Drawing on Erin Manning’s concept of the ‘minor gesture’, this article engages with the choreographic and filmic value of gestural hands. It considers Bausch’s choreography as a gestural practice that intervenes into everyday comportment and habits to show or incite potential variation; and it traces how Akerman’s filmic intervention into Bausch’s work intensifies and alters (our readings of) this work in turn, enhancing what is there and adding new orientations to thematic pathways that it might indicate. Akerman’s 1983 documentary Un jour Pina a demandé… includes many activities that involve hands, both on and off stage, as they are engaged in forming dance gestures, but also in smoking, putting on make-up, tying ties, performing gestures of tenderness or of sign language, and also of ‘marking’ movement sequences. Hand gestures, here, embrace both signification and functionality; yet even more importantly, Akerman’s filming brings to the fore their tactile and social dimensions. This is less a matter of appropriating, but of sharing a choreographic concern for gestural hands, testifying to an aesthetic preoccupation with conduct that ultimately belongs to the commitment of Akerman and Bausch to what might be called an ethics of gesture, carried out across the media of dance and film.
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Lucia Ruprecht
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Minor Gestures: Chantal Akerman’s Un jour Pina a demandé…
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Minor Gestures: Chantal Akerman’s Un jour Pina a demandé…
                                                 demandé…
Lucia Ruprecht, University of Cambridge, UK




Abstract

    Drawing on Erin Manning’s concept of the ‘minor gesture’, this article engages
    with the choreographic and filmic value of gestural hands. It considers Bausch’s
    choreography as a gestural practice that intervenes into everyday comportment
    and habits to show or incite potential variation; and it traces how Akerman’s
    filmic intervention into Bausch’s work intensifies and alters (our readings of) this
    work in turn, enhancing what is there and adding new orientations to thematic
    pathways that it might indicate. Akerman’s 1983 documentary Un jour Pina a
    demandé… includes many activities that involve hands, both on and off stage,
    as they are engaged in forming dance gestures, but also in smoking, putting
    on make-up, tying ties, performing gestures of tenderness or of sign language,
    and also of ‘marking’ movement sequences. Hand gestures, here, embrace both
    signification and functionality; yet even more importantly, Akerman’s filming
    brings to the fore their tactile and social dimensions. This is less a matter of
    appropriating, but of sharing a choreographic concern for gestural hands,
    testifying to an aesthetic preoccupation with conduct that ultimately belongs to
    the commitment of Akerman and Bausch to what might be called an ethics of
    gesture, carried out across the media of dance and film.

   Transposing Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s concept of the ‘minor’ to
the gestural, Erin Manning writes: ‘[t]he minor gesture punctually reorients
experience’, and she continues: ‘[t]he event and the minor gesture are always
in co-composition, the minor punctuating process, moving the welling event in
new and divergent directions that alter the orientation of where the event might
otherwise have settled’.1 This article draws on Manning’s concept of the minor
gesture in a double sense. It associates its metaphorical resonance with the ways
in which Pina Bausch and Chantal Akerman open up experience and events to
‘variability’;2 and, more literally, it zooms in on Bausch and Akerman as artists
who are concerned with the small, actual gestures both of choreographed dance


1
 Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), pp. 2–3.
2
 Ivi, p. 72. My use of the concept of the ‘minor gesture’ uncouples it from Manning’s strong focus
on neurodiversity.

