Pina Bausch's Dance Theater - Critical Dance Studies

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rel: Mummification on the Dance Floor

Why I’m reading

I’ve watched one segment of Pina’s dance many times. Studying dance is technically unlike things I’ve done before, but shares elements. A lot of physical activities I’ve done in the past (like skateboarding), I prefer to view them in the style of dance.

The work of a dancer, is very different than the work that I do. This difference interests me.

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch

Practices:

presented things unlike anything anybody had ever seen before: dancers coughing as they danced; dancing in flip­flops, rubber boots and high heels, with fins on their feet and branches on their heads; jumping, writhing and running through water and soil, over carna­tions and stones; speaking, shrieking, giggling, yawning, sleeping and smoking cigarettes; hitting, flirting with and screaming at each other; frying eggs on an electric iron, making sandwiches for the audience, offering them tea and showing them family photos; wrapping themselves in rugs, lolling around on pillows, jumping into mountains of flowers and climbing up walls.

Aesthetic Revolt

For their art was an aesthetic revolt, fundamentally rattling the paradigms of both theater and dance: there was no narrative dramaturgy, there were no storylines, no scenes, no conventional choreographic rules or work processes, no orthodox dance techniques, no leotards, no classical scenery, no librettos, no preselected or illustrative music.

Over the course of her more than 35­year long career, Pina Bausch went on to develop 44 choreographies with the Tanztheater Wuppertal.

Anthropologist

As an anthropologist of dance, she was a trans­lator. She motivated her dancers to discover gestures, bodily prac­tices and everyday rhythms in different cultures, to find and artisti­cally transform the claviature (latin, clavis = “key”) of the human in everyday life. In her pieces, she took this material and set both the similarities and cultural differences fundamental to it in relation to each other. The success of her cultural ­anthropological research was also due to the way in which she deliberately selected the members of her company. Coming from up to 20 different nations, all of her dancers contributed different languages, degrees of experience and artistic habitus; they each dealt differently with what they experienced and discovered on their journeys due to their biographical backgrounds.

Pina died at the age of 68, in 2009. She was born in 1940.

The Praxeology of Translation

Translation here defined as a cultural practice in the same vein of translation studies, and postcolonial studies. The basic proposition is that acts of translation are fundamental to artistic work.

It demonstrates how process of translation characterize a dance production.

Her pieces followed a logic that was not that of consciousness, but rather of the body, “following the principles of analogy rather than the laws of causality.”

”dance as the cultural-critical antithesis to rationality and logic of consciousness.

Artistic Phases

67-73 - Democratic Awakening and Aesthetic Upheaval

I never actually wanted to work in a theater. I didn’t have the confidence to do it. I was very frightened. I loved working freely.

Her development took place in a climate of social, political, cultural and artistic awakening. She was a typical war baby, a generation born during the Nazi regime. They grew up during the war years, and as young adults rebelled against the older generation. They did not want to be hush, but directly confront what predicated the authoritarian structures.

they refused to accept authoritarian theater company struc­tures, strict hierarchies, undemocratic decision ­making structures, the extreme division of labor.

In her rather associative, satirical choreography, she made it unmistakably clear that the renunciation of traditional forms of dance for the stage was an irreversible process and began to fun­ damentally call concert dance into question as a theatrical event. In this piece, a woman in a shirt lies motionless on a hospital bed. All of the company members get into bed with her, playing macabre games with her lifeless body. They roll it over the stage and hoist it up on a pulley, letting it dangle from the ceiling.

73-79 Development of a New Concept for Choreography and Stage

Wuppertal was one of the centers of the Fluxus movement. Highlighting and dissecting the power structures of gender relations would become a central topic of her work.

Even before the rise of gender studies, which began dis­ cussing the body in the 1970s, these female artists demonstrated that gender was directly tied to, symbolized and represented by the body in which it materializes, and that it is the body that is charged with heteronormative phantasies and popular imagination

Pina does not consider herself to be a Feminist. “Feminism – perhaps because it has become such a fashionable word – always makes me retreat into my shell. Perhaps this is also because it so often means a strange separation that I dislike. It sometimes sounds like it’s about being against instead of with one another.”

“I never in­ tended to invent a particular style or a new form of theater. The form emerged entirely by itself: from the questions that I had.”

