Pina Bausch + New York
Year: 2017
Role: Script Writer · Researcher
Format: Documentary film / Oral History
Production: Producing Partners NYC in collaboration with the Pina Bausch Foundation
Broadcast: Arte1 (Brazil), as part of the series Geografia da Arte
Locations: New York · Chicago · Woodstock · Wuppertal · Essen
Project
Pina Bausch + New York was Ricardo Viviani’s first major project at the Pina Bausch Foundation after joining the institution in 2016. The documentary explored the formative relationship between Pina Bausch and New York, drawing on Oral History, archival research and conversations with artists and people connected to her experiences in the United States.
The project was an unusually direct intersection between Viviani’s own history and his new work at the Foundation. He had first met Pina Bausch personally in New York after performances of Viktor at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Bausch stayed with dancer Manuel Alum at his loft in TriBeCa, together with her son. Viviani was at the time part of Alum’s performing circle and had known him since his own years at Jacob’s Pillow.
This encounter revealed a number of connections between Viviani’s own formation in the New York dance scene and Bausch’s formative experiences in the United States. When he began researching the documentary, these intersections became an important starting point for tracing the people, places, teachers and artistic encounters that had shaped Bausch’s early development.
Research
The research extended across a wide range of dance and performing-arts archives and personal networks. Viviani worked with the archives of the Pina Bausch Foundation and the Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln, as well as collections and institutions in the United States including the 92nd Street Y, Jacob’s Pillow, the New York Public Library’s Dance Collection and the archives of Juilliard School.
At the 92nd Street Y, where Pina Bausch had danced in New York for the first time, Viviani encountered an institution that was also part of his own history as a choreographer, having received a grant and presented work there. At Jacob’s Pillow, he returned to an archive and community he had known since 1980, when he was a scholarship student there, and worked with longtime archivist and curator Norton Owen.
The research also included conversations with dance scholars and critics including Mark Franko and Deborah Jowitt, as well as tracing places, people and artistic networks connected to New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Viviani also drew on his own study with Alfredo Corvino and his knowledge of the New York dance environment.
Oral History
The documentary developed into an Oral History-based account of Pina Bausch’s formative relationship with New York. Interviews and archival research brought together memories of artists, teachers, collaborators and other witnesses, allowing aspects of Bausch’s early artistic development to be reconstructed through personal testimony and historical sources.
The resulting material provides a record of experiences and encounters that are not always visible in conventional accounts of Bausch’s biography, including the teachers, artistic communities and cultural environments that she encountered in New York and the United States.
Production
The opportunity to produce the interviews arose through an independent coincidence. Rolf Salomon Bausch received a request to collaborate with a New York production company developing a series about artists and geographical places. This led to a collaboration between Producing Partners NYC and the Pina Bausch Foundation.
Interviews and filming subsequently took place in Chicago, New York, Woodstock, Wuppertal and Essen. Although the production company was based in New York, the resulting series was produced for the Brazilian cable channel Arte1. This created another unexpected connection to Viviani’s biography as a Brazilian-born artist and researcher.
Producing Partners, led by Tatiana Issa and Guto Barra, went on to receive international recognition for its documentary and television productions.
Significance
The project marked the beginning of Viviani’s large-scale Oral History and research work at the Pina Bausch Foundation. It brought together his experience as a dancer and choreographer in the United States and Europe with his developing practice as a researcher and oral historian.
It also established an important methodological principle in his subsequent work: using personal testimony, archival research and lived artistic experience together to reconstruct histories of dance that cannot be fully understood through surviving documents alone.
The project remains an important source of Oral History material concerning Pina Bausch’s early relationship with New York and the artistic environment that contributed to the formation of her practice. The broader story of these encounters and their significance continues to be developed through Viviani’s ongoing research.
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