                                                         Cinéma & Cie, vol. XX, no. 35, Fall 2020
                                        Lucia Ruprecht


and everyday life. It considers Bausch’s choreography as a gestural practice that
intervenes into everyday comportment and habits to show or incite potential
variation;3 and it traces how Akerman’s filmic intervention into Bausch’s work
intensifies and alters (our readings of) this work in turn, enhancing what is
there and adding new orientations to thematic pathways that it might indicate.4
Akerman’s 1983 documentary Un jour Pina a demandé… creates a sense of
intimate yet respectful proximity to the dancers. This proximity rests not least
on the filming of activities that involve hands, both on and off stage, as they are
engaged in forming dance gestures, but also in smoking, putting on make-up,
tying ties, performing gestures of tenderness or of sign language, and also of
‘marking’ movement sequences. Hand gestures, here, can be both functional
and meaningful; yet even more importantly, Akerman’s filming brings to the fore
their tactile and social dimensions. This is less a matter of appropriating, but of
sharing a choreographic concern for gestural hands, testifying to an aesthetic
preoccupation with conduct that ultimately belongs to the commitment of
Akerman and Bausch to what might be called an ethics of gesture, carried out
across the media of dance and film.5
   One of the most urgent questions, when exploring Akerman’s documentary,
relates to the vast discrepancy there must have been between the available and
the ultimately chosen footage; and to the thought that must have gone into
singling out what to include. Akerman and her team accompanied Bausch on
tour from Wuppertal to Milan, Venice, and Avignon, recording run-throughs
and performances of five pieces: Komm tanz mit mir (1977), Kontakthof (1978),
1980, Walzer (1982), and Nelken (1983). All of these pieces are between about
two and three and a half hours long. How did Akerman pick the passages that
made it into her 57−minute documentary, how did she decide what to show
and what not to show? We can only attempt to answer this question. What we
see is that the filmmaker went for a collage of clips of performances, rehearsals,
and backstage sequences that echoes Bausch’s own collages of scenes in her
performance works. These clips are juxtaposed or respond to each other across
the length of the film in ways that go beyond the documentary in the strict sense,
to bring about an insightful variation of Bausch’s choreographies in the form of a
new, co-authored piece of filmic dance theatre: Un jour Pina a demandé….


3
  The gestural quality of Pina Bausch’s choreographies has often been commented on, see, for
instance, Inge Baxmann, ‘Dance Theatre: Rebellion of the Body, Theatre of Images and an Inquiry
into the Sense of the Senses’, in The Pina Bausch Sourcebook: The Making of Tanztheater, ed. by
Royd Climenhaga (Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, 2012), pp. 142–51.
4
  While this article considers Akerman’s specific ways of ‘intervening’ into Bausch’s work, it is
based on Douglas Rosenberg’s definition of all ‘screendance’, which ‘implies that the method
of apprehension (the screen) modifies the activity it inscribes (dance)’. Douglas Rosenberg,
Screendance: Inscribing the Ephemeral Image (Oxford: OUP, 2012), p. 3.
5
  See Lucia Ruprecht, ‘Introduction: Towards an Ethics of Gesture’, Performance Philosophy 3.1
(2017), 4–22 <https://www.performancephilosophy.org/journal/article/view/167/185> [accessed
January 2021].

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              Minor Gestures: Chantal Akerman’s Un jour Pina a demandé…


Handling Touch

   Among Akerman’s chosen clips is the following: about twenty minutes into
the film, we witness one of the most memorable stagings of tactile hands in
Bausch’s œuvre, shown during a performance at the Scala in Milan. It is part of
Kontakthof and it draws out this piece’s declared interest in (sites for) ‘contact’.
Dancer Nazareth Panadero, wearing a pink, flowy dress with lace inserts as if
made for a doll, is surrounded by perhaps eight men, who touch and test her
body with over-agitated but also business-like gestures. This is recorded in a
medium shot, hardly allowing for an orientating scan of the entire group. Carrying
out moves that are both childish and possessive, hands ruffle Panadero’s hair,
tickle or press the tip of her nose, pinch her cheek, massage her shoulders, stroke
her belly, caress her temple, smack her bottom (fig. 1). The female dancer does
not show any reaction, she remains passive and silent. The men let her down to
the floor and pick her up again while her head and limbs hang loose. When she
is on the floor, someone shakes the flesh on the inside of her upper arm, another
one rubs his head on her stomach. The longer the routine continues, the more it
speeds up, lasting approximately three increasingly unsettling minutes beyond
the duration of the nostalgic love song ‘Spring and Sunshine’ (Frühling und
Sonnenschein) which accompanies it. When the men finally let go of Panadero,
she simply keeps on standing there, before she picks up her shoes and leaves.
The men are joined by another woman in a pale blue dress, who leads them into
one of Bausch’s signature ‘lines’ or circles, in which dancers walk in linear
procession behind each other while performing looped sequences of arm




         Fig. 1: Un jour Pina a demandé… (Chantal Akerman, 1983). Screen capture.