80-89 Internationalization and Stabilization of Aesthetic Language

Pina Bausch’s second artistic phase with the Tanztheater Wuppertal fell in the midst of this floating, dance­loving decade. It was a phase characterized by internationalization on the one hand and aesthetic differentiation on the other. The troupe expanded its international touring activities and created pieces that added new flavors to what had come before.

86-00 International Artistic Production and Rediscovery of Dance

Aside from artistically focusing on the interculturality of everyday gestures, attitudes and habits, as well as on the universa­lity of the emotions that guide them, this work phase was character­ized by a generational shift in the company.

“Dance, dance – otherwise we are lost,” is what a Roma girl once said to Pina Bausch, and this statement was to become the leitmotif of Wim Wender’s film pina.

01-09 The Love of Dance and Nature

Last piece by Pina Bausch is all about loving – and about its fragility, especially in the face of death.

Company

We play ourselves, we are the piece.

Tanztheater Wuppertal is composed of an equal number of men and women from different countries and various generations, it is a social and cultural model of reality.

As a child: Sometimes, she sat beneath the tables, kept quiet and listened. She observed and fantasized, took in smells, regarded chairs and table legs, trousers and high­heeled shoes. Herein lies one of the sources of her love for observing every­ 97 day life, which would later – magnified by aesthetic means as if under a microscope – characterize her choreographic work.

Rolf Borzik

Rolf Borzik was what some might call an artistic all­rounder and others would simply consider an explorative artist.

From Pina

“During that time I met Rolf Borzik. He painted, photographed, drew inces­santly, made sketches, was always inventing something – he was interested in all technical things He had so much knowledge and was persistently interested in things for which the form was decisive. At the same time, he had an infinite imagination, humor and a very precise sense of style, plus knowledge. But he didn’t know what to do with them, with all his abilities and talents. That’s how we met.”

Peter Pabst - Set Design

Set design for The Window Washer

Although he claims to understand nothing of dance, even after almost 30 years of work­ing with Pina Bausch, Peter Pabst built spaces that take bodies, movement and space into consideration together.

The sets have a function, they show familiar, everyday life while also alienating it.

Materials used

• grass for 1980 and Wisenland
• stones as walls for Palermo Palermo
• stone-like structures as cliffs
• soil
• sand
• salt and paper that looked like snow
• water
• trees
• plants
• flowers
• ashes and shrapnel

Animals also appear like deer, a walrus, a polar bear, and a whale fin.

Pina Bausch was hesitant and late to make decisions, even about the design of the stage – sometimes very late, no more than four to six weeks before the premiere.

Musical Collaborators

In Bluebeard, the use of the tape recorder and the technical possibilities that it provided, such as fast­forwarding and rewinding, and its mobility onstage, were part and parcel of the aesthetic concept

the music collages were not prerecorded. He controlled the tracks individually, sometimes keeping tabs of cues for up to 40 different pieces of music in a single performance. In every per­formance, the scenes and timing changed onstage, and Andreas Eisenschneider had to react in the moment. Pina Bausch’s collage­ like pieces did not allow for any relationship of dominance be­ tween music and dance: the music did not dominate the scenes or vice versa. It was a dialogue.

Her Dancers

Pina was very, very considerate. She made a lot of allowances for the personal affairs of individuals, in a way that didn’t usually exist in theater

Everything was tried out till it felt right.

Only a handful of dismissals existed in 35 years, but when someone did leave the company it was not uncommon for emotional ties to be completely severed.

210 dancers participated in the period of her work, with 30 dancers employed a year.

Love is colder than death:

Pina probably couldn’t accept that I was trying to find my own way without her. If you left her Tanztheater, you were dead to her. It was like withdrawing love from her. She couldn’t deal with it. She always wanted to be loved by everyone in her vicinity. To say it nicely: those who distanced themselves got to know a very cold and hostile side of the usually kind Pina

“somehow we were stuck again in this dead end… she quietly called us all together to share her despair… fighting back tears. Indeed, none of us could imagine how this hopelessly confusing collection of fragments, short scenes, images, movement ideas, dances that were only just coming together, a few group dances even, small gestures, unfinished improvised dialogues, texts, musical ideas… how all this might be organized into arcs of tension and form resembling a ‘piece’ that could be, no, would have to be performed in just a few short days…

Work Process

“Quite simply, because there were actors, dancers, a singer in this piece. I couldn’t turn up with a movement phrase; I had to start differently. So, I asked them questions that I had been asking myself. The questions are a way to very carefully approach a topic. It’s a very open working method, but also very precise. Because I always know exactly what I’m looking for, but I know it in my heart and not in my mind. That’s why you can never ask directly. That would be too crude, and the answers would be too banal. Instead, I have to leave what I’m looking for alone with the words, while nevertheless bringing it to light with a lot of patience.”

