Pina Bausch was born on July 27, 1940 in Solingen, Germany and is

internationally known as the creator and the Queen of Dance Theater. Living in Solingen

as a child, the city was experiencing a disastrous amount of destruction due to the war.

She would hear sirens nonstop and always had a bag ready incase she and her family had

to leave to avoid danger. Her parents owned a pub/hotel, where she and her siblings

worked. As she worked she was always dancing around and was told by the customers

that she must join a youth ballet group. Although her parents were never interested in

dance and hardly ever saw her dance, she felt strongly loved and appreciated that she

never had to prove anything to them and was completely trusted by them without a single

guilt. …show more content…
I found that her approach to creating choreography has always been

unique; she would put herself in a natural environment, inhale the feelings the

environment produced in her mind, and that’s where her creation evolved. Another

approach to creating choreography was by emotion and improvisation; she would start by

asking questions or observing her own experiences in life and the experiences of her

dancers. Her exquisite uniqueness of constructing powerful dance pieces is the main

reason why I chose to critique her piece, “Vollmond,” translated in english as, “Full

Moon.”

The elements used in the physical theater of Vollmond consisted of a pool of

water, pouring rain, and a huge boulder/rock. Bausch loved the symbolism of water for

she felt water to be a source of nurturing and/or destroying; the metaphor of the title “full

moon,” as we know in reality the moon to be the cause for the oceans tides, depicts the

idea of how the moon affects the tides of human emotion. For a long time humans have

had an ongoing superstition that a full moon causes us to act out of our natural state