                                                                                    65
                                         Lucia Ruprecht


movements and hand gestures. Now, the gestures are more subdued ones,
resembling the typical displacement activities of social comportment: a little
scratch of the neck, smoothing down one’s jacket, a half-embarrassed smile
across the shoulder; but also breathing out with puffed-up cheeks, as if in
frowning, self-inflated commentary on the previous goings-on. The piece’s other
female dancers also join the line. Kontakthof ends with the entire cast walking in
a large circle around the stage.
   Kontakthof’s ‘doll scene’ is the culmination of the piece’s gestural leitmotiv
of often problematic tenderness, which is performed in a number of hand-led
choreographic sequences, and associated with the repeated use of the song
‘Spring and Sunshine’.6 Apart from the long take of the climactic scene, however,
Un jour Pina a demandé… does not show us any of these other sequences.
Instead, Akerman contextualises the doll scene by regularly punctuating her
film with short, isolated clips of couples who enact encounters in front of the
green padded walls of the company’s working space, the Wuppertal Lichtburg.
In one of these clips, we see a couple practicing the idiosyncratic gestures of
tenderness on each other. As the performers keep on repeating their gestural
routine, they give us a chance to observe with attentiveness what they do, so
that we recognize single moves and touches from the doll scene without being
distracted by the speed and multiplicity of hands that make up its spectacular
group setting.7 If that setting unfolds a disturbing emotional effect, the couple’s
rehearsal makes clear that it studies the form, not the dramatic impact, of touch.
Akerman uses the analytical quality of this rehearsal to counter the affective blow
of the performed version. Another one of Akerman’s choices of footage works in
similarly re-routing fashion. Showing one of the processional lines from Walzer,
she makes us realise how this piece also takes up Kontakthof’s ambivalent hand
gestures, now possibly in order to redeem them by way of the light-hearted, hip-
swinging élan and the greater agency of the female dancers, who perform the
routine of hair-ruffling and nose-pinching first on the men, then in the air while
waltz-stepping away from them.
   In addition, Akerman places Kontakthof’s doll scene in between two backstage
sequences. The first sequence catches moments at various points of time before
the beginning of a performance. It shows us dancers in calm, but also focused
or expectant moods, resting, waiting, and smoking, in street attire; it shows
them getting ready, applying makeup, rehearsing, already in costume, movement
phrases by marking them with their hands. A dancer sits at a piano and plays
a jazz piece, very different from the songs and musical excerpts that Bausch


6
  See Raimund Hoghe, ‘Into Myself — a Twig, a Wall: An Essay on Pina Bausch and her Theatre’,
in The Pina Bausch Sourcebook, pp. 62–73 (p. 67).
7
  For a fuller analysis of the aesthetic of repetition in Bausch, see Gerald Siegmund, ‘Rehearsing
In-Difference: The Politics of Aesthetics in the Performances of Pina Bausch and Jérôme Bel’, in
The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, ed. by Rebekah J. Kowal, Randy Martin, and Gerald
Siegmund (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 182–97.

