Dance doc walks the walk

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SUPPLIED PHOT0 Documentary describes choreographer Pina Bausch�s life and work through dance movement.

FOR a nominee in this year's best documentary category of the Academy Awards, the film Pina has a very un-documentary-like notion of information.

Almost every moment onscreen is staged, and elaborately so. The nominal subject of the film is choreographer Pina Bausch, but one doesn't emerge from this screening knowing many salient details of her life. (Was she married? Was she a mother? Yes and yes. But you wouldn't know it from this film.)

The veterans of her celebrated dance troupe Tanztheater Wuppertal only offer sketchy remembrances of the unusually collaborative way in which she worked, leaving us to intuit who she was. Director Wim Wenders doesn't even shoot his subjects speaking. Their words are heard over their silent faces.

No one could ever accuse Wenders of making a "talking heads" documentary. But that antithetical approach is the point of this loving tribute to Bausch, who died in 2009 at the age of 68.

This doc doesn't talk the talk. It literally walks the walk.

Wenders assumes the best tribute he could pay to Pina is through lovingly realized stagings of her choreography in an assortment of remarkable settings, including among cityscapes in Wuppertal, Germany, a massive open-pit mine, and even in public transit vehicles. For added dynamism, he shot these sequences in 3-D, an unconventional but sublimely smart choice. If 3-D is about fooling the eye into believing you're witnessing people moving through three-dimensional space, what better application of the medium than choreographed dance scenes?

Wenders restages a few of the pieces that put Bausch on the map of contemporary dancing, her staging of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring on a floor covered with dirt and her celebrated Café Müller, in which the dancers violently interact with a stage cluttered with tables and chairs. Kontakthof is kind of a gymnasium dance in which the young dancers transform into old dancers in the blink of an eye. Young dancers play in water and on a huge rock in Vollmond.

The film begins and ends with a lovely promenade in which dancers old and young interpret the four seasons with their upper bodies. Seen off and on through the film, it weaves a droll Fellini-esque thread through the tapestry of the film.

Artistically, it is fine. But some dissatisfaction remains. While one may respect Wenders' insistence that the best way to know Bausch was through her work, it's a one-way street.

When you consider the dramatic, joyous, distressing interactions between men and women in many of the dance pieces, one comes away from Pina thirsty for the details of the turbulent life that informed this provocative work.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Other Voices

Selected excerpts from reviews of Pina.

What might seem like a convenient bid for publicity -- the first 3-D art-house film! -- turns out to be the only logical way to showcase the action.

-- Stephanie Merry, Washington Post

Even for someone who would rather count sheep than attend a ballet, these scenes are nothing short of astonishing, beautifully presenting dance's ability to depict words.

-- Matt Pais, RedEye

I watched the film in a sort of reverie.

-- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times

So this is what 3-D is capable of when used for art rather than the commerce of hiking ticket prices and repurposing cartoons!

-- Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

A tribute to Pina Bausch, one of modern dance's most groundbreaking choreographers, lets the artist's work speak for itself via big, juicy slabs of performance.

-- Leslie Felperin, Variety

It should appeal to dance mavens, and to folks who have no idea what a pas de deux is.

-- V.A. Musetto, New York Post

The question is, What do you get from Pina that you could not get from watching the Tanztheater live? Answer: More than you could possibly believe.

-- Anthony Lane, New Yorker

By virtue of its subject alone, enthusiasts of modern dance will devour Pina. If it was in a bottle, they'd drink every drop; if it was in a squeeze-tube, they would rub it on their skin.

-- Jaime Christley, Slant magazine

Combines a haunting elegy for the avant-garde choreographer Pina Bausch with a wondrously surreal evocation of her work.

-- Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal

-- Compiled by Shane Minkin

Movie Review

Pina

Directed by Wim Wenders

Grant Park

G

103 minutes

3 1/2 stars out of five

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 10, 2012 D7