Farewell to Pina Bausch, the dangerous magician of modern dance

Beautiful and strange, tragic yet hopeful, Pina Bausch's creations entranced the audience. The news of her death is terribly sad – and a challenge for dance-makers.
Anger and danger ... The Rite of Spring at Sadler's Wells in 2008. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
You can count on one hand the number of modern-dance-makers who have changed the landscape – and Pina Bausch was one of them. Even though she never created a style that could be taught in the classroom, as Martha Graham or Merce Cunningham did, her influence went far and deep. It's now impossible to enumerate the hundreds of works heavily indebted to her unique brand of dance theatre, trying to imitate Bausch's surreal voyages into memory, pleasure and pain. Even those who hated her productions never forgot them.

Bausch believed passionately in choreography but her works were not primarily about dance. She wove her material out of movement, speech, theatrical imagery and music, often starting out with no more than a feeling. She worked closely with her dancers, drawing on their own fantasies and experiences; in her darkest works, Bausch was famously accused by New Yorker critic Arlene Croce for indulging in a "pornography of pain". Not only did her productions feature brutally explicit confessionals, with the dancers spewing out shocking revelations of misery, hatred or desire, some of the choreography was so angry and dangerous that the performers seemed quite literally at risk of damaging themselves.

It was a formula that many choreographers imitated, but few came even close to achieving. There was a combination of terror, beauty, strangeness and even bawdy comedy in the worlds that she and her designers invented, from The Rite of Spring, in which the floor of the stage was covered in dark peat, to Nelken, where it was carpeted with carnations. In Victor, 20ft walls of mud flanked the dancers, so that they appeared like a lost tribe unearthed in an archaeological dig. It was the monumental magic of Bausch's productions that inspired and won assorted devoted followers including stage directors such as David Alden and film directors such as Federico Fellini and Pedro Almodóvar.

The first time Bausch and her company performed in London, back in 1984, audiences felt they had never seen anything like it. (Some wished they hadn't; every night, half the theatre walked out.) But she became a cult. Fans travelled the world, following their favourite productions. Dancers queued up to audition for her company. And while Bausch's most recent productions may have lacked the intransigent vision of her greatest works, they never lost the capacity to amaze and entrance.

Her last performance in London was a double bill of early work, The Rite of Spring and Café Müller, which drew on Bausch's childhood memories of her parents' boarding house in Solingen, north Germany. It was a performance that I was meant to be reviewing on the night. But sitting at my computer, still reeling from the savage dread and ecstasy that had been generated in Rite, still haunted by the indefinable mix of tragedy and hopefulness in Café Müller, I kept forgetting the ticking of the clock. I kept forgetting to write.

For the world of dance, news of Bausch's premature death is a terrible sadness. It's also a terrible challenge. Many of her productions have been recorded for video, but that's not the same as seeing them live. The urgent task for her colleagues and her dancers is to ensure that at least some of them survive for the theatre too.
Judith Mackrell
The Guardian