Abstract
Originally planned as a collaboration, Wim Wenders’ 2011 film about the choreographer Pina Bausch and her Tanztheater Wuppertal was made by Wenders alone, working with members of Bausch’s company after her unexpected early death. More than a documentary, Pina combines clips of staged productions, interviews with dancers, and sequences of them performing in selected settings in and around the city of Wuppertal. Combining Kracauer’s theories about film and dance with contemporary cultural geographical theory, this article unpacks how these landscape performances reflect Wenders and Bausch’s shared preoccupation with performance and temporality, and mediate a post-historical relationality between culture and nature. These performances occur in variety of overlooked places, in a region known to both Wenders and Bausch, and recently the subject of a renowned post-industrial regional regeneration project. This region’s material and ecological history, and the experimental approach adopted for its re-purposing, is set against broader histories of nature-culture, notions of bildung and self-actualization, environmental politics, and re-unification. Wenders’ direction and Bausch’s dancers combine to (re)perform this corrupted, post-carbon landscape, exorcising its revenances, and projecting an atmospheric, affect-saturated world by non-discursively working through its multiple pasts.
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