Gabriele Klein’s Pina Bausch’s Dance Theater: Company, Artistic Practices and Reception offers a major reconceptualisation of Bausch’s œuvre by shifting attention away from the solitary mythology of “Pina” and towards the entire ecology of production through which Tanztheater Wuppertal generated, transmitted and renewed its art. Klein begins from the historical shock of Bausch’s 1970s stage language: dancers coughed, smoked, shouted, flirted, collapsed, crossed water, soil, carnations and stones, and transformed banal gestures, social habits, objects, animals, plants and emotions into dance, thereby dismantling the established borders between choreography, theatre, everyday life and performance. Yet the book refuses to repeat inherited critical myths; instead, it proposes praxeology of translation as both theory and method, understanding each production as a continuous process of translation between speech and movement, body and writing, rehearsal and performance, performer and audience, cultural research and staged form, memory and renewal . The decisive case study is the Tanztheater Wuppertal itself, treated not merely as a company executing Bausch’s vision, but as a social and artistic formation whose dancers, designers, musicians, rehearsal practices, research trips, restagings and acts of passing on collectively shaped the works. Klein’s analysis of international coproductions further demonstrates that Bausch’s method anticipated later debates on artistic research, since the company investigated everyday rituals, gestures, music, customs and atmospheres across cities and cultures before transforming them into choreographic material. The result is not ethnographic illustration, but a dense theatrical practice in which the human condition is searched for through difference, repetition, affect and encounter. Klein’s conclusion is that Bausch’s art survives through living transmission: in restagings, audience memories, critical texts, bodily inheritance and the ongoing translation of dance into discourse, where the work remains contemporary precisely because it is never simply preserved, but continually reactivated.
