Pina Bausch and the Wuppertal Dance Theater

The Author: Ciane Fernandes is a tenured professor in the Performing Arts Graduate Program at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil, and an associate researcher at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies (LIMS), New York. She received a Ph.D. in art and humanities for performing artists from New York University (1995) and a certificate of movement analysis from LIMS (1994). She is the author of The Moving Body: The Laban/Bartenieff System in Performing Arts Education and Research (2002). She has danced and choreographed in the United States, Italy, and Brazil, and has published articles in Brazil and Germany. She is Director of the AFFECTUS Dance Theater Group at the Federal University of Bahia, which in 2000 received the Brazilian ANDES-SN National Prize for Art at Universities. She has been awarded with several scholarships and prizes, including a 2003 Virtuoso Grant from the Brazilian Ministry of Culture to further develop her latest project: a comparative study between contemporary dance theater and the classical Indian dance style of Bharatanatyam at the Rajyashree Ramesh Academy for Performing Arts, Berlin.

«Ciane Fernandes provides the reader with a rich and comprehensive introduction to the work of Pina Bausch. Above all, her concise and well-delineated analysis addressing psychological and sociological aspects, opens my eyes as a choreographer and dancer to a broader understanding of Bausch's creative process and choreographies.» (Frank Händeler, Choreographer and Dancer)
«Due to her experience as both performer and academic, Fernandes is able to devote herself equally to both worlds: the emotionality of Bausch's nonverbal world of images and the theoretical verbal world provided here by Lacan, Foucault, and Susanne Langer. Through a highly analytical discourse, Fernandes succeeds in keeping sensibility, respect, honesty, and humility toward the world of movement and images. The author becomes herself a mediator between dance and theory, movement and words, aesthetics and analysis. The descriptions/explorations of scenes taken from different pieces of Pina Bausch provide the reader, who [may not have seen any of her pieces], with many possibilities to experience the artistic variety of the Wuppertaler Tanztheater.» (Excerpt from the Preface by Susanne Schlicher, Dramaturg; Coordinator of Department of Theater Directing, University of Hamburg; Author of 'TanzTheater. Traditionen und Freiheiten' (1987))