Words as movements

rel: Survey of Text Etymology, Connections to Fiber, Body Manicule, Body in Books and Analysis of Love

Pina Bausch also frequently asked ‘questions’ aimed at writing words with movements – a method that she used often, for example in the piece The Window Washer (premiere 1997) for the Chi­nese words fu (happiness), hé (harmony), ai (life)16 and mei (beauty).

rel:Vibe

the right and the left hand · earthy · elephant · hugging someone and staying hugged ·
thing that relates to food · unreal · dance as a weapon · expressing the word ‘yummy’ ·
living for · kita taka tare kita tom · continue change movement · hygiene on the street ·
to mountains rivers forests · like music · in awe of light bulbs · human · people in animal
legs the way down below · profound joy · injustice · tierra del fuego · vision of the future ·
palm trees · beauty · so sad and so lonely · a man a woman · flirt · high society · secret
experienced · about the beauty of nature · lovesickness · spreading optimism · potato ·
playing with fire · something like that · rebellious movement · some thing that you otherwise
dazzled · human and animal · shadows · kitsch · hot chocolate · enchanting · dreams are but
really want · teaching something essential · optimism · adjust · loving one body part in
love love · creating a paradise for yourself · great despair · at a small creek · gentle rain ·
drown · break the ice · something nice in relation to something natural · warmth in the
forever · you are a man · gliding · extremely elongated movement · something from your
and you · dealing with fear · something that moves you a lot · positive powerful energy ·
yellow · something about the color blue · fragility · old and new together · attempts at
of everything · your movements have to shout for joy · something fragile · extreme · being
sing the senses · disarming · something real · saving something · raising up to a movement ·
one to glide · working on happiness · the smallest · motherland · influenced movement · what
out · wanting to really feel a body part · opportunity to make something better · sliding
lonely · movement like swaying · bridges · safeguarding · western atmosphere · dammed to
· like fresh water · waking up before something · boat · gaining trust · ho harmony · pulling
caresses you · you are a woman · something with a face at the very top · a small world of
patented · in front and behind · movement head leads · making money · keeping up appearances
· ignoring something important · try to make the best out of it · all hope rests on you
sinking into a magic sleep · hospitality poor · learn to be together · stingy · sharp tongue ·
fantastic · a parody of something · being bowled over · something nice in the meadow
heavy lightly · macabre · a little bit crazy · absurd order · friend · judas · wanting to fall
down from an emergency · objects where they come from · something heartfelt · something
and other spots · pure · two cups of coffee · oh how funny it was · describing joy · it’s all
proper behavior · two cultures · hitting for fun · new beginning · horizontal vertical · direct
necessity · showing no fear · turning someone on · cheering someone up · demon · rich poor
loving details · kinds of fish · being bowled over · making something trivial important · in
peace · finding a solution · letting in a breath of fresh air · nice mixture · big sigh · coffee
sending wishes · sleeping with something · all in · bird ostrich · black and red · showing no
squeezing lemons before sunrise · spoiling for a fight · quick mermaid · auctioning · club ·
an act · correcting · folk dance · welcome · covering the face · face in the dirt · two wrist-
body culture · starting something not doing it · appearances are deceptive · with two
bravo · jumping down from something small · letters · careful · where the wings grow ·
· a problem · with stone house broken · determined by the weather · a sheet of white paper
male profession · getting your hopes up · kitsch and reality · protective
king from afar · poisonous · big-breasted · ritualizing something about love
well-dressed opposite prop · the last ray of sunshine · giant balancé ·
lors and sad · venerating gods examples · melody trance · something small from a dream ·
retreat · flying · playing ball with hands and feet · mermaid · combing your hair and putting
arm that never ends · doing something with a lifeless body · saying very nice things answering some thing strange for your well-being · tears · inspired by swaying plants in the river · for isabelle · some-
profound joy · in the morning at the river · not letting anyone stop you · the gods’ delight · something worth
something that makes every one the same · nights at las ramblas · wanting to always stay young · what happens
masks · supple like big cats · like crying · sensually erotic · feelings of guilt · holding a pose on top searching for
beauti ful pain · a color · movement with large steps · dreams nowadays · a beautiful smile · tick stop · kolkata ·
