pina, where I think she thought she was going to do something like she did in the Stravinsky evening. There was going to be this part of "Bluebeard". But, then there's going to be a comedy part. I remember she wanted us to be barbers, or something. I remember me and Ed Kortlandt in a rehearsal, and it went no place. We weren't funny, there was nothing. Nothing. Nothing happening. So anyhow, we get into the rehearsal room, and things just started happening. If you remember in "Bluebeard" there's these wonderful times, when the men come in walking very slowly in lines, and then they can break into any kind of scene they want to. Sometimes, we're walking like that and the women take their costumes out and use this as a living dress rack, and she would come out. I can remember the day that that happened. Because, Pina didn't know how to put this piece together. We had all these pieces, but how are we going to put them together? And then she started this walking thing, and after the rehearsal, I can remember going back to the dressing room. And Louis Layag said to me: "She found it. She found it. What's going to hold this piece together?" This walking in and out that comes in and out every scene. So, it was very fascinating this whole way in which she put this monumental piece together and ... How long is "Bluebeard"?

Three hours and ten minutes [SIC Today 1h 50min].

It used to be 45 minutes longer, because that whole end section where we do the pictures and things, where he goes and pulls her around. We repeated the whole thing, up until the dress rehearsal. So it was quite, quite the piece to do. Still, it is one of my favorites and I think if someone put a gun to my head, and say which piece of PIna is the best piece? I'd have to say "Bluebeard". I think it incorporates so much what she had to say about the battle between the sexes, the way it's put together, the music, the scenography, the women on the walls, you know, everything about it is just superb, just superb.

As we were talking about the business of being exposed and having to have some sort of confrontation for something to happen, and then building this trust to let her do things. As you're saying that Louis Layag actually started to sense that that a turning point was there ...

Yes. We knew something was definitely afloat. Something really good. We felt it. I felt it. And it was the first time coming back. After these years, couple of years of being away and I turned 30. I turned 30 that summer. And I think this is a really important thing. Pina's work is not for young dancers. They still want to dance and they want to jump. Pina's work isn't about that, Pina's work is about something else. So I began to really understand Pina with "Bluebeard", and could really give myself to the work, feel good about it, feel good as a dancer, feel good as an actor, as a performer. Everything. Quite an extraordinary feeling when something like that happens. And so different from being in Fritz. Standing. You know, of course we had to sit for half an hour in places, but somehow it was different. I was different. I was ready for it, I guess.

But do you see it on the arch? Since you mention Fritznow?

It's hard to say. That the thing about Fritz is – if you talk about Pina's development into dance theater from choreography – well, dance theater was there from the beginning. Fritz is dance theater. Just a different kind of dance theater, than what she was going to later evolve. But it's dance theater from the beginning.

Obviously she did some incredible pieces in between. That's there also in her development as an artist. From Iphigenie auf Tauris, Orpheus und Eurydike, the whole Stravinsky evening, which is something that carries to today.

I was lucky enough because the first thing I did when I got back was learn "Sacre" because we had to do both evenings. So, while I was doing Bluebeard, I was performing both the Kurt Weill evening and the "Sacre" evening. So, that was wonderful to having all this to come back to. Quite wonderful. And we perform those all over too: in Berlin and Vienna. Here and there, you know, a wonderful story when we were in Berlin. I think it was with "Bluebeard". In the Kantine, the little place where you go and get your drinks in the theater, there was this extraordinary woman sitting there, and I looked at her and she looked like a prune. She was so old and had red hair. You know, this prune face? I looked at her and she looked at me, and she had these blue eyes, like a child. Eyes of a child in this old woman. I went up and said, Pina, I just saw the most extraordinary woman in the Kantine. She said: "Oh, that is Valeska Gert, very famous!", as I would find out later a very famous cabaret artist and dancer, actress, you know. So, it was I got to lay eyes on Valeska Gert. It it doesn't get better than that.

That was in Berlin, but, there was also the big Asian tour.

Yeah. That was the first big international tour. We had done in and out of Nancy, Edinburgh; but the first long tournée was the Asian tour. That was fantastic.

Was there some kind of strange confrontations as far as bringing this aethetics?

