Barbara Kaufmann

Barbara Kaufmann (Hampel) was born 1959 in Braunschweig but grew up in Munich. In 1977 she left school after year 11 and enrolled to study dance at the Iwanson International School of Modern Dance (then the Iwanson Dance Center) on the invitation of Jessica Iwanson, finishing in 1979. Study trips took her to Stockholm, Paris and New York, and she gained her first performance experiences with the Iwanson Dance Company. Jessica Iwanson also found Barbara her first work as a dancer, touring the show Laser in Concert with Eberhard Schöner and The Police. In 1980 she began dancing with Tanzprojekt München, led by Birgitta Trommler, whose artistic approach already showed the influence of Pina Bausch. Performances with the Tanzprojekt München again took her as far as New York. In 1984 Susanne Linke discovered her at a Birgitta Trommler performance and brought her to Essen to dance at the Folkwang Tanzstudio (FTS). She trained at the Folkwang University of the Arts (then the Folkwang School) with important teachers such as Hans Züllig and Jean Cébron, and joined Susanne Linke on a tour of South America lasting several weeks.

How things came together

Like most Folkwang students, Barbara Kaufmann also learned Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring , which she first danced in 1985 in Wuppertal. She had already seen the piece in the TV version, a key influence on her decision to become a dancer. The strong emotionality and physical directness of the piece represented exactly what she wanted to dance. In 1987 Pina Bausch offered her a position at her dance theatre. Her long held wish had become reality. Without reservations, she dived into Pina Bausch’s rehearsal world, reacted directly and intuitively to her questions, and was amazed by everything she then discovered. The most important rule she learned was that less is mostly more. Pina Bausch valued Barbara’s directness and honesty. They treated each other as equals. Barbara Kaufmann performed in no less than 26 Tanztheater Wuppertal productions, including seven premieres: Palermo Palermo, Tanzabend II, Das Stück mit dem Schiff (The Piece with the Ship), Ein Trauerspiel, Danzón, Nur Du(Only You) and Wiesenland. She never grew tired; for her, each piece was a new, exciting journey of discovery.

Gradual shift in role

From 2001 Pina Bausch began using Barbara Kaufmann as a rehearsal assistant, alongside her work as a dancer; she contributed to the revival of repertoire works and was involved in the appraisal of the extensive company archives. Following Pina Bausch’s death in 2009, she took on rehearsal direction for various performances and assisted the guest choreographers Dimitris Papaioannou and Richard Siegal. She also worked for the Pina Bausch Foundation from 2010 to 2016 on documentation, video annotation and oral history. From 2017 she was commissioned by the foundation to work on the rehearsals of Pina Bausch’s _ Rite of Spring_ with the English National Ballet, the École des Sables and the Opera Ballet Vlaanderen as well as on Iphigenie auf Tauris with Dresden’s Semperoper Ballet. She fulfilled a similar role in 2004, 2013 and 2024 during rehearsals for Pina Bausch’s Tannhäuser Bacchanal. She also contributed to films by Amos Gitai, Pedro Almodóvar and Wim Wenders, and danced in videos and dance films by Lee Yanor, Anne-Luise Frei and Samantha Shay. Over the years Barbara Kaufmann has become a distinctive face at the Tanztheater Wuppertal; as a rehearsal director she holds profound insights into the wellsprings of dance theatre. When passing this knowledge on to the next generation, what is important to her is not just a formally correct restoration, but the reanimation of the spirit in which the pieces were created. She seeks to open up spaces of experience to the dancers, and mobilise their own imaginative power, because she knows that only then will this legacy be filled with life.

Text by Norbert Servos
Translation: Steph Morris