Bausch, Pina (1940– )

German avant-garde dance choreographer, director from 1974 of the Wuppertal Tanztheater (dance theatre). Her works incorporate dialogue, elements of psychoanalysis, comedy, and drama, and have been performed on floors covered with churned earth (Le Sacre du printemps/The Rite of Spring, 1975), water (Arien, 1979), and artificial carnations (Nelken/Carnations, 1982). In Nur Du/Only You (1996) dancers build and dismantle an huge stack of chairs. Spanish film-maker Pedro Almodovar's film Hable con ella/Talk to Her (2002) begins and ends with two Bausch pieces.

Her dramatic form of dance has all the emotional involvement of theatre without recourse to narrative structures, and she has been a major influence in breaking the stranglehold of American postmodernism on European dance.