It's Not How People Move Poem by gershon hepner

It’s not how people move,
said Pina Bausch, it's rather what
can move them which can prove
both what they are and what they're not.

Pina Bausch, the German choreographer who combined potent drama and dreamlike movement to create a powerful form of dance theater that influenced generations of dancemakers, died on Tuesday in Wuppertal, Germany. She was 68. Daniel J. Wakin, in his obituary in the NYT published on July 1,2009, writes:
Mr. Melillo described Ms. Bausch as having created a new dance form — tanztheater — by transforming a pure formal dance background through “her own passions and technique and discipline.” “The whole scale of Pina Bausch’s tanztheater no one had ever seen before, ” he added. Ms. Bausch established a method of creating dances that was widely copied. She would begin rehearsals by asking specific questions of the dancers: about memories, about their daily lives. She would ask them to act out the recollections, and create minidramas from their responses. The dance would grow out of that work, as well as a sense of place derived from foreign residencies. “I don’t know where the beginning or the end is, ” she said in an interview with The New York Times last year. “You have to digest. I don’t know what will come out.” The ideas and feelings were often harsh, like frustration and alienation, cruelty and pain, but the works were frequently suffused with humor. Ms. Bausch was quoted as saying she was “not interested in how people move but in what moves them.”


7/1/09