Every moment something would be strange. In Indonesia we performed in an outdoor theater. This was like January, February, maybe a little earlier, which is the rainy season. So, the Goethe Institute hired this shaman to sit out there under a tree and do something with eggs to keep the rain away. He did it. The Goethe Institute said they don't know how it works, but it works. So, they paid the man, he sat there, did something with the eggs, and it didn't rain. Because the week before, they said, in the streets the water was up to here. That was an unforgettable performance. We did some of the movements from Cantata [Wind From West]John Giffin: (shows), and you look up and bats are flying around. At one time, in Sacre, a cat came onstage, looked around, was not interested, and walked out of again. It was fabulous. Fabulous: every stage we went on. The stage in Thailand was built for Thai classical dancing. It was very small stage, it had a low part, and it had this hill that went up where the gods would stand, and do their dances. We have to do Sacre on this. So, we did it like a relay race. Some people would run on and do this section and they'd run off, and other people would come on. It was wild. It was wild. So much fun. Then in Korea: huge stage, much bigger than here. We'd have to run to where you had to go (laughs). We took with us, both the Kurt Weill evening and the Stravinsky evening. We did the Weill evening one performance. One performance. They didn't like this evening at all. Subsequently, we drag Ann Höling, Erich Leukert, Karin Rasenack through the entire tour, from Europe, and they got to be like tourists, go out, because they weren't working. And we're doing Sacre every night. Anyhow, that's the way it was. That was fun. So, what else happened on that tour? All kinds of things. I remember one time, about the costumes. They had sent the costumes out to get clean and they came back in and the men's pants were about that short. ... What was her name, our costumes person. She was crazy, I know, she had to pull out the pants, and by showtime it was just fine. Oh, and with Vivienne Newport... I was doing the old man in The Second Spring because Michael Diekamp, the original dancer, had left the company. So, I took over that role. At one point, Vivienne and I, we each have a plate of grapes, and we walk toward each other, eating the grapes in a very seductive manner (shows). So, there was something on the plate. Vivienne and I looked at each other, we walked toward each other, we started chewing and it I was really little lemons. They don't have grapes. Who knew? They don't have grapes. And in the Kurt Weill evening, where she has to eat the apple, there were no apples, they have to have a banana. Anyhow, it was great fun, and we just did what we had to do, and that is live theater. That was a strange theater, that night.

So, adapting to different spaces: did you travel with the turf as well?

I think we did. We traveled with all those damn sets, too: the furniture, for The Second Spring, that big couch. All that Klamotten (costumes), we had to travel with all. I can remember Rolf Borzik tearing out his hair, because of the crews had a different sense of time, in these countries. We called it Bali Time. You'd see it at breakfast. They'd come out, they'd take your order, did leave, and maybe 25 minutes later, half an hour, maybe something would come out. So, you can imagine Rolf trying to get this set done with workers who have a completely different sense of time. For them, time is not money. Time is something completely different. So, there were challenges every day.

Let's talk about Rolf Borzik.

Rolf Borzik was quite a character. Quite a character. We were not close, but we were on very good terms. I wonder how he got into the theater at all. Because he didn't have this background that theater designers have. He was a photographer, but he created some really magnificent things for Pina Bausch: the set of The Rite of Spring, the set of "Cantata". The first piece, we call it "Cantata", it's Wind From West that I luckily got to reconstruct here in 2013 as part of the Pina 40 Project. It's just fantastic. It divides the whole theater space into four separate rooms, with scrims and with doors besides. Pina Bausch loves to do this [movement] toward the audience and backwards. Couldn't do any of that on this set. It was a perfect set. Everything about it. And of course "Blaubart": running into the walls and everything about it. In "Blaubart", Rolf had these mechanical birds. You know what the crow is? A blackbird. Dead birds down there in the leaves, and they would kind of go like that (shows), you know, dead birds. We got rid of the birds, but I remember the birds.

So, he was experimenting, bringing stuff, and throwing it in there? Was he a structured person?

