The messiah is coming...
...and her name is Pina Bausch.
I am going to see the work of my favorite favorite artist this Friday, a German dance-theater choreographer named Pina Bausch. This makes me so happy. One of her pieces typically comes to BAM every two years, and believe you me, it is cause for celebration.
Who would have guessed that a half-Asian Jew from Baltimore would find salvation in a little old German lady? Apparently, my directing professor at NYU, a brilliant man named Jim Peck, did.
Picture it: New York City, 1997. A wide-eyed 17-year-old arrives in the city and, thanks to a forward-thinking theatre training program, starts to soak up the creme de la creme of the downtown avant garde. The first performance he sees (wait, no--the second; the first was, appropriately, the NYSF production of On The Town) is Karen Finley, artfully spreading her buttocks on a milking stool at P.S. 122. His semester is filled with Robert Wilson and Ivo van Hove, and his eyes are opened to the joys of the non-literal.
One day in class, his directing teacher, the aforementioned Jim Peck, mentions in passing a piece that's playing at BAM, a dance-theater work by the choreographer Pina Bausch. He says it's bound to be pretty swell, so Adam and his industrious friend Lauren Frey decide to go check it out.
Lauren lived on the same floor as Adam in an NYU dorm down in Soho. Lauren was a worldy, saxophone-playing transfer student from Connecticut. (Lauren's a voiceover artist now, and sings in an indie rock band, which is pretty cool.)
Anyway, Lauren and Adam hopped on the F train into Brooklyn to see Pina Bausch. Little did they know that the F train was the wrong train, and they were halfway to Coney Island before they jumped to a Manhattan-bound line and made their way to BAM. Just in the nick of time, they arrived, and they bought student rush tickets ($7.50!) and got two seats dead center in the front row of the mezzanine.
For the next three-and-a-half hours, Der Fensterputzer unfolded, and changed both of their lives forever. It's one of those performances that is seared into Adam's memory, that he knew, from the moment he left the theater, that he'd had some sort of seminal, world-view shifting experience. (The only other one which comes close would be a year later: Ricky Ian Gordon and Tina Landau's musical Dream True at the Vineyard Theatre.)
And so, every two years, Pina Bausch brings a new, mind-blowing, life-affirming piece to BAM. And Adam, like it's the high holy days, is there, with a grin on his face and God -- or at least something close -- in his heart.
I am going to see the work of my favorite favorite artist this Friday, a German dance-theater choreographer named Pina Bausch. This makes me so happy. One of her pieces typically comes to BAM every two years, and believe you me, it is cause for celebration.
Who would have guessed that a half-Asian Jew from Baltimore would find salvation in a little old German lady? Apparently, my directing professor at NYU, a brilliant man named Jim Peck, did.
Picture it: New York City, 1997. A wide-eyed 17-year-old arrives in the city and, thanks to a forward-thinking theatre training program, starts to soak up the creme de la creme of the downtown avant garde. The first performance he sees (wait, no--the second; the first was, appropriately, the NYSF production of On The Town) is Karen Finley, artfully spreading her buttocks on a milking stool at P.S. 122. His semester is filled with Robert Wilson and Ivo van Hove, and his eyes are opened to the joys of the non-literal.
One day in class, his directing teacher, the aforementioned Jim Peck, mentions in passing a piece that's playing at BAM, a dance-theater work by the choreographer Pina Bausch. He says it's bound to be pretty swell, so Adam and his industrious friend Lauren Frey decide to go check it out.
Lauren lived on the same floor as Adam in an NYU dorm down in Soho. Lauren was a worldy, saxophone-playing transfer student from Connecticut. (Lauren's a voiceover artist now, and sings in an indie rock band, which is pretty cool.)
Anyway, Lauren and Adam hopped on the F train into Brooklyn to see Pina Bausch. Little did they know that the F train was the wrong train, and they were halfway to Coney Island before they jumped to a Manhattan-bound line and made their way to BAM. Just in the nick of time, they arrived, and they bought student rush tickets ($7.50!) and got two seats dead center in the front row of the mezzanine.
For the next three-and-a-half hours, Der Fensterputzer unfolded, and changed both of their lives forever. It's one of those performances that is seared into Adam's memory, that he knew, from the moment he left the theater, that he'd had some sort of seminal, world-view shifting experience. (The only other one which comes close would be a year later: Ricky Ian Gordon and Tina Landau's musical Dream True at the Vineyard Theatre.)
And so, every two years, Pina Bausch brings a new, mind-blowing, life-affirming piece to BAM. And Adam, like it's the high holy days, is there, with a grin on his face and God -- or at least something close -- in his heart.
posted by Adam at 11:14 AM
1 Comments:
My buttocks are artfully spread in anticipation. No milking stool.
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