Consoling Carnations – Peter Pabst in a conversation with Wim Wenders

Wim Wenders: The Schwebebahn (suspended monorail) just outside your window! That would take some getting used to for me.

Peter Pabst: That’s actually why I’m here. There’s a story behind this room. I was always at the Tanztheater on a freelance basis, so I never had a set place to work. And then, at some point, I was granted asylum on this floor and took over two rooms. It’s just around the corner from the Lichtburg where Pina rehearsed. Eventually, I realized that Pina enjoyed coming here. Pina was always a bit hard to get a hold of, even when it came to looking at my models. I even started to record the models on video and then I would bring the tapes along to the rehearsal just so Pina could at least see them. But here, she always came here! That was nice. And later, when it became clear that we had to settle someplace else with the company, I said, “Why don’t we go where I’m already at?” And then we moved here and…

Wim Wenders: ...and then you immediately went for the best view...

Peter Pabst: we immediately took over the Schwebebahn (suspended monorail) side of the building, right away and it’s something that I’m happy about, still, to this day. From here you can see the Schwebebahn go by and below, in the Wupper, there’s an egret who is always perched on the same stone there. That was our bird; we loved him.

Wim Wenders: Well, that’s a very important thing, finding the right space, that is. Actually, that ties in nicely with what I wanted to talk about. Dancers need space to dance. They need room to move about; maybe you could even call it a “playing field” of sorts. How does the stage designer contribute to this space? Would you consider yourself a landscape architect in some ways?

Peter Pabst: (laughs)

Wim Wenders: (laughs) See, I did my homework.

Peter Pabst: (laughs) I was curious to see what you’d come up with.

Wim Wenders: Well, we have to start somewhere… So even if it just provokes further discussion: landscape architect, what do you say to that?

Peter Pabst: I’m not intentionally acting as such, but in a certain sense, of course there is some similarity between a landscape architect and myself. If I try and think back on my overall process, all of my thoughts begin with the floor, I think.

Wim Wenders: You must know an awful lot about floors, right? How many types of dance floors are you familiar with? What all do you know about them?

Peter Pabst: By now, yes, I know quite a few things about dance floors. About their appearance, their flexibility, how soft they are or the kind of resistance they offer, the sounds they make or their muteness. I’m constantly creating new surfaces to be used as dance floors. But one of the first things I always think about - and this was especially important for the piece that you just filmed, Vollmond (Full Moon) - is that it’s hell for dancers if the dance carpet gets wet. They fall on their backsides almost immediately.

Wim Wenders: But this isn’t the first time that water was used in one of Pina’s pieces, right?

Peter Pabst: …yes, that’s true, but it’s never been used on the dance carpet! These mats never served as dance floors before. If there was water, there was always something under it. With Arien (Arias), for example, where Pina had water fill the stage for the first time - I was completely jealous, I would have loved for that to have been my stage design - there was an old sisal carpet underneath. That was also a phase during which not much dancing took place.

I also built her an island once, which moved, because I thought that a moving floor could actually be quite nice for dancers to work with. So I made a large island, at least 100 square meters in size, that was floating in water and that moved, or more precisely, that was moved by the dancers’ movements.

Wim Wenders: Which piece was that?

Peter Pabst: It was called Trauerspiel.

Wim Wenders: Yes, of course.

Peter Pabst: So they danced on an island that was floating in water. The island was covered with blast furnace slag - granulated blast furnace slag - and that kind of material is a real nuisance for dancers to work with.

Wim Wenders: That is one of my first questions actually, what was all over the floor in there?

Peter Pabst: Ah, yes, just awful…

Wim Wenders: ...was it blast furnace slag?

Peter Pabst: ...you know, it was so nice because it sparkled and because it was black. But it was like ground glass. I wanted to have a black floor. Everything was supposed to be black: black water and a black floor, and I tried and eventually I came with the idea of…what is the name of that small island near Tenerife…?

Wim Wenders: …Lanzarote...

Peter Pabst: ...I thought of Lanzarote with its black lava sand, but for some reason or another I just couldn’t get a hold of any. And then I found out that they ground blast furnace slag - a byproduct of steel manufacturing - around here. The granulate they make is used to sandblast large steel structures like bridges, for instance. That’s what its intended use is anyway.

Wim Wenders: A local material then, for the Ruhr anyway.

Peter Pabst: Exactly, and I prefer that. I don’t like to look through catalogs in search of theater materials. I like looking around here to find local products.

Wim Wenders: What did you use to ensure that the floor in Vollmond was nonslip?

Peter Pabst: That, well, that was the most difficult task because Pina said to me, “The dancers have been playing around with water a lot.” Those are often the first indications - if I haven’t been at rehearsals - and then she tells me something like that, then I know, well, it would probably be a good thing if the set design allowed for the usage of water. (laughs)

I really wanted to create a river. A dark, silent, calm stream… But I also knew that the dancers were going to be dancing a lot and using the entire stage to do so. Pina also said to me that things would become quite wild and reckless toward the end of the piece. If there was a lot of water on the stage, then the whole thing was going to get very wet once this happened. So I knew that I had to find a dance carpet that would allow the dancers to dance without inhibition or limitation whether the floor was wet or whether it was dry. As the stage designer, the last thing I ever want to be is a hindrance to the performers. And that became one of the most complicated…

Wim Wenders: Did a material exist?

Peter Pabst: No. At the beginning at least there was no material that I knew of, so I asked myself what sort of public places have to address similar problems. There were, I figured, almost