He was just a wild man with ideas. He'd come in and he'd be doodling and stuff. You know, Pina Bausch and Rolf Borzik had the courage to not know in advance what the hell they're going to do. They came into the rehearsal process, and from the rehearsal process became this dialog, that then, became somehow a set. How do you do it in the theater, where they want to know a year in advance exactly what you need from the metal shop, this and that. How they ever made it work, I have no idea. So one of the miracles of German theater is that this ever happened at all. Truly a creative process! Truly, truly a creative process.

Eventually he would be in Café Müller. But, then we have Kontakthof again with an inner room.

Yes, and that was the first piece that we did in the Lichtburg: was Kontakthof. And that's what the theater looks like: the Lichtburg. So that was fine. Just took ideas from that and made this thing on the stage.

Because Kontakthof comes right after "Macbeth" and of course Café Müller. But, do you remember a change in the in the work process?

I think somewhat. Of course, I was very glad to have Pina back. You know, our mother had left us and she was now back. It did seem to change, because there seemed to be a lot more questions being asked. I won't say she started working like a theater director because she was still a choreographer. Even though, this dance theater thing came, she was still a choreographer, but it was informed by this other wonderful kind of thing going on, that she'd ask a lot of us dancers personally to share our stories, to do those things. And there's something wonderful about being on a stage, knowing that you don't have to present a character. Not that it wasn't great: like the old man in The Second Spring – I loved it, but I didn't have to do that anymore. I didn't have to wear a wig, I could be John on the stage, and there's something very nice about that. That doesn't happen in dance very much. Even in The Rite of Spring I thought of myself: Yes, I was John, but I was also blah blah blah blah blah in my mind. You know? But we could even put more of our fantasy in, when it became more personal, as the work evolved.

Is there in Kontakthof something that came directly from you?

Oh, yeah, I'm sure there is. I can't particularly think of anything right now. I certainly know more from Arien. And I remember doing the Itsy Bitsy Spider to Beethoven Moonlight Sonata, or something. I do that there is. There's a number of things that are kind of built in Renate Emigrates. Even then, she was working a little bit toward this way with "Renate". I got to do: "Renate, ich bin auf der erste Stufe. Renate! Ich bin auf der zweite Stuffe. Renate!" (laughs) You know, stuff like that. She had always used what we had, but it became even more, she mined even more with this questioning process. And still had to use her choreographic talent to put all this together. She was incredible. I remember my friends would ask me about a month before premiere, they'd say: "Oh, John, how's the new piece coming?" And then I'd go: "What piece? There's no piece. No piece." But then, that day would come where Pina came into the room, she had another hat on – metaphorically. And she was not the maker of experiments anymore, she was the choreographer. "Let's see what this looks like with this." And she'd just try things, and things would work. So, from nothing would become these little pockets of things: material that was kind of coherent in her mind. And from the little pockets she would, somehow, then begin to weave these, these smaller pieces into bigger pieces. Then comes the premiere, and we have a four hour piece, which a month ago didn't exist. So she was a tremendous, tremendous, choreographer, dance maker, collagist. Whatever you want to say, she had a real talent for it. And spatially: talk about a genius! If I stood here and did something (shows), it would be absolutely banal, but she put me standing here. Glorious, glorious! I've never seen such a fine sense of space as Pina Bausch had. She'd just look and say: "Oh, isn't that interesting?" Nothing was ever in the center. There's certain traditional things of theater. Doris Humphrey wrote about this. You learned in composition classes: where the center is, what your diagonals are, where you stand if you want to make something important. Pina kind of did nothing with that particularly. Anyhow, it's quite remarkable. Quite a remarkable woman. One thing about her that was remarkable, there were many other things.

So, let us go back to Renate Emigrates. As the company started in the very first season, it was just so regular German dance company, integrated into the whole theater apparatus where they had to do operettas, musicals and all of that. Eventually, the company detached itself from it. But Pina also did pieces like I'll Do You In... She called it a Pop music ballet by Pina Bausch [Schlagerballett von Pina Bausch]. And she did Renate Emigrates she called Operetta by Pina Bausch [Operette von Pina Bausch]. How do you place those pieces within this frame?

It's hard to say because I think Pina, even though she was dealing with perhaps the evergreen songs like in Renate Emigrates. She still had a serious artistic agenda behind it. It wasn't just entertainment. It was also always had something else going on. So, she may have called it an operetta, but it wasn't an operetta like the other "operettas". It was a Pina Bausch operetta. I don't know why she particularly called it that, but for us it was just another Bausch piece, even though the music was different, it was Pina.

