A Flowering Collaboration

Designer Peter Pabst can’t remember where he got the crazy idea to blanket the stage for Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal production “Nelken” (Carnations), in an extravagant bed of 10,000 flowers.

“I can never remember where the ideas came from,” says the 56-year-old German designer in a telephone interview from his house in northern Italy. “This is one of the most illegal questions,” he adds with a laugh, his English flavored with a German accent. He does remember talking to Bausch about fields of remembered flowers--Pabst reminiscing about tulip fields he saw in Holland; Bausch about blossoms on South American travels.

But pink carnations? “I don’t know,” he says with a smile audible in his voice, lighting up a cigarette. “Do I have to know?”

Another thing he does remember: waking up in a sweat at 5 a.m., once they’d decided it would be carnations, some 14 days before the premiere, and wondering how he was going to pull it off.

“I woke up and I thought, ‘Who the hell is doing this kind of stuff?’ and I [thought] of very busy Asian fingers,” he says. He found an artificial flower-maker in Bangkok who was able to manufacture the flowers for the right price and deliver them by the deadline.

Pabst’s dramatic pink-flowered stage will be on view starting tonight at UCLA, in the West Coast premiere of “Nelken,” a work that, according to one London critic, “helped to change the language of theater and dance.” It’s emblematic of the striking visual style that marks all of Bausch’s work--artificial carnations for “Nelken” (1982); a forest of giant redwoods in “Nur Du” (Only You); a giant crumbling wall in “Palermo, Palermo.”

But Pabst says that some 20 years of dreaming up sets for the celebrated choreographer have done nothing to illuminate the mysterious process of how the ideas are born. The Berlin-bred designer met Bausch in the late ‘70s, when he was working with influential German theater director Peter Zadek. But the relationship didn’t turn professional until a few years later. The result was “1980,” which featured a real onstage lawn. Since then, Pabst and Bausch have combined forces on 10 more works.

Each time, says Pabst, they are racing against an impossible deadline, working through Bausch’s famously collaborative creative process.

“It’s always very difficult,” admits Pabst, who also works in theater, opera and film. “If you work in theater you have a play at least, so you have got a written structure you can talk about. If you work in opera, you’ve got the score and this musical notation is very exact. When Pina starts rehearsal, it literally starts from the point zero. There isn’t an idea, there isn’t a theme, there isn’t a title, there’s nothing. So that automatically means there’s nothing to make a design for--which needs a lot of patience and good nerves. And much attention.”

The mystery continues for a period of two or three months, in which Bausch poses questions to her dancers and takes notes on their movement “answers.” Pabst says that he tries to spend as much time as possible observing the rehearsals to see “what kind of things they are going to do, how the dancers’ fantasies develop, hoping that [I] might have an idea of where it might be going.”

He is careful to point out that his designs are deeply linked to specific elements of choreography.

“I’m convinced that there is no point in designing a set to try to tell a story. Or to transport an idea,” he says. “I don’t think about sets in that way. This is up to dancers, to actors, to Pina. The piece of art is [the] performance. So I [design] only in connection to things that happen.”

After Bausch observes, collects and sifts bits of movement, says Pabst, discussions begin. “From a certain point on we start to try to talk to each other about what it can be. She would tell me something that goes through her mind, I would tell her. We look at books, photos. This is not very concrete.”

But he has learned to trust the process.

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It was in his work with Zadek that he first learned to push his creative limits. “When we started [a] production, we would lock ourselves into his apartment or mine for about five or six days, and nobody would be allowed to call and we would discuss endlessly and look at thousands of books. When we came out, one thing was clear: that we would never do it like we have discussed. Then we started rehearsal periods like an adventurous journey, with all the fantasies of the actors included. So I learned very much about not knowing what will be at the end.”

Pabst says that he relies on Bausch’s “good taste.” “She feels immediately if something is only decorative,” he says. “If ideas are weak, she would smell it.” Working with Bausch , he says, has allowed him to “dare to think of more unusual solutions. This opens up the mind.”

These unusual solutions often take great logistical efforts to succeed. He engineered a second floor for the stage in “Nelken,” in which the flowers are “planted” in holes, a process that takes several hours initially and then requires maintenance after each performance.

“It’s a very beautiful image,” he says. “On the other hand it’s very complicated for the dancers to deal with. In the beginning they are trying to walk very carefully, but then at some point they’re going to dance. So the field of flowers which is in a state of innocent and immaculate beauty will then be destroyed.”

He says that as his designs evolve the dancers have to be extremely flexible, often having to adjust weeks of rehearsal on one surface to another on a whim.

“They have all my admiration,” he says, “because it is so difficult. The dancers have rehearsed on a dance carpet for 2 1/2 months and I come a few weeks before the premiere--or sometimes two days before--and throw 10 tons of salt on the stage and they have to move around in there. Usually every normal person would say, ‘You are kind of crazy, thank you very much, go home.’ And they don’t.”

He admits that it’s trying even for him.

“Sometimes it’s so difficult that I really am desperate and I think, ‘This time it’s not going to work out, I’m finished,’ ” he says, without a trace of exasperation in his voice. “So why get always again into this kind of disaster? I think the answer is that it’s really a big privilege for a designer to do things [that] need a kind of collaboration between director and designer, which is rather rare.

“When you try to find an artistic solution for something, you’re in an extremely vulnerable state. And this combined with [a deadline] is something very difficult. And this does not change by experience, it does not change with success or whatever. It does not change.”

* “Nelken,” Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal, UCLA, Royce Hall, today, 8 p.m., Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m., Sunday, 4 p.m. $16-$60. (310) 825-2101.