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Pina 3D - dance/landscape/design
Pina 3D - the Wim Wenders film that is a tribute to choreographer Pina Bausch and an enactment of her dance performances. Last year I saw her Vollmond piece at BAM and was blown away by the dance- the emotion evoked by the physicality and the image of the piece were all breathtaking. But to see the work on film shows the dance in even more dimensions. At the live performance you see the dance as a set piece and as a presentation. With the film you see this from the dancers' point of view and you see the performances from a completely different, and more intimate way. There is access to the depth of the performances in a way that is not possible during the live performance. Wenders brings the camera to places that you cannot otherwise see.
When I was a student at the AA in London way back when we did dance workshops with dancer and choreographer Gaby Agis, learning how to explore architectural space with our bodies. As a student this was a way to think about urban space in a new way. At the time I thhught more of an individual perception of space, ie using dance as a tool for myself, rather than the effect of the performance of the space itself, or of the dance as an urban act.
The Pina film shows dancers enacting emotions, feelings, life in space. The spaces that Wenders shows are of 6 types:
-Theater Space - the idealized, abstracted presentation space.
-Architectural Space - showing the dance in buildings, rooms with structures.
-Infrastructural Space - the dancers on an elevated suspended tram line that traverses the city of Wuppertal in Germany. The characters, and the viewers move through the city. Also dance is depicted in the context of a massive bridge in an idyllic valley. And yet another set piece is at a strip mine - a constructed landscape that acts as symbolic space.
-Nature - showing the dancers in the valley
-Designed Nature - in landscape architectural space
-Everyday Urban Space - the dancers enact their dances during the course of a normal day, at swiming centers, in traffic, on the tram. Passers by do not look at them as if they are doing anything unusual.
The spaces illuminate the dance, but also the dancers show the possibilities of the spaces around us.
By showing the dance - the physical expression of emotion - in these typologies of space I thought of another dimension of design, perhaps the missing link of how I think of design, and maybe what the old dance exercises in school were trying to get out that I missed then - that design sets the stage and the performace is as important as the stage. But also that the stage influences the performance. A feedback loop.