So, in that note, how do the pieces are different from one piece to another piece. What's the same and what's different from one piece to the other?

They each brought a certain kind of challenge, and you either enjoyed that challenge or you didn't. think it was very different for different company members. For instanceCome Dance With Me is not a great favorite with the men. Because we had to wear those hats and those heavy, heavy black jackets throughout the whole thing, and they're hot as hell. Going up and down the slide was fun, but the rest of it, maybe not quite so much fun. So, each piece brought those kind of issues. I can remember enjoying doing Renate Emigrates. It was such an open piece. I remember, if we wanted to, we could go up and sit in the little cafe at the top of the ice and just watch the show or read a book. I remember Luis Layag and I up there just relaxing and the show going on. The audience seeing us. "Oh, it's time to go!" Come down and do the next thing. Sometimes there was 45 minutes or so before we went on again. So, there's all kinds of things that make each piece very individual. Very, very individual.

I mean, you are saying that you were able to go up, to have that freedom during the performance?

Yes. Yeah. Pina says: "You want to go up there? Sure." So we did. Took work, talked with each other, watch the show when we wanted to, you know. Yeah!

Very interesting, because I believe that later she would not allow that sort of freedom.

Maybe not. I think that that piece was had that kind of breadth about it, somehow. And length, it was a very, very long piece. Just one of the things that we were allowed to do.

I'm just picking up some elements here. – Talking about length; how important is it? What's your take on that?

When you're in something, and you're really in it, you don't necessarily notice the length. Like I knew "Blaubart" was long piece, but when you're in it, you're so busy with that moment, whatever that moment is. That time loses the quantitative aspect and becomes qualitative. It becomes about the quality of that time. So, I don't remember particularly feeling "Well this is too long and this is not too long." It's just what Pina wanted. So you just dug in, did the problem. Gave it what you could and that was it. So, it was very interesting that way. The only thing that was really long was looking at the the window in Fritz. That was long.

What was the stage direction? Just look in that direction, or would she gave an image?

Never, never. Pina Bausch never gave us anything in the way of meaning. I think that was one of the geniuses of Pina. She said someplace that she didn't want to take the dancer's imaginations away from them. That's one of the most powerful things you can do. As long as you can corral your dancers to do what you want and not have all kinds of other things come in. But, she certainly wanted us to build our fantasies into what we were doing at all times.

And with that challenge, would you make yourself a path to follow?

Sure, for instance my interpretation of my path – Not that I ever shared it with anybody. – when dancing The Rite of Spring was that I certainly belong to a society, well, in the past. And it was clear that this society totally believed that if this human sacrifice was not made the crops would not grow. There'd be drought, there'd be famine. There would be death for us. So, for me at that moment, it was totally important, for me as an individual, and for us as a society, that this woman dies. I didn't see it as being cruel, particularly. It was important that she died, because if she didn't die, we wouldn't live. So, that's the existential place that I went to when I did The Rite of Spring. But it was just made up in my mind.

And in "Bluebeard"?

"Bluebeard". There's different things. Sometimes, when we were walking around like that (shows), I felt like somebody in an insane asylum. Maybe, not all my faculties were there. A lot of it came from the feeling of the body and what we're doing. So, I just let that take me where it would. A lot of "Blaubart" felt, in that set, institutional in a way. This old house, what was it? Was it an old insane asylum? What was this place? And it wasn't just one place. I love the fact in Pina's work that it is ambiguous, meaning that it has more than one meaning. And every time I look at Pinas work, I see something different. This time when I go to "Blaubart", I see something entirely different that I've never seen before. It just is that way and I do love that about the work. It makes it very rich. I think, Pina Bausch knew exactly what she wanted, and she got exactly what she wanted. But at the same time, her vision was big enough that other people can bring their imaginations to her vision. And this is a really wonderful thing.

About live theater: doing it at this moment in time, we are under the same weather influence. Whatever it is, does that make a difference?

