Souffrance: a Study of Pina Bausch and the Tanztheater Wuppertal 1970s-1980s

• Main Authors: Yao-Jang Yang, 楊曜彰
• Other Authors: Yu-Pin Lin
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/5mmdkw

碩士 === 國立臺北藝術大學 === 戲劇學系碩士班 === 100 === Pina Bausch (1940-2009) and the dancers of the Tanztheater Wuppertal had performed the “symptomatic body” by means of their practices and reflections on the movement quality, structure and creative process. Bausch intertwined the tradition of Weimar modern dance and the avant-garde impulse in the European contemporary art 1960s, problematizing the the post-war dance culture, which had been influenced by opernballett and the modern dance / ballet form the U.S.A. Furthermore, they located the formal “symptomatic body” in experienced and/or historical social conditions by means of “Questioning-respnding” process and the theatrical form; thus, they expressed their concerns for the social history experienced by the “body” in the 20th century Germany and the conditions of the oppressed individual body. This study aims at the “body history” written by the experiments of Bausch and Tanztheater Wuppertal in 1970s-1980s. To establish my framework of analysis, I shall review Lacan’s discourse of the “subject structure.” In order to analyze the tension between the dancing body and the cultural-social system, I should have a detailed review on Lacan’s idea about souffrance. Secondly, I should construct a narrative of the history of the German modern dance – especially focused on the dance cultures in the post-war West Germany. In the main body of the study, I shall narrate the experimental traces of Bausch and Tanztheater Wuppertal in 1970s-1980s; eventually taking Café Müller and Nelken as examples, I shall give a detailed analysis of the dance texts, observing the souffrance embodied by Bausch’s subtle reflections on the dancing body and the space: the introspection on the subject’s pursuit for desire and on the body’s memory of being oppressed, and the dancing body’s resistance against temporal-spatial principles. In souffrance, desire, power and longing for liberation collide with each other, denying the body history written by the cultural-social system.