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                 Minor Gestures: Chantal Akerman’s Un jour Pina a demandé…


chooses for her performances. We hear muffled talk. Another dancer is tying his
tie and smoothing his hair in front of a full-length mirror. A female performer
quietly sings ‘My Bonnie lies over the Ocean’ while applying powder with a
brush.8 The backstage sequence that succeeds the recording of Kontakthof’s final
passages displays a different mood; quick changeovers during a performance
indicate an alert atmosphere. We see a male dancer (Lutz Förster) first standing,
apparently just having changed into a new outfit, then sitting in front of a
makeshift mirror in dim light while two women and two men help him with the
final touches of his makeup and clothes. The film cuts to Dominique Mercy in
pin-stripe suit who refreshes the foundation on his face, using a powder puff to
cover the sweat. Panadero, chewing gum in mouth, takes over the puff as soon
as he is done. More dancers huddle in front of another mirror to check their
faces. Loud voices intrude from the stage, mingling with whispered chatting in
the wings. Hairspray is passed round, pins attached to buns, hands rubbed clean
with tissues. Mechthild Großmann is having a smoke and sipping coffee. While
we saw Mercy cross-legged against a wall, taking a drag in comfortable clothes
in a moment of rest at the beginning of the first backstage sequence, he is now
smoking again, but in more formal fashion, sitting in his buttoned-up suit on a
chair, with a collected, slightly tense face.
    By including the functional, everyday backstage moves of professional
performers in her documentary, Akerman echoes Bausch’s own principle of
putting on stage and choreographing mundane comportment. Framed by the
camera, quotidian hand moves thus become gestures, acquiring equal value
as those we see in the clips from performances.9 Activating the interventionist
potential of Manning’s concept of the minor gesture, this becoming-gesture
implies the creation by the filmmaker and the choreographer of conditions that
allow for the ‘variability’ of the events or comportments that they work with.10 As
in the scene of the couple in front of the green wall that shows us another version
of the touching that we have witnessed before, it is in this variability that a self-
reflective dimension arises. Akerman chooses and places her scenes so that they
yield gestural commentary on each other. In the case of the backstage sequences,
it is especially the passage with Förster being swiftly looked after by four people
that reflects back on the doll performance. Like Panadero, Förster does not
object to being handled by a group of colleagues. Yet he, of course, receives
services that help him getting ready in haste. In addition, he is in control of what
happens to him, reacting to one of the women’s touches by telling her that she


8
  This song is another element of Kontakthof, sung by the company sitting in a line of chairs parallel
to the back of the stage, in front of the podium that is part of this piece’s stage design; we do not
see the scene in Akerman’s documentary, however.
9
   For the aesthetic of the ordinary gesture in film, see Lesley Stern, ‘Ghosting: The Performance
and Migration of Cinematic Gesture, Focusing on Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Good Men, Good Women’,
in Migrations of Gesture, ed. by Sally Ann Ness and Carrie Noland (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2008), pp. 185–216.
10
   Manning, p. 72.

                                                                                                   67
                                     Lucia Ruprecht


just applied a little too much makeup. By contrast, Panadero puts all her strength
into remaining controlled enough not to react to what the men do to her. She
invests energy into the maintenance of her passivity. This way, she prolongs rather
than shortens her ordeal. Akerman’s clips follow the distribution of masculine
and feminine norms of behaviour that define large parts of Bausch’s œuvre. But,
like Bausch herself, Akerman also diversifies gender performance, by directing
the camera at a man to whom make-up is applied; while filming the doll scene at
such length as to reveal the steadfast endurance of the female performer whose
stamina outlasts the men’s handling. If the functional manual activities of the
backstage setting become gestures through the direction of Akerman’s camera,
the persistent reiteration of hand gestures in the passages that show deliberately
staged behaviour leads us to perceive them in their functionality, rather than their
signification. In this way, and closely echoing Bausch’s own strategies, Akerman
handles touch: valuing the ordinary hand moves of the performers as gestures in
their own right, while taking apart extraordinary gestures by giving us enough
time to perceive them as (dis)functional units of manual operability.