Well, in some way, I think Pina's work could only been made in Wuppertal. The kind of work she does. She's from this area. It's gray, it's gray, it's gray. It's heavy. Pina's work had a certain heaviness to it, a certain heft. I don't know if I can say anything more about that.

But somehow, it does resonate in other places as well. This work has been shown in all different places in very different cultures as well.

But for us, every place we went in the world, we took the piece that we knew. We didn't perform it a differently way with the bats coming down or the cat coming along, we didn't perform it any different than we would in Wuppertal. So, for me at least, I tried to keep a very consistent kind of vision for each piece, and that's what I liked about working with Pina. I discovered I could put so much of myself into the work – I probably put too much of myself into the work, but that is my problem – but there's something wonderful about being able to be there, warts and all. You know? For the good, for the bad, for the ugly. Everything that you are as a person. Something really wonderful about that.

Did that become a burden?

Yes, I think it became that for me because I, perhaps gave more than I should have. Maybe too much emotion into the work. I invested maybe too much of myself into the work, and after a number of years, it just got really kind of heavy. Maybe not the most healthy way for me. In my last piece, in Arien, and I'm up in the balcony, threatening to throw myself off, that had a basis in reality. So, I'm sorry that I couldn't have stayed longer with Pina, because I think she wanted me to stay. She liked me. But I think I just was not emotionally strong enough to continue with the work. But again, that's my problem, it had nothing to do with with Pina.

Maybe we can talk about Arien. The process of working, how and when did the water come?

I don't remember much about it. Because this is the time when Rolf Borzik was sick, and we knew he was going to die and Luis Layag had just died. So there was a lot of [grief]. Pina later in the piece 1980 made her Trauerstück [Grief Piece]. But for me it was Arien, the place to work all that out. I don't remember much about it, except I really enjoyed the piece. Except, that after four hours the water was cold, stone cold, and you'd be sitting in it, in your tuxedo, and that wasn't so nice. I don't know if you've seen, but nobody asked me, but I got perfectly nude on the stage. Run up and down into the thing, it seemed perfectly fine to do it. You know, so I just did it. Do they still do it, does somebody get naked?
Yes, yes.
I started it! So. I started something.

That was fun. I enjoyed the water, I loved the deep part of the water. I loved the race. You know, when we went up and down, I was not going to lose. If I died on the spot, I was not going to lose. And it came down between me and Ed Kortlandt, and I beat him. It was so ... YES! Yeah. There I could really put all my frustration and everything into it and just run the race. That was fun. I don't necessarily let that side of myself out, you know, that really competitive kind of obsessive thing that you have to have as a dancer. Anyhow there. That was just fine. (laughs)

Being able to achieve this level of playfulness, that's a very difficult thing for a director to bring out their performers. Do you have any insights of how she worked with that and how she was able to bring you guys into such a playful state?

I think she chose wisely, and then just let us do our thing. Just let us be. You know that. She said the only thing she ever really did was watch. I can remember Pina Bausch sitting there with her cigarettes, just watching. Just watching. In the early days there was no video, so she wrote everything on the back of napkins from the Bahnhof. Then later on, should lay out all the napkins, put things together, but now, she just looked. I think she trusted us and I think we trusted her. It was always clear that it was about Pina's vision, and we were there to facilitate her vision. But that's the way it is with any artist. So, I had no no problem with that whatsoever. Especially as later on, as I began to understand the work after "Blaubart", after some of the bigger works, after we got over the trauma of Pina leaving us for Bochum, then things were good. If Luis Layag hadn't died, and with no the problems with Rolf Borzik, maybe I would have stayed. I don't know. It's hard to say. Anyhow, it was what it was. It was exactly what it had to be, and I am very thankful that I was able to be a part of it. And still I am a part of it, you know, you can't ever leave it. No matter. You may want to, but you can't leave it. It's just this part of your soul at this point.

How much the work didn't finish when you close the door and went out to the café. Can you talk about some of those times after rehearsal, before rehearsal, sitting at the café, talking about pieces?

