Abstract

This study pursues an aesthetic and theoretical exploration of repetition in the works of the contemporary German choreographer Pina Bausch . The method combines Laban movement analysis and the philosophies of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. The method is applied to the examination of repetitive scenes from four of Bausch's pieces: Kontakthof , Arien , 1980--A Piece by Pina Bausch , On the Mountain a Cry Was Heard , and some relevant scenes from other pieces. A complete compositional analysis of the piece Cafe Muller is also provided. The repetitive scenes are organized in categories ranging from simple repetition of movement on words, to repetition of a scene in different contexts, to the dancers' reconstructions of their life experiences on stage, among others. The study is divided into six parts: the company's creative process: the Symbolic order in dance and society, and the temporal and visual nature of dance; the body's torture, value, and needs within power relationships; the absence of meaning and the meaning of absence; reconstruction and transformation in Bausch's dance theater; the analysis of Cafe Muller. ;Repetition is the basis for domination over the body within both dance and social discipline, establishing a system of Truth and socially agreed values. This study demonstrates how Bausch's dance theater neither rejects nor is subservient to the power of repetition. Her works incorporate and alter repetition in a radical manner. Repetition is consistently used to subvert its own process of domination over the body, at aesthetic, cognitive, and social levels, for both dancers and audience. Through repetition, the Wuppertal Dance Theater transforms stable polarities such as dominated-dominator, dancers-audience, movement-words, body-mind, women-men, spontaneity-artificiality, daily life-theater, individual-society, meaning-form. Within dance theater's Symbolic explorations, these dichotomies become dynamic modes of relationship, constantly exchanging, questioning, and transforming aesthetic, psychic, and social roles. Through Bausch's radical use of repetition, the body explores its conflictive, paradoxical existence, between natural and linguistic, experiential and automatic, personal and social paradigms. The body 'retells' and 'redances' its own history of domination, constantly repeating and transforming--'redefining'--dance