Guiding the Gaze, Taking by the Hand

  Can the directing of the gaze be a gesture, in the sense of taking viewers by the
hand to share a precious selection of impressions with them? Or of making them
cover and uncover their eyes with their hands? In footage of a run-through of
Walzer that is included towards the beginning of the documentary, we see dancer
Héléna Pikon’s head and bust in medium close-up. She is looking at something




         Fig. 2: Un jour Pina a demandé… (Chantal Akerman, 1983). Screen capture.

68
                 Minor Gestures: Chantal Akerman’s Un jour Pina a demandé…


motionlessly, lifting her hands to her head and placing them right and left on her
skull, in a take of about 90 seconds. The weight of her arms very slowly drags her
hands and the skin on her temples down, so that her left eye begins to be slanted
downwards, impeding her vision (fig. 2).11 If we carry out the gesture of the
woman by ourselves, we feel the warmth of our skull, covered by layers of hair,
the pressure of our palms, the slight tension in the arms that are lifted while the
shoulders are held down, and the pull on our skin as the hands ever so slowly
descend along the temples. We also notice the diminution of our visual field with
the increased pull at the corner of our eye. Our sight is being disfigured alongside
the disfigurement of our face. Akerman points up a concern with sight, with
what to watch or acknowledge and, by extension, with what to show, in one of
the brief interviews of the film. We see her sitting on the floor underneath a
window, saying to a woman who is placed towards the left-hand side of the frame,
with her back to us (thus echoing our own position):

        When I watched one of Pina’s performances for the first time a couple of years
     ago — it was Bandoneon — I was overcome by an emotion I can’t quite define. But
     it was very very strong and had something to do with happiness. And now, we’ve
     been following her for two weeks. We’ve been watching her as she works, we’ve seen
     rehearsals, performances, rehearsals, performances. And something else has really
     happened. There really have been moments during which I felt I had to defend myself
     from what was being expressed, moments in the performance when I had to close my
     eyes. And at the same time I don’t understand why.12

    One specific sequence of the documentary seems to re-create this experience.
It is a passage from a performance of Nelken in Avignon, which is inserted shortly
after Akerman’s confession, and makes us want to close our eyes, and ears, in turn.
This wish to defend ourselves is brought about by Akerman’s framing, restricting
our gaze to the events at the front of the stage, while omitting that which happens
in the background. What we see are women and men in evening gowns on a row
of chairs, leaning back and placing their weight on their forearms while pushing
their pelvis up — as if ‘jumping’ with their hips — so that they can change the
crossing of their legs while momentarily being in the air. While we see them first
from behind, the performers grab their chairs several times to rearrange them.
As opposed to the many long, stable takes of the documentary, the camera here
rushes around with the dancers’ actions. Performers are filmed from a low angle
so that we get glimpses of white underpants, worn indiscriminately by all of them.


11
   The image of the woman recalls the beginning of Kontakthof, not included in Akerman’s
documentary, where the performers enact exactly the same gesture of placing their hands on
their skulls, yet moving them down by sliding their hair away towards the back of their necks
when presenting themselves to the audience. A slight gestural variation turns the determined
self-exhibition of Kontakthof into Walzer’s melancholic stare, set to Edith Piaf’s song ‘No, je
ne regrette rien’.
12
   English subtitles, Un jour Pina a demandé… (Chantal Akerman, 1983).

