Bray was a unique behind-the-scenes champion of twentieth
century theatre, sharing a close personal relationship with Samuel Beckett
for three decades as she tirelessly worked to bring his work, as well as
that of Harold Pinter, Bertolt Brecht and others, to public notice. Notes
Andrew Todd:
Strikingly beautiful, opinionated and headstrong, Bray
had run the course of her career at the BBC by 1961. At the age of 36, she
moved to Paris with her daughters, partly to be closer to Beckett (who was
55) and partly to pursue a freelance career as a translator and critic.
Besides writing for the Observer and appearing regularly on the
BBC programme The Critics, she translated almost all of Duras's
work; Anouilh's Antigone; Pinget's Clope; Genet's
Prisoner of Love; Michel Tournier's The Ogre; works by
Julia Kristeva, Philippe Sollers, Michel Quint, Frederic Richaud and Amin
Maalouf; Flaubert's correspondence with George Sand; and Elisabeth
Roudinesco's biography of Jacques Lacan. She won the Scott Moncrieff prize
for translation four times.
An extraordinary woman by any measure, Bray's final years were marked
by the same fierce independence as the rest of her life: "A stroke in 2003
limited her activity, and left her using a wheelchair. She remained
doggedly independent in a studio flat in the Rue Seguier, proudly reciting
swathes of Shakespeare, Donne and the King James Bible from memory. After
a steady decline in her health, she moved last December to Edinburgh to a
nursing home near her daughter Francesca's house. Resolutely rational and
atheist to the last, Bray eschewed a funeral and donated her body to
science." The full obituary, well worth reading, is here.
Alistair MacAulay in the New York Timesreports the death last night of Merce Cunningham at
the age of 90. "In his final years he became almost routinely hailed as
the world's greatest choreographer," MacAulay writes. "For many, he had
simply been the greatest living artist since Samuel Beckett."
News just in that choreographer Pina Bausch, the creator of the
Expressionism-inspired Tanztheater, passed away today at the
age of 68. From the Deutsche Welle obituary:
Bausch's oeuvre explores memories, questions of identity
and the difficulty of human understanding. Frequently, she thematizes the
difficulty of relations between the sexes. Men and women can flirt
tenderly at one moment, then fling each other violently across the room
the next.
"It is about life and about finding a language to describe
life," she
said. The choreographer, on the whole, usually avoided pinning down or
labeling her creations, preferring to let her audiences make up their
minds.
The Web site for Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal, which features a
biography and full list of her work, is here.
Below is a sample of Bausch's work, a few moments from the
30-minute 1978 piece Café Müller, set to music by Henry
Purcell. In a lecture about Bausch's work presented at Stanford
University, Janice Ross discussed the piece in the context of Bausch's
entire career:
In a dance like Café Müller, a vision of
the kind of gritty working class cafe Bausch's parents used to run in
Germany, physical exchanges are repulsively brutal: A man repeatedly slams
a woman into a wall, and she obliges him by doing the same, grabbing him
about the waist and hurling him at the wall with such violence that he can
only cushion the impact by throwing out his hands and his feet ahead of
him at the last minute. Long before British sculptor Damion [sic] Hurst
was
displaying butchered animals preserved in formaldehyde, Bausch was
pioneering something close to the dance equivalent – the body under
physical and emotional assault suspended in time and space by the framing
device of the stage. ...
Another aspect of Bausch that distresses some American
critics is what seems an almost anti-feminist stance at times.
Indeed, she often pushes familiar male-female interactions to their
extremes, so that they totter on the edge of the humorous and the
anguished. An example is a moment in the middle of Café
Müller where a man and a woman lock in a desperate embrace, only
to be systematically repositioned by a third man so that the woman keeps
sliding from her partner's arms and crashing to the floor. This repeats
nearly a dozen times (repetition is another favorite Bausch device) until
the forlorn couple repeats this brutality on their own in a Pavlovian
response of self-inflicted brutality. ...
In the fifteen years since Bausch's first appearance in Los
Angeles, American postmodern dance has found its own way into the
territory of loss, mortality and pain that initially seemed the almost
exclusive province of Bausch. This is because of AIDS and the specter of
massive tragedy and sorrow that now haunts dance makers in locales far
broader than Germany and Japan. The fact that the rest of the world now
has first hand experience with Bausch's vision is a sad, not joyous
reality. It does however, invite us to regard her works as prophetic in
the way some of the richest and most disquieting art can be.
The clip below also features Bausch commenting briefly in English on
her own
work.
The Guardian brings
news of the