pleasure · giving power · small but nice with head and hands · doing something unexpected with a partner · in-
feverishly awaiting something · is not true but true · wisdom · full moon · ganges · everyday life · fragile ·
wouldn’t dare · desperation · moonlit night · bodies that complete each other · modernizing something ·
shadows · the world · risky · wonder as topic · something about the moon · large movement in space · what you
particular · plucking up courage · chennai · brilliant · realism simultaneously figment of imagination · love
joy · storm · yin · boundary · kim chi · bear · yang · we are scared for you · like someone who does not want to
heart · bunraku · absurdities · precisely practical · cheating how to organize it · a small world of your own ·
dreams · gliding in pairs · something concerning mountains · persevering · hibiscus · optimistic · grandmother
enduring education with a smile · healthy · once i cried · risk · what should i do · longing in pairs · friendship
flirting · arm · inventing something for sos · everything has to go quickly · making something wonderful out
able to endure a lot · californian longing · being very well organized · very practical · joie de vivre · addres-
second class · swapping · well maintained · will to live · corruption · worry about the future · helping some-
you are worried about · everyday work · making something possible · you have to be brave · feeling locked-
movement · it was meant with the best intentions · sign of life · catching · so beautifully and so desperately
beautiful solitude · elbow phrase · super critical · feat of joy · ideally being at home everywhere · saving face
your own leg · fear of not being beautiful · making yourself comfortable · being happy to be alive · the wind
your own · absurd and very slow waltz · movements that traverse the space · the wind caresses you · not yet
· having trust · bluffing · bogeymen · something cozy · humiliating · betraying defense mechanisms six times
· gestures in the house · a movement that you would like to do for an hour · first class · dispelling fear ·
do it yourself sitting · hopping lift · loving details · i am a nothing · exposing someone · at the water · feeling
· stalling someone · about the stage · foreign · lucky charm · movement sun shining on it · taking something
in love · feeling somebody’s pulse · not loving each other six times · oh love · surprisingly practical · calming
meticulous · closing a movement · oversized movement · only feeling desire · alone with yourself · the nose
rubbish · distracting · funeral march · protecting someone · being able to forgive · into the heart · all there ·
· is a bad spaniard a better brother than a good chinese person · a breath · olives · knee · extreme out of
together · all or nothing · fear of missing out · something very sensual · strange lovemaking · sorrows gone ·
shrubbery · enjoying doing something unobserved · suddenly hiding something on your body · bridging · playing
house · sticky kiss · cream · distracting · what you only do alone · partner dance hands in unusual places ·
fear · strange healing · giving yourself up · imaginary society · hot dusty · fear exhausts me · better living ·
outside at night tired · tulle dress · squirrel · teaching something · agreeing on a price · flying · putting on
watches · celebrating bodies · the heart is heavy · king kong is a human · signs of friendship · signs of hope ·
fingers · venerating nature · rain · praying with the cows · beauty from a foreign country · feeling beautiful ·
geisha game · loving living beings · angel · on top of something · kiss not on the body · something with the devil
· showing that you are injured · on the carpet · flying carpet · train station · male profession · shocking · fe-
measure · destroying yourself with something · something by craftsmen · double-crossing someone · lovema-
· sign health · unbelievably great message · allowing something positive to grow · enjoying working hard ·
revelation · jump without jumping · celebration of nature · unexpected small impudence · with headscarf · co-
defending something about dance · a kiss · a form of gratitude · with your breath · you and the elements · kiss
on makeup in a row · cats · we were lucky it could have been worse · like something strange in a dream · an
seriously · befriending an animal · not allowing something to penetrate you · someone who rebuffed you ·

Dancers who only understood a little German had to ask someone to translate for them what exactly was being asked. No matter what they understood, they searched for answers using their bodies, their voices, through movement, alone or with others, with the help of materials, costumes and props lying around…

For every ‘answer’ from each dancer, she used a new piece of paper. Every dancer had their own compartment in a folder, into which the notes disappeared. Assuming that she asked approx. 100 questions per piece and that she worked with around 20 dancers for one piece alone, she probably received around 2,000 answers during the devel­opment of a new production.