                                                                                            69
                                          Lucia Ruprecht


They repeat their movements at a frantic pace, interspersing their leg-crossing
with fast seesawing passages where they lean backwards and forwards on their
chairs while executing a brief arm routine. There is intensity in the soundscape
too: the music is from Franz Schubert’s string quartet Death and the Maiden,
overlaid with the increasingly urgent cries of a woman whom we do not see and
who breathlessly shouts (in French), as far as we can understand her: ‘This is
impossible! What are you doing? No, no; yes! Stop! Don’t do this’, ending in
a piercing scream, after which Akerman cuts to another backstage sequence.
The particular concurrence of sonic and physical exertion, together with our
ignorance of the full picture, might force many of us to imagine rape. If Akerman
had opened the entire stage to our gaze, we would know that the scene plays out
in front of two large blocks of cardboard boxes that are built by a group of male
performers while the upset woman paces between them, commenting on their
actions. Independent of its filming, the scene is still unsettling as the men do not
respond to the woman’s pleading. The violent imaginary is however held further
at bay. Akerman does not offer us this reassurance.13
   Yet again, in the backstage scenes this imagined violation of intimacy is set
off against a space of safe privacy. Dancers are at ease changing in front of each
other, and in front of the camera — note the filmmaker’s medium close-up of a
bare-breasted female dancer who is brushing her hair.14 Such scenes suggest that
Akerman’s film constitutes a document of friendship. Akerman and her team
lived with the company for three months, and viewers are allowed to re-live this
experience. She begins her documentary in the mode of familiarity, in the middle
of a stage rehearsal, focusing on Bausch giving instructions to her dancers without
informing us about time, place and title of the piece that was being rehearsed at
that moment.15 The documentary ends with a brief snippet of an interview with


13
   She also includes a similarly uneasy scene from Komm tanz mit mir, in which Jo Ann Endicott
fails to convince a single man to dance with her and instead finds herself being encircled by a large
number of men.
14
   In its confidence and ease, this shot of the bare-breasted woman might be the most emancipatory
one of the documentary, next to the shot at the beginning that shows Bausch herself in a loose vest,
visibly not wearing a bra, while directing her dancers on an open-air stage through kind but firm
gestural communication. Is it coincidental that Akerman chose to show Bausch in this outfit, given
that the choreographer is often seen without a bra underneath a vest or T-shirt, and given that bras
were less compulsory in 1980s Europe than they are now? In any case, these shots exude calm
authority, especially when we juxtapose them with staged scenes such as Kontakthof’s underwear-
adjusting march, in which two women continuously fiddle around with the layers underneath their
formal wear.
15
   The lack of establishing shots makes orientation as to which of the pieces we are seeing at
any one time difficult. It is also sometimes not immediately clear whether we are witnessing
performances or rehearsals. To some extent, the subtitles that indicate titles of pieces are helpful
here; but, Akerman certainly did not lay stress on conventional means of continuity and location,
assuming a relaxed kind of acquaintanceship with Bausch’s work. This is differently approached
in Klaus Wildenhahn’s documentary What are Pina Bausch and her Dancers Doing in Wuppertal?,
also made in 1983, which begins with the presumably programmatic confession that the camera
team (always) arrive too late when attempting to catch the liveness of rehearsal work. For a

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                 Minor Gestures: Chantal Akerman’s Un jour Pina a demandé…


Bausch in a dressing room. Akerman, who is behind the camera, asks: ‘Pina, how
do you see your future?’ The sweet and perhaps conspiratorial smile with which
Bausch looks at Akerman before answering that she hopes for love and strength
indicates a little less of the professional distance of other interviews. Familiarity
between filmmaker and choreographer is also an effect of the pervasiveness of
medium shots, medium close-ups, and occasional close-ups, allowing us to gain
much more proximity to the dancers as compared to watching them in a theatre.
Full-body shots that include the feet are rare.16 Mostly, the camera is set at a low
height, omitting the floor and catching performers from the hips upwards. While
this angle is unusual in dance filming, which normally gives much attention to
legwork, it epitomises Akerman’s reading of Bausch as a gestural choreographer.
The familial closeness and perspective of the shots enables us to access gestural
detail, while simultaneously implying the director’s presence. Giuliana Bruno
writes: ‘[a] visitor to Akerman’s world’ — or to Akerman filming Pina’s world
— ‘can even become sensitized to her own position in it. The placement of her
camera sometimes indicates where the author stands in all senses, since it even
includes the measure of her slight height’.17 As Bruno’s move from anatomy
(‘slight height’) to attitude (‘where the author stands in all senses’) indicates,
Akerman’s filmic aesthetic is also an ethics, demonstrating a dedication to
choreographic conduct that echoes Bausch’s own.18
   Such conduct might be best represented by the minor gesture of taking
someone by the hand. As Marina Nordera explores, the motor functions and the
sensory and kinaesthetic qualities of this gesture gain symbolic value in dance.19


