Pina was so beautiful to watch when she was watching us

Paroles de danseurs
Tanztheater Wuppertal, Pina Bausch 

"Meeting Pina was like finding a language, finally. Before I didn’t know how to talk. And then she suddenly gave me a way to express myself, a vocabulary. When I began, I was pretty shy – I still am – and after many months of rehearsing she called me and said: "You just have to get crazier!" And that was the only comment in almost 20 years."
Ruth Amarante

"Kazuo Ohno passed away as well, not long ago. I often see the two of them up there, Pina and him, how they’re both dancing and jumping from one cloud to the other."
Jean-Laurent Sasportes

"Pina had the most penetrating eyes in the world. I’ve never encountered anyone else who could look at me and see through me like she did! Everything that I always tried to project simply vanished under her gaze. Instead, she saw something inside of me that frightened me, as I didn’t know it yet…"
Michael Strecker

"How often did I dance Café Müller with Pina! How often did I see her hair, her back, her arms. Howoften did I sense her, with my closed eyes, knowing that she could feel us all. Even with her closed eyes she saw everything!"
Aida Vainieri

"Qui était Pina?! Un mélange de fragilité et aussi d’une force incroyable! Qui avait la capacité infinie d’écouter et de regarder, mais aussi d’aller au-delà de ses limites. Mais surtout, je ne sais pas pourquoi, j’ai cette image d’une maison avec un grand grenier, et plein de choses dedans."
Dominique Mercy

"On dansait tout le temps, on riait tout le temps, on était tout le temps ensemble, jusqu’à quatre heure du matin, parler, essayer de trouver quelque chose pour le lendemain. Mais ça, c’est tout dans le début de la compagnie. Se retrouver au Bahnhof à Barmen, le matin, avec un café, Brötchen, et on parlait de ce qu’on allait faire dans la journée. "I’m working with angels. You are an angel! You are beautiful…" Tu as toujours l’impression que tu es plus qu’un être humain quand tu travailles avec Pina."
Malou Airaudo

"After a disastrous rehearsal of Iphigenie, Pina didn’t say a word tome during the critique. Then she came into my dressing room before the performance and said, as always: "Lützchen, be beautiful!" And I answered, as always: "Pinchen, enjoy." She left, turned in the door, and said: "And don’t forget: You have to scare me." Then my head started spinning… That was muchmore to the point than three hours of conversation could have been."
Lutz Förster

"Pina was so beautiful to watch when she was watching us. In the rehearsals I often used to look over to see her sitting behind that desk and watching us every day, living every moment with her dancers, sometimes like a little child, full of all of the feelings that we were having. I often thought: Pina sat behind that table and actually watched me for 22 years… And that was even longer than my parents saw me!"
Julie Shanahan

"What is honesty? What is our responsibility, even when we dance? Pina taught us to stand up for what we do, for every gesture, every step, everymove."
Aleš Cucek

"Pina always wanted to bring out the best in all her dancers. One time she said to me: "You are the most fragile. That is also your strength!" "
Nayoung Kim

"For Vollmond Pina asked us a question: a movement that was related to "joy", or to "the pleasure of moving". The question really inspired me… I suggested a movement to Pina, and from it she developed an entire scene for the piece."
Fernando Suels Mendoza

"I was always in the corner… Or behind someone’s back, when she was doing corrections, perhaps because I simply respected her so much. Once she caught me and asked me in a sad voice: "Ditta, why are you so afraid of me? I didn’t do anything!" Actually she was right.And gradually I lost my shyness."
Ditta Miranda Jasjfi

"The way Pina worked allowed all of us to be sad, furious, or to cry, or to laugh or to shout, we could bring out all our colors, our textures, our qualities… It was as if Pina was hidden in each and every one of us, or the other way around, as if we were all a part of her…"
Julie Anne Stanzak

"She sometimes said things like: "You need to keep searching!" But that was all she said… And that meant you… needed to keep searching, without knowing exactly where to look, and without knowing if you were even on the right path."
Silvia Farias Heredia

"In the beginning, when I was new in Wuppertal and confused about a few things, she simply said: "Dance for love!" "
Pablo Aran Gimeno

"All her pieces were about love and pain and beauty and sorrow and loneliness… When I had this love affair with the hippopotamus – I was about 28, when I did that piece –, I even identified her with this big, sweet hippo monster. I was trying to understand her, figure out why she had to keep working and working and working…"
Josephine Ann Endicott

"The elements were very important to Pina. Whether it was sand, earth, stone, water… At some point icebergs and rocks suddenly appeared on stage. When you dance among them, they offer resistance, you either have to go against them, or through them, or over them…"
Rainer Behr

"Pina was a radical explorer, she looked deep into our souls. There was one particular subject
she kept asking us about: What are we longing for? Where does all this yearning come from?"
Barbara Kaufmann

(extraits de "Pina, The Film and the Dancers" par Donata & Wim Wenders, Schirmel/Mosel 2012)