“You ask me what the reconstruction and the passing on of the piece Wind from West after 40 years means to me. This piece is so full of content and meaning, as primal, pure and true as it was 40 years ago. It is like birth, like love and death. Experiencing Wind from West with John and Mari and The Second Spring with Vivienne and John, and reviving it together with the dancers after such a long time has been exceptionally beautiful.”
Josephine Ann Endicott
Thirty-four years – one generation. Wind from West, the first of the choreographies for Pina Bausch’s Stravinsky-evening Rite of Spring, had not been staged between 1979 and 2013. Premiered in December 1975, the piece was reconstructed in the course of 2013 under the artistic supervision of Dominique Mercy in the form of a cooperation with the Juilliard School in New York, the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen and Tanztheater Wuppertal and thanks to the project funding of TANZFONDS ERBE.
Former dancers of Tanztheater, some of them from the original cast of the premiere, took the rehearsal management: Josephine Ann Endicott, John Giffin, and Mari DiLena. Students of both universities were on stage. The premiere of the reconstructed piece – just like in 1975 as part of the three-part Stravinsky-evening Rite of Spring – took place in the Wuppertal Opera in November 2013. Eight further performances followed, in Wuppertal, Essen, and New York.
The work has been successful not only because of the knowledge and memories of the former dancers. Being able to access the material from the Pina Bausch Archive was essential: video recordings and photographs of the performances, historical programmes, and press material. Video recordings and available documents made the compilation of the stage plans possible and allowed conclusions on the construction of the individual elements of the stage design. Available original costumes were patterns for the reconstruction by the costume tailors of Wuppertaler Bühnen.