discussion of Wildenhahn’s film, see Annemarie Matzke, ‘Was tut Klaus Wildenhahn beim
Filmen von Pina Bausch und ihren Tänzern in Wuppertal? Das Making Of als Ethnografie von
Probenarbeit’, in Die andere Szene. Theaterarbeit und Theaterproben im Dokumentarfilm, ed.
by Stefanie Dieckmann (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2014), pp. 82–99. For a discussion of two
recent documentaries by Lilo Mangelsdorf, Anne Linsel and Rainer Hoffmann, of stagings of
Kontakthof with senior citizens and teenagers, see Christina Thurner, ‘“Wirklich eines meiner
Lieblingsstücke.” Fokus auf Pina Bauschs Kontakthof mit Senioren und mit Teenagern’, in
Dieckmann, Die andere Szene, pp. 100–13.
16
   When recording Mercy’s demonstration of virtuosic feats of ballet technique in Nelken, the
camera suddenly drops down to his feet, echoing the abruptness of the dancer’s display of technical
prowess.
17
   Giuliana Bruno, ‘In Memory of Chantal Akerman: Passages through Time and Space’ in Chantal
Akerman: Afterlives, ed. by Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson (Cambridge: Legenda, 2019), pp.
7–12 (p. 9).
18
   If Akerman is able to pursue and depict Bausch’s gesturality so well, this is because the latter is
characteristic of her own work too, independent of the choreographer. Her Toute une nuit of 1982,
shortly preceding Un jour Pina a demandé…, is a Bauschian collage of gestural scenes that even
includes a dance of objects, in the frontal shot of a couple whose precipitous departure from a
shaking bar table makes their beer glasses tip over to the right, once they have hastily left the frame,
in analogy to the couple’s flight. Also note that Charlotte Garson, in her blurb for the Cahiers du
cinema DVD leaflet, calls Toute une nuit a ballet ‘à la Pina Bausch’.
19
   See Marina Nordera, ‘Prendre par la main,’ in Histoires de gestes, ed. by Marie Glon and Isabelle
Launay (Paris: Actes Sud, 2012), pp. 165–79 (p. 167). Also note the title of Bausch’s 1978 seminal
adaptation of Macbeth, He takes her by the hand and leads her into the castle, the others follow,

                                                                                                     71
                                          Lucia Ruprecht


In footage of a rehearsal sequence of Nelken, Jan Minarik, Urs Kaufmann, and
Förster lead Mercy by the hand. This is set to an instrumental version of the ‘he’ll
take my hand’ line in George Gershwin’s song ‘The Man I Love’, which Förster
enacted in sign language in two previous scenes.20 It is a sequence in which the
performers do not watch each other move, but make each other move, through
gestural intervention. In her documentary, Akerman likewise does not merely
record the choreographer’s work, but intervenes in it, by her choices of what
she shows, and how she shows it; sometimes appeasing its afflictions, sometimes
drawing out their urgency. Like a friend, the film takes Bausch and her dancers
‘by the hand’, as it were, leading them towards new constellations.




which marks the choreographer’s move to her rehearsal method of asking questions; see Gabriele
Klein, Pina Bausch’s Dance Theater: Company, Artistic Practices and Reception (Bielefeld: transcript,
2020), p. 47.
20
   For a queer reading of these scenes, see Eike Wittrock, ‘Pina Bausch backstage, oder:
Tanztheater von hinten’, in Staging Gender – Reflexionen aus Theorie und Praxis der performativen
Künste, ed. by Irene Lehmann, Katharina Rost, and Rainer Simon (Bielefeld: transcript, 2019),
pp. 81–102 (pp. 95–99).

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