Only You Questions

First Rehearsal

precautionary measure · no respect · a form of dependency · head cuddles ·
survival artist · distrust · bouncing back · provisional · provoking · defending
· bluffing · something comfortable · attempt reconciliation · but not
complaining · conservative · positive · asser ting the right to · tempting ·
brave · starting from scratch · disarming · addressing the senses · wanting
to make one’s fortune · desperately wanting to be good · being inventive ·
protective measures · six times in need · signals · with respect · six times
punishment

Second Rehearsal

gestures in the house · something small very important · finding a reason
for something unnecessary · suppressing · angel · Buffalo · six little explosions
on the body · in front – behind · not yet patented · something with censor-
ship · something that you’ve dreamed · Try to make the best out of it · a
movement that you’d like to do for an hour · a movement with breath ·
afraid of not being beautiful enough · revealing something beautiful · some-
thing with the elbow · so beauti ful and so desperately lonely · feeling locked
out · pleasant · being able to endure a lot · making something possible ·
pause in space · something that you’re very good at · very practical · in
order to be loved · super kitsch · constructing a bogeyman · you have to be
brave 33 · paul apodaca · it was well meant · Working hard · something real ·
movement with a stiff neck · six moments of pleasure · waking up from
something · dammed to beautiful loneliness · sliding movement · movement
head leads · something small that you’re worried about · joie de vivre ·
symbol of happiness

Third Rehearsal

little feat of joy · without prejudice · head massage · working motion ·
being able to endure a lot · movement pulling in pairs · like fresh water ·
movement swaying · really wanting to feel a body part · catching · uncanny
movement · lifting toward a movement · well-organized · ideally being at
home everywhere · Western · punishing yourself · reality and illusion ·
first class/second class · Two jobs at the same time · californian longing ·
writing Angel in movement · writing Pretty in movement · writing moon in
movement · porch swing · tableaux · trophies · peace pipe · circles/cycle

Are the ‘questions’ still recognizable in the pieces?

Sándor Kányádi’s Exchange of Words Poem (translated)

I carried you on my back
when you had no feet
and ungrateful as you are
you let yourself grow wings
you carried me on your back
when I had no feet
so as not to have to thank you forever
I let myself grow wings.

It’s impossible to conclusively connect scenes to questions.

“People say it’s all so easy, that we should simply perform for the audience. But that’s precisely the difficulty: for which audience? The audience is so very diverse. Everyone sees differently, every­ one has different thoughts. So, who are we performing for?”

Although the sum of all of the ‘ques­tions’ asked for an individual piece provides us with some indication of the mood and color of the piece, the multiple steps of translating from ‘question’ to ‘answer’ and then into a scene are so productive precisely because the aesthetic quest is so ambiguous. The identical translation of language into movement or into a scene fails – or rather: is doomed to fail – and the aesthetic productivity of the process emerges out of this very failure.

Artistic Practices of un(certainty)

Dance can be understood as phenomenon of uncertainty. Thus dance studies have developed three main positions.

1. dance is ephemeral, something that evades language, writing and in this sense, every form of rationalization and categorization as well. It is the last form of magic in a disenchanted world.
2. dance is that which undermines the order of choreography, as productive resistance against choreography as prescription, “as law.”
3. dance is a special experience of movement, which, unlike sport, is not movement as purpose, but as “pure mediality.”

rel: Erotetics

For Pina Bausch, asking the same ‘question’ again and again was not an act of repetition, but rather constituted a shift, a trans­lation into another context, because the ‘question’ and the dancer’s perceptions of it were constantly changing, prompting them to ‘answer’ differently each time. Some dancers made reference to their earlier ‘answers’; some showed something completely different. All this was unsettling and sometimes unnerving as well – as some dancers re­ called in their interviews with me – but it also led to creativity: what can I show and what do I want to show? This ‘question’ again? What can I develop in response to it today? The others always think of something new – why can’t I?

The dance isn’t capturable, and video is misleading and problematic in passing on material

Video as a medium for passing on material also harbors a fundamental translation problem: the piece is recorded from the audience perspective, which is a perspective with which most dan cers are not familiar because they have always danced in the piece and, if they have seen the piece at all, have only occasionally watched from the wings. In addition, a video recorded from the perspective of the audience has to be inversely retranslated into its mirror image by the dancers in the studio. After all, video is a two­dimensional medium attempting to depict a three­dimensional performance that is a theatrical and spatial art form on the one hand and a choreography on the other, i.e., an art form of movement in time and space. Even the best video cannot properly convey the spatiality of dance, the spatial dimensions and distances that are of such elementary importance to dancers. Temporality is also a problem, because cinematic depic tion has its own temporality: move ment generally appears to be faster or slower, because the cam­ era is moving along with it. This distinct temporality intensifies with shifts between close­ups and long shots.

