Tanzträume

How do you teach the arts and creativity? Can we transmit emotion, sensitivity, intensity and passion? How can we encourage young apprentice artists to explore their own relationship with creation, and to fully integrate their own being into their artistic expression, paving the way for a living, vibrant art form capable of touching audiences? In partnership with the Collection Lambert, ARTE invites you into the intimacy of studios and schools to follow dance and theater classes and the lessons of two great masters, Pina Bausch and Peter Brook. A selection of fascinating documentaries and a surprising new series preview, accompanied by meetings with artists and teachers.

Tanzträume

By Anne Linsel and Rainer Hoffmann // Germany // 2010 // 1h25 // VOSTF

Screening presented by Marie Labory and followed by a meeting with dancers from the Tanztheater Wuppertal Ensemble, Çağdaş Ermiş and Simon le Borgne.

Tanzträume is first and foremost the film of a moving paradox: the last images and the last interview with Pina Bausch before her death in June 2009 show her in the company of high-school students discovering dance and its demands. A bath of youth and a return to her roots, where the famous choreographer finds herself with obvious tenderness in the face of the freshness and shyness of beginners. In 2008, a group of teenagers from the Wuppertal region rehearsed Kontakthof, one of her most famous pieces, first staged in 1978 and then revived with amateurs in 1999 in a version "for ladies and gentlemen over 65". With young people, the stakes are diametrically opposed: Kontakthof evokes love and its violence, the discovery of the other and the attraction of bodies... Exactly what apprentice dancers experience with the intensity of first times. "For me, dance is an unknown land", confesses one of them. This double discovery - that of life in sync with that of dance, which transcends it - is the real challenge of the film, which focuses above all on rehearsals. The shyness of some, the boldness of others, the shyness that hesitates to break free, make up a ballet of infinite grace. Pina Bausch's benevolent, non-condescending presence (and that of two former members of her troupe) pushes the students to surpass themselves without trauma. This is the birth of a passion that the Tanzträume cameras manage to capture.

With Pina Bausch, Josephine Ann Endicott, Bénédicte Billiet
A documentary film byAnne Linsel and Rainer Hoffmann
Based on Pina Bausch's Kontakthof
Coproduced by Tag/Traum, ARTE, WDR