Dancing Pina ***
the Florian Heinzen-Ziob
German film, 1 h 51
The last violins of the orchestra agree while the final conversations of the public vanish. Behind the still closed curtain, Sangeun Lee lies face down on the set in the position that marks the start of the choreography ofIphigenia in Tauride to music by Gluck.
In a discreet camera movement, Florian Heinzen-Ziob captures the loneliness of the star of the Dresden ballet before the show. This moment stolen from behind the scenes gracefully sums up the subject of Dancing Pina. Loose hair, incredibly slender in her silk dress with straps, one would believe in a fraction of a second to see the ghost of Pina Bausch in the silhouette of Sangeun Lee.
How not to get lost when you suddenly find yourself the custodian of such a heritage? How do you find your own way to bring a legendary work to life? These perilous questions irrigate the repetitions ofIphigenia led by Clémentine Deluy, a former dancer from the Tanztheater in Wuppertal, Pina Bausch’s company. Malou Airaudo, performer from the start, is there too, taking part in this vast undertaking.
After mourning, the issue of transmission
Both were part, like the other dancers who appear here, of the faces of Pina by Wim Wenders, released in 2011. If this film, remembered as an exceptional tribute paid to the choreographer who died in 2009, was a work of mourning, Florian Heinzen-Ziob’s documentary is resolutely turned towards the ‘coming.
It sheds light on the adventure of the transmission of two key plays to companies other than the Tanztheater: Iphigenia in Dresden and the Rite of Springby a troupe of African dancers brought together in Dakar by Germaine Acogny.
If it sometimes struggles to find its rhythm between the numerous testimonies and the images of dance, the film nevertheless offers magnificent choreographic sequences carried by the unique breath of Pina Bausch.
A celebration of dance as a universal art of dialogue and emancipation up to this sublime conclusion: this extraordinary Rite of Spring, then deprived of a room by the Covid epidemic, danced on a wild beach on the edge of the Atlantic. Freely.