Type: Presentation
Date: 26 June 2026
Context: International Conference Pina Bausch – From Ritual to Romance, Bergische Universität Wuppertal
Institution: Pina Bausch Foundation
Role: Presenter / Researcher
Participants:
Ricardo Viviani
Isabelle Charnavel
Laura Wiemer
Embodied Knowledge Articulated
Reflections on Ten Years of Oral History Collection of the Pina Bausch Archives
This presentation reflects on a decade of oral history work at the Pina Bausch Archives, examining how dancers’ testimonies illuminate artistic processes, pedagogical lineages, cultural encounters, and personal histories within Tanztheater.
Drawing on approximately seventy interviews, the project develops a methodological framework that integrates video testimony with archival materials to document rehearsal practices, generational formation, political and transcultural experiences, and moments of rupture or displacement.
By making embodied experience narratable rather than theoretical, the presentation foregrounds narrative, memory, and institutional context, showing how oral history expands the archive and enables a more nuanced understanding of Tanztheater’s artistic and historical development.
Presented within the conference section Epistemologies and Forms, the contribution was situated among approaches that examined how knowledge in and through dance can be investigated from different disciplinary perspectives. The surrounding programme included formal approaches to dance and music cognition, as well as practice-based approaches to bodily memory, storytelling and the translation of dance into concrete action.
Archival Material:
Presentation material; conference documentation; presentation photograph; related oral-history material from the Pina Bausch Archives.
Post Scriptum — 30 August 2026
This entry is revisited in the context of the conference programme and its published abstracts, allowing the presentation to be considered not only as a record of ten years of oral-history work but also in relation to the different epistemological and methodological approaches brought together by the conference.
Contribution / Ertrag:
The presentation contributed a long-term, practice-based oral-history perspective to the conference’s discussion of epistemologies and forms in Pina Bausch’s work. Its distinctive point of departure was not a formal analysis of movement or cognition, but a corpus of approximately seventy interviews and the methodological integration of testimony with archival materials. In relation to the other contributions, it connected questions of bodily knowledge and storytelling with the documentary and institutional conditions through which such knowledge can be preserved, transmitted and made available for further research.
Assessment / Relevanz:
The presentation is relevant within the conference because it extends the discussion of embodied knowledge from the level of performance and interpretation toward the level of archival methodology. Its emphasis on making embodied experience narratable complements approaches concerned with bodily memory, translation, cognition and practice, while placing particular weight on long-term testimony, narrative and institutional context.
Keywords:
Oral History; embodied knowledge; Pina Bausch; Tanztheater Wuppertal; dance; memory; testimony; archival practice; epistemology; narrative; embodiment; rehearsal; choreography; cultural memory; methodology
External Links
Pina Bausch – From Ritual to Romance — Bergische Universität Wuppertal
Pina Bausch – From Ritual to Romance — Conference Flyer
Pina Bausch Foundation — Interviews
Internal Links
Presentation Script / Conference Material
Archival Note: This page forms part of an ongoing personal archive documenting Ricardo Viviani’s professional work and activities over more than four decades. Names and other personal information appear where relevant to the documented work or collaboration. If you believe that information concerning you has been published incorrectly or should be reconsidered, please contact me.