Bausch sidesteps talk of intention

Now 66, German choreographer Pina Bausch has become the living symbol of a whole era of intuitive, nonlinear, multidisciplinary modernism that’s called Tanztheater (dance-theater) or Neo-Expressionism simply because nobody’s been able to define it more precisely.

She’s made a dance mecca of Wuppertal, an industrial town in the Ruhr Valley where her company has flourished since the early ‘70s; been a star attraction at cultural events worldwide (including our own Olympic Arts Festival in 1984); and influenced a constellation of major artists in theater and dance -- not to mention the leading characters in Pedro Almodovar’s Oscar-winning 2002 film, “Talk to Her.”

Initially she was known for having her company dance on dirt, on leaves, in ankle-deep water; for putting the dancers in direct contact with the audience, sometimes by moving through the auditorium, sometimes through confrontational speeches; and for juxtaposing high and low -- deeply emotional sequences versus broad comedy.

Dance-driven passages have always been in her work, but they’re usually subordinate. As she says, “We’re there to speak about life and something we feel together that has nothing to do with words -- something that is its own language -- and not just to do wonderful steps.”

Bausch won’t be in UCLA’s Royce Hall when her 17-member company presents the North American premiere of her evening-length “Ten Chi” from Thursday through Sunday. (“Next time,” she says.) The performances will mark the company’s first visit here in eight years and feature a typically phantasmagoric set by Peter Pabst, with the whale that floated into “Nur Du” (Only You) at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion 11 years ago now half-buried in the stage floor. But in a recent phone conversation from her home in Wuppertal, she proved as hard to pin down or label as her works have been: an artist who insists on the aesthetics of indeterminacy if she insists on anything.

Here’s a simple example. “Ten Chi” belongs to a series of plotless, often dreamlike Bausch impressions of various locales -- Hong Kong; Lisbon; Istanbul, Turkey; Palermo, Italy; and Los Angeles. Its focus is Japan, and a reviewer from that nation described one of its production effects in the following words:

“Toward the end of the first act, white confetti resembling snow begins falling on the stage and continues through the intermission to the end of the second act, giving the show a sense of the fantastic.”

Bausch, however, declined to confirm that interpretation. “Some people say it’s snow,” she said with a soft laugh. “But some think it’s maybe cherry blossoms or the ash from the holy mountain. It depends on your imagination.”

And your imagination is what she wants to stimulate. Where some choreographers provide doctrinaire program notes, pre-performance lectures and post-performance debriefings to make sure everyone grasps their exact intentions, Bausch is reluctant to talk about “Ten Chi.”

“I don’t want to push anybody,” she explained. “I don’t want to say something about this work because I don’t want people to look at it and think they have to see it the way I said. For me, it is very important that people in the audience trust their feelings and let happen what can happen to them.”

The creation of her pieces, she said, is “complicated” (one of her favorite words), but it begins with her asking her dancers a series of questions. Those might be about some of her familiar themes or preoccupations: tenderness and its opposite or what people do when they don’t feel loved or want to be loved.

“Everybody in the company is responding to these questions,” she said. “They can do something in movement, something they think of out of reality, some fantasy. Or if they don’t want to, they don’t have to do these questions -- it’s completely free.

“This way, we collect material for the new work. That doesn’t mean we use all of it, but maybe little things that we find and try will arrive in this piece. Or perhaps they cannot be used right away but have an influence on us and come out somewhere in another piece. They belong to us.”

The travel-related pieces also involve visits to the host locales, intensive work sessions there and distillations of feelings about living there that the company explores back in Wuppertal.

“It always has to do with people too,” she added. “You cannot take that away. It has to do with who you’re there with and how you got there.” She remembers working in Los Angeles on “Nur Du” in 1996 as “a wonderful experience” and finds travel one of the joys of her creative life.

That life began with training by Germany’s great prewar choreographer, Kurt Jooss (“The Green Table”), followed by studies at New York’s Juilliard School with a pantheon of modern dance and ballet luminaries. One was Antony Tudor, the British expatriate credited with inventing psychological ballet in such works as “Pillar of Fire.”

“I loved him,” Bausch recalled. “He was very close to me the way Jooss was. What a personality! What a devil and an angel! He was loved by everybody, a great, great man.”

She performed briefly in New York dance companies but returned to Germany, and Jooss, to integrate and develop all she had learned about choreography. She created her first piece in 1968 and a year later became head of a state-supported arts institution.

She likes Wuppertal: “Not a big town, but it’s a good area because many cities are nearby -- 20 minutes, half an hour away. And it’s a good working town, not like some cities where you get so high on everything you can see that you don’t know anymore how you can work. Here it’s more calm, and you have time and space to work.”

But because that work draws on her deepest resources as a woman and an artist, she said “it’s not fun to do a new piece. It’s frightening, even. Of course, I’m happy when I think I have found something very special, some little jewel. But even when it’s finished, I’m very nervous to show it because I always feel like it is so little what I have done.

“I know so much more than I can show in one piece,” she said. “And with so much left behind, I always have a strong wish almost to do it again -- to start over and find the form for it that I couldn’t do before, a completely different way of showing the same thing.”

lewis.segal@latimes.com

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Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal

Where: Royce Hall, UCLA, Westwood

When: 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday

Price: $38 to $76

Contact: (310) 825-2101 or www.uclalive.org