The West Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) has announced an impressive curtain closer for its final dance season for 2022.
Icon: An Extraordinary Event pays homage to world-renowned German choreographer, Pina Bausch. It marks the first time that Bausch’s Tannhäuser Bacchanal will be performed outside of Germany as well as the first time that a Pina Bausch work will be performed in Perth.
Bausch, who passed away in 2009, was a ground-breaking dancer and choreographer who pioneered neo-expressionist dance.
“She was an extraordinary artist,” says WAAPA Course Coordinator for Dance, Susan Peacock.
“Initially as a dancer she performed in her own works and now she’s credited for being one of the people that shifted or started that whole movement of what we now know as Dance Theatre.
“The work that we’re performing is a very early work of hers. It’s a modern dance piece, it’s like watching history live. It’s fascinating to watch in that it combines movement with dance form and structure with texts. So the dancers also speak, and the work can be more image-based, as well as choreographic. It’s a blending of those two forms.”
Bausch herself was fascinated by the psychology of dance. ‘I am not interested in how people move, but in what moves them’, she once famously noted. In creating new works she would give dancers freedom to go deep within themselves and re-emerge from their own lived experiences.
“That’s the theatre part that comes out in the work,” Peacock notes. “She was creating material from the dancers’ personal responses to a question she might have asked.”
Marigia Maggipinto and Ophelia Young – two stagers of the Pina Bausch Foundation and both former dancers in Tanztheater Wuppertal – have flown to Perth to share their expert knowledge of Bausch’s choreography with the dance students and LINK, WAAPA’s graduate dance company. Some 23 dancers will appear onstage.
“It’s very important that the style is precise and authentic as much as much as one can teach that to someone else,” Peacock says. “It’s really important that the style is honoured
“The students do realise how lucky they are when they’re in the room working with the artists. And they can feel their excitement and that’s kind of really nice to see as well.”
The other two dance works featured on the Icon program – produced with the support of the Minderoo Foundation – are remounts of works by acclaimed Australian choreographers Meryl Tankard and Michael Whaites, who is Artistic Director of LINK Dance Company, both of whom were former dancers in the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch.
Tankard’s work Chants de Mariage, is remounted with assistance from award-winning WA choreographer Paige Gordon. Whaites’ Things That Remain, is “a gentle piece devised around nostalgia and remembrance,” created shortly after Bausch’s passing.
While Tannhäuser Bacchanal, Chants de Mariage and Things That Remain are works of and unto themselves, Icon will offer an overall reflection upon Bausch’s work and her ongoing influence.
“It offers a range of things and all the works are really different,” Peacock says, “but I think you’ll be able to see something flowing through from work-to-work that connects them. Even though the artists are very much individuals, and their work is their own work, there is something of a shared history.”
ICON: AN EXTRAORDINARY EVENT
Friday, November 11th-Thursday, November 17th (7:30pm)
Saturday, November 12th (2pm)
Geoff Gibbs Theatre, 2 Bradford Street, Mount Lawley, WA
Tickets $35 Full / $30 Concession / $28 Friends
Choreography by: Pina Bausch, Meryl Tankard with Paige Gordon, and Michael Whaites
Performed by: 2nd and 3rd Year Dance students with LINK Dance Company
BOOK NOW: Tel: (08) 6304 6895 or online at: waapa.ecu.edu.au