In 2007, the choreographer Pina Bausch was awarded the prestigious Kyoto prize. Her acceptance speech was a rare moment when she talked publicly about her work – and, even more unusually, her life. Under the theme of What Moves Me, she spoke about her parents, her teachers, her collaborators, her dancers. She described the impact of the death, at the age of 35, of her partner Rolf Borzik and later meeting Ronald Kay, a poet and professor of aesthetics and literature at the University of Chile, with whom she had a child.
She went on: “Since 1981, the year in which our son Rolf Salomon was born, we have been living together in Wuppertal. After having to experience how a person dies, I have now been allowed to experience how a person is born. And how one’s view of the world changes as a result. How a child experiences things. How free of prejudice it looks at everything. What natural trust is given to someone. In general, to understand: a human being is born. Experiencing independently of this how and what is going on in your own body, how it is changing. Everything happens without me doing anything. And all of this then keeps flowing into my pieces and my work.”