The thing about working with Pina is that, in some dance companies, you come, you leave your emotions at the door. You know your body is there, your mind is there. But you know your emotions are someplace else. We can't do that with Pina's work. You have to take everything you have. Good, bad, everything into the rehearsal room. So, consequently it became your life. Yes. I could go and do my laundry and and go shopping in the afternoon, and I could do those things, but your life was working with and for Pina. She worked evenings. A lot of choreographers are done at like 5 or 6 pm. We had an American young man in the company, who had worked previously in Cologne. And he was used to their hours, so he came here, and working four hours in the evening was unheard of. I guess for me it was just fine. I was there to work, you know? I wasn't here to enjoy the beauty Wuppertal. So, I'm here to work, so let's work and let's present something that is extraordinary. And Pina gave us that, Pina gave us the opportunity to be extraordinary. Because she was so extraordinary. So, it was a two way street with Pina.

There are things that one discovers with a little distance. How did your journey follow the times that you were with Pina? And how did the work with Pina Bausch inform your work?

Totally and completely. Again, I told you I had this mentality, when I was young, that you're either born as a choreographer or not. You had to be a genius, all that kind of stuff. Well, working with Pina, you were working with a genius. But you saw how she worked. You saw how she worked with people. So consequently, I learned that if I were going to cast, cast interesting people, different kinds of people. Have them interact. Look at what's happening in the rehearsal room. Not what's in your head. Remember that awful piece I said that I made? For the first season? Guess where I made that piece? In my head. No good at all. So I learned, as Pina: sit and watch. There's always something interesting – if you have interesting people in the room – there's always something happening. Always. It may not be what you want in the piece at that time, but there's always something happening. And if you tune into this, it's a very powerful tool, and I've learned how to do that, I think, from working with Pina. Subsequently I got a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. They gave me US$20,000, because they liked the work I did. It started out as very reminiscent of Pina Bausch at the beginning. Because that's what I knew. I started in the late 80s in the United States, everything was Twyla Tharp, you know, or Merce Cunningham. So, it was all this formal stuff. Well, I wanted to do something different because I was sick of this formal stuff. So, I began to put things together, and the first they were very Pina-like. How do you use some of the same problems that Pina did. Not the same solutions but the same problems kind of thing. But then it began to branch out on its own. It took on other dimensions too. But still, my teachers were very important and Pina Bausch probably the most important of all. I only worked with her for four years, but maybe that gave me time to go away and have something else. Be this kind of influence. I guess it was a good thing, I don't know. I can't, I can't really say, but it happened the way it happened. It happened the way it happened, just because of Pina Bausch.

Did you keep in touch? Did you watch the pieces and her development?

Not really. When they came to BAM, I would kind of go for the season, but I didn't keep too much contact. I would see Pina every now and then. I was teaching in North Carolina when she got her (...) prize from ADF American Dance Festival. She was awarded their big prize in the late 90s, I think. That was interesting because that was one of the few times that Pina and I could just sit down and talk like the old days. You know Pina became an international star. And this is fine. Her talent deserved it. But as she became this international star, it was harder and harder to approach Pina, in the way that we were at the beginning, and I missed that. I just missed it, even though I understood it. I would see her and we would talk a little bit. Sometimes she would be more happy to see me than other times, and it just depended on 100,000 things. So.

Could you relate? As you were seeing the dance scene in the 90s, and the whole physical theater movement of the 90s, could you see corelations there or influence?

I certainly saw always Pina Bausch in every, every piece. But I think that work changed. I think it because Pina became a mother. I think it's fundamentally changed the work. Instead of being this large ensemble work which I loved. It became sometimes a string of solos, one after the other, which personally I don't find nearly as interesting as some of the large ensemble works, but that's just the way I felt. Even though these dances, individual dancers, were fabulous, the choreography is fabulous, but it's for me that particular form is less interesting than what we did. I think it had to do that she wanted to get back to dance, but I guess she couldn't make it work in this group way. So, she took the solo route. Again, I just I just say it's because she wanted more time at home with her son. I don't know. I really don't know. I know Pina worked 24 hours a day. Always without a break. Ever. That was Pina Bausch.

About being German, no more than being German, about society and world politics, Cold War, all of those elements, environmental questions. How much of that do you think influenced the work?

