Pina Bausch was a German dancer, choreographer, and company director. She is considered one of the most influential dance artists of the late 20th century. Bausch began her training at the age of 14 with Kurt Jooss at the Folkwang School in Essen and continued at the Juilliard School of Music in New York (1960–1) with Antony Tudor. Between 1961 and 1962 she danced with the New American Ballet at the Metropolitan Opera, a company then directed by Tudor, after which she returned to Germany as a soloist with Jooss’s Folkwang Ballet. She began choreographing in 1968 and when Jooss retired in 1969 she became company director. In 1973 she was appointed director of Tanztheater Wuppertal, in Germany’s industrial Ruhr Valley. Her debut work for Wuppertal was Fritz (mus. Wolfgang Hufschmidt, 1974) followed a year later by her landmark staging of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1975)—a work of primal power in which the dancers, divided tribally between the two sexes, performed on a stage covered with bare earth. With her 1976 production of The Seven Deadly Sins, Bausch established her reputation as one of the most original and visionary creators of dance theatre.
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