Thought

I’ve noticed this, and internalized this limitation in the dances I’ve seen. At times, when watching a recording, I wanted to zoom in to some particular group of dancers. I felt like I wasn’t getting a correct perspective on the dance. It’s also surely a completely different feeling for the dancers, who are in the middle of it, and often colliding or feeling the pressure of another person close.

Video promises identical reproduction, a visual depiction of the real, but actually produces a simulacrum.

Dance and Body/Voice

“I am interested in grasping something, perhaps without understanding it.”

Almost anything can be dance. It has to do with a certain awareness, a certain inner, physical attitude, a very high degree of precision: knowledge, breath, every little detail. It always has to do with the how.

Solo Dance

Pina Bausch was less concerned with how people move than with what moves them.

There was no dance notation, only images and texts that comprised video recording, schematic diagrams, and notes.

The history of dance notation, which goes back to 16th­ century Europe, with its origins in Thoinot Arbeau’s dance notation from 1589, illustrates the translation of dance into writing.

Feldpartitur

rel:Dance Notation, Orchésographie Software developed that allows the user to work with characters, symbols and text to record movements that were recorded on video. An adaptation of Labanotation.

Her accentuated hand movements (fig. 18) are integrated into the slow flow of her arms. They are primarily characterized by the varied positioning of her palms, which are directed upward, down­ ward or forward, and by the way that her palms are positioned to­ ward the body. Both hands are brought together to form a light fist, which she places in front of her sternum, lifts over her head or drops into her lap.

The translation of dance into writing does not just help us to re­construct dance; it is above all a decisive, indispensable process of analysis in dance studies

Thought

I did not expect this digression into writing actions during this read, but it’s really suitable to other entries in Infinite Digressions.

Notation seems to have to be done manually, and with a reviewer. I suppose that is the point, but I’m curious about the state of the art (maybe something that auto-notates, almost like a set of available moves like in Just Dance (only backwards) which when detected are registered/transcribed as notation.) Because, it seems if you were taking continuous body movement, you are basically just getting too much information, and there’s not a benefit (compared to just watching the video.)

This is one of those problems where there are many obvious solutions but it might not cover all cases (especially with the artistic impulse to break away from the standardization.)

But once you do have this notation.

Like I really wonder about what the transcribed language of my movements would be in a day, like if I had a list of verbs running continuously. Right now I’d be transcribed as, legs up, typing at desk but it’d be continuously running throughout the day.

This would be such a cool dataset to have, to see how my verb/position/body moves, (independent of my environment) in different situations such as taking the train into the city, or working, or hiking.

Each step of translation from one medium to another makes some­ thing disappear while simultaneously making something visible that was previously unknown.

Reception

The audience is always part of the performance, just as I myself am part of the performance, even when I am not onstage. We have to have our own experiences, just like in life. No one can do it for us. rel:Concert

Pina Bausch also repeatedly stressed that it was not important for spectators to know or understand what she as a choreographer thought about her piece or what she saw in it. In her opinion, the audience should be open to their own percep­tions, interpretations and points of view about the piece: “When I make a piece, I am the audience. But I cannot speak for everyone. The pieces are actually made in such a way that everyone in the audience can search for and perhaps find something of their own. Each individual in the audience becomes creative in this state or that movement, or in the mood that he or she is in at that very moment.”

Theory and Methodology

The closest thing to us is our body, and every human being is constantly expressing themselves, simply by existing. It’s all very visible. When you read it, you can see everything

Translation

Translation is a term that is in itself a trans­ lation, namely from ancient Greek (hermeneuein, metaphrasis) and Latin (transferre, translation). Its imagery of ‘carrying across,’ ‘crossing over to another shore’ calls attention to the fact that trans­lation can never be ‘word­ for­ word,’ is never identical with its point of departure and thus can never truly convey a supposedly authen­tic meaning

Cultural transmission in dance, does not mean cultural understanding, building bridges between cultures or blending them. The space of translations is a hybrid one, a third space of transculture in which translations are the rule rather than disturbances. When taken to its logical conclusion, the dream of no borders or boundaries that follows on from these concepts of colonialism and modernity is actually totalitarian.