I think a lot of it influenced, because if you think Pina was born in 1940. What was her childhood like in a Germany that's at war? I know, we hear a lot about the individual thing, as you know, her father was a Wirt [publican] and she worked there and she was under the tables. We understand. I just often wonder what that played into her psyche. Because she would have been – when was the war over, like 1946 or something – she'd have been six years old. My questions are: as a child, was she sent away? Sometimes they sent them away. Did she go with an aunt someplace in the country? What part did that play? There's just a lot of questions. And she comes from that generation, where their parents taught them nothing about the war. Nothing. So, there's this big secret always in the room. What did they do? Who were they? So on. I felt that in Pinas work somehow. It was work by a German choreographer for a German audience. Pina Bausch told the German public a truth they didn't want to know about themselves: that they were a society that treated their dogs better than they treat their children. I think that's why they despised her so much in the beginning because she told the truth. I think again, it comes from wanting answers when nobody's talking about. This whole thing was just this societal thing. So, when you have so many unanswered questions. She wasn't political, but she was totally political. She was not a feminist, she was an ultra feminist in her artistic expression. And I felt, as an American, I could never quite get in there or understand it, because I come from a totally different mental place, totally different from where she comes from.

Eventually you recreated Wind From West, and revisited material that you had done many, many years before with a very different eyes. With a lot of other experiences. As somebody having to reconstruct the piece, you have to put all the pieces together. What did you learn from that and from her work?

Again, it's very strange. I just put together the Regiebuch [show bible] for this. I've owed Salomon Bausch this Regiebuch since 2013. So, I'm finally getting it done. So much work went into the making of that. But, watching the tapes over and over – this thing about it being ambiguous – I see more and more things, that I never saw before. There's a wonderful piece toward the end of "Cantata". There are so many wonderful things about it: who are these people? Who is Tjitske Broersma, she seems to be a mother, is she the mother? Marlis Alt and Monika Sagon, are those her daughters? Are they all the same character as Jo Ann Endicott, the lead? Of course, Ed Kortlandt is like a Christ figure, up there in the corner. It's just very interesting - all the layers of this. Very recently, I had seen this moment a thousand times, but Tjitske leads Jo Ann from the first room into the second room, where the bed is, toward the end of the piece, and she closes the door. Wow. Is she putting her because she's been a naughty girl? Is she putting her in an asylum, like they did in the 19th century? She's left alone on the bed. Is she having a religious ecstasy? Is she mad? What's happening? This is fantastic, when you've seen a thing a thousand times, but the thousand and one time, you see something else. Extraordinary. She was an extraordinary choreographer.

Well, I shouldn't say this, but I will. They had a Pina 40, in 2023 it'll be Pina 50, right? I would like to do a lecture on the Stravinsky evening because having reconstructed it, I realised that it's all the same material in the three pieces. It doesn't look like it at all, because Pina is such a good composer, such a good choreographer. In fact, recently I saw some things I went: that's from "Sacre" and I never thought of it before. I never saw it, but that's from Sacre. There's just so many things like that I would like to talk about, because on the compositional level there's been a lot written about The Rite of Spring – but how these three works work together, I don't think, there's been so much research done. Anyhow, we'd like to talk about that. So. It's very interesting. Very, very interesting. I was talking with Jo Ann Endicott, because I wasn't there, how is this evening put together? She remembers that Pina started with Cantata, then probably went into The Rite of Spring and at the end put together The Second Spring – knowing Pina and how she would work. So, it's very interesting how these three totally different pieces works. I love the Stravinsky evening because, I think, it shows the breadth of Pina Bausch's work like nothing else quite shows. It begins with this beautiful spiritual and esthetic thing, then goes into this Chaplinesque s kind of comedy, and then ends up with this primal, gut wrenching The Rite of Spring. I think it's extraordinary range there, and how she can take so little and make it so big. Just an extraordinary gift.

You experienced the company at the very beginning, it had a certain meaning within the dance world. Then, the company swelled and became an international thing. We didn't very much touch about, uh, the co-productions going, getting inspiration to watch other places. But there's the company today. Um. Well. How do you see the company at that point in relation to today's place of this company?

It's hard to say because, with the younger dancers who hadn't worked with Pina, it has to be different, it can't be the way it was with Pina. Even though, we try to give as much as we can – the people who were around – it still just can't be the same. So, it loses something, but hopefully it gains something too, from the young people putting their fantasy into the pieces. So, it's always a problem with work that lives on over time. Because, in one way, it has to change. But how much is it to change? How much is too much change? If there's not change, is it stale? What happens? With dance it's a big problem. How do you do that? And I think the Wuppertal company, at least so far – Pina has been gone since 2009. So how long is that?
11 years.
11 years. It's not a long time, but still things are changing. I'll probably see things tonight in Bluebeard that I like very much. I'll probably see things that I don't like very much. It's the nature of the beast, when you're working with human bodies. An oboe is an oboe. So, when you have it in the score, it's going to always sound like an oboe, because that's the way it is. Dancers are not oboes, you know. We are all individuals, with our psyche, with our body, everything is different and cannot be homogenized. Pina Bausch, of all choreographers, did not want this homogenized ballet thing going on. She loved ballet, she loved the form of it, but she wanted individuals on the stage, and she got individuals on the stage. It's impossible to replace those individuals. There can only be one Jo Ann Endicott. There'll be other people doing Jo Ann Edicott's roles, but they'll only be one Jo Ann, and that's the same for all of us. Because Pina took so much from the individual onto the stage – Jo is Jo on the stage she's not just playing somebody else – it makes it even harder. Dance is hard enough to do later on, even if it's ballet, but with something like Pina, it becomes almost impossible. Still, people love the work. Why not continue on with it? As long as they think they can keep a certain amount of quality there, a certain amount of Pina Bausch. And not dumb it down for dancers, keep it high quality, keep it rehearsed well, that's all you can do. That's all you can do.

As you were saying, in Wind From West, there's a level of handcraft, of skill. Wouldn't that also be a very a very powerful thing to carry on?

Pina Bausch's structures are very, very powerful, but they need the personalities there too. Because the structures will not just live by themselves. They do need that individual personality there. But yes, they're very strong. Her sense of composition, of choreography is really extraordinary. Again that spatial thing, we were talking about before, that alone is genius. The more I look at it, the more I'm amazed. Looking at the tapes is just quite, quite amazing. Something I'm very thankful to have been a part of, even for the short time I was there – relative short time.

Before I ask a last question, was there something in your mind, as you were coming here, that I didn't touch on, that we should talk about?

Not particularly, but when I'm back in Wuppertal, I begin to feel this grayness. You look at the people on the street, they all seem so sad. Somehow, they're always waiting for a bus. They're always waiting for a bus. They're standing there and nobody smiles, nobody talks to each other. It's like being in an Oscar Schlemmer painting, it's just extraordinary. I remember why. One of the reasons that I left was to get the gray out, it just is on the spirit. It can be very heavy. Very, very heavy. I don't know, if it's just Germany, because I've lived in other places of Germany and it's not like this, or it's because of the climate or the Schwebebahn, who knows? But every time I'm here, I go: "Oh yeah, I remember, I remember this." I remember it getting to me, allowing it to get to me. Maybe, that means I'm just not strong enough inside, as a strong person but not not strong enough. Somehow not strong enough.

Does that mean that one can only experience the full Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch in Wuppertal?

Absolutely. Totally and completely!

And what is the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch?

It's an extraordinary collection of people who are able to come together, at one time, in one space, in one theater and extraordinary things came out of it. For me, of course it's about then – I know the Tanztheater continued for many pieces – but for me that is my Tanztheater. I know at that time, even when we were making the works, I knew they were extraordinary. I didn't need to have critics tell me that. I didn't need any of that, I just knew they were extraordinary. I did it as long as I could and that was enough. That was enough. And I owe Pina Bausch so much, so much: I wish you were here. I wish you were here, because there is so much that is left unsaid. Just so much left unsaid. But I guess that's the way it always is with people you love. You never can say enough, you can never express enough. The last time I saw Pina Bausch she said: "Bis nächstes Mal." ["See you next time."] And nächstes Mal was of course her funeral. Yeah. Extraordinary woman.

I thank you immensely for sharing your experience with us, your time with us and for giving us and everybody this material. I finish here our interview today.

Thank you. Again, this is giving back for what I was given from Pina. It's time to give back. So, thank you.