December 3, 2025 sees the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Pina Bausch’s groundbreaking ‘The Rite of Spring’. Ahead of performances by the Bayerisches Staatsballett, Jeannette Andersen drops in on rehearsals and talks to the four former Bausch dancers staging the work.
The Bayerisches Staatsballett opens its annual Ballettfestwoche in April with a triple bill featuring Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring together with pieces by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Jiri Kylián. It will be the second time that the company has performed a Bausch piece, following Die Kinder von gestern, heute und morgen (For the Children of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow) in 2016.
The Bausch Foundation, who own the rights to Bausch’s pieces, is very meticulous about how her pieces are staged. For Die Kinder von gestern, heute und morgen, the original cast came to Munich, stayed for six weeks, each coaching the dancer who took over their part. For The Rite of Spring, four former Bausch dancers, who all danced in the piece while Bausch was alive, Azusa Seyama-Prioville, Kenji Takagi, Pau Aran Gimeno and Luiza Braz Batista, spent around eight weeks in Munich, out of which they worked full days with the dancers for three weeks. I attended two rehearsals and talked with the four about their work.
rehearse Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring
Photo Miljana Bernal
Rite of Spring for 36 dancers differs from pieces like Café Müller and Kontakthof because, as Kenji Takagi explains, “It is a pure dance piece, where there are almost no parts that you could perceive as theatre or other kinds of action.” Azusa Seyama-Prioville adds, “It is based entirely on Stravinsky’s score. The choreography follows the notes and the counts.”
At the women’s rehearsal the focus was on placement, the dancers having already learned the steps. Seyama-Prioville and Batista conferred with diagrams and repeatedly asked the dancers to watch video excerpts. At times one of the repétiteurs would stand on a chair to observe the dancers. “We do this because the choreography is set exactly. It looks improvised, but it is not,” says Seyama-Prioville. “The piece has a set structure,” Batista agrees. “If you look at it from above, you see the whole design of the choreography. It is very beautiful.”
On the same day, Kenji Takagi and Pau Aran Gimeno were working on a short sequence with five men. They kept repeating it to get the right energy into the movements. The dancers got individual corrections. “Try to be as big as possible at all moments. Take the space. Get rid of some of the energy.” They were never told what to do specifically. Takagi explains, “We do it this way because it is about finding keys for them, and each dancer needs a different key to find a way to use the material we give them so that it has the right feeling and transmits what we want to see in the piece.” In turn Batista advises, “It also needs to make sense for the whole group, and between the four of us, because we are frequently rehearsing the women and the men separately until late in the process”.
Bausch died in 2009, and an important aspect of the staging is to keep her pieces alive so that they don’t turn into museum pieces. “We are not trying to copy the original. We are trying to understand it, to transmit it,” says Batista.
Photo Pina Bausch Foundation/Ulli Weiss
“We are passing on the choreography, and by working together with the dancers, ensure, that they make it their own. It is a mutual, creative process,” confirms Seyama-Proville. Having learnt the work from Bausch, Takagi recalls, “Pina was always searching. For her, it was not that a piece was finished and then we only had to do it again. In the rehearsal she was always looking for something and trying to really feel if it still functioned.” Gimeno adds, “We are always analysing, why is this working, what is not working. Is it enough? No, it needs to be longer, higher.” Seyama-Prioville sums up, “For this piece it is very important that the dancers know that they can do more, and that they each time search for this during the rehearsal.”
The four are enjoying the work with the company in Munich. Battista observes, “We have danced Sacre together, and now rehearsing it together is very enriching, also the work with the dancers, how we try to understand each dancer, their personality.” Takagi adds “Sacre gives you the possibility to have a very nice process with the dancers. From the beginning until the end, you see something develop from zero to something very, very intense.” Meanwhile, Seyama-Prioville reflects, “And we are continuously discovering new things, while teaching. Watching Sacre is great, but experiencing it first hand is far more exciting.”
Some people consider many Bausch pieces museum pieces, but the four see it differently. As Gimeno sums it up, “The beauty of Pina’s artwork is that it deals with many universal topics, which makes it timeless. Her pieces are not only about form and aesthetics. They are talking about life, and the dancing is just a vehicle to express these thoughts.” And that is perhaps the main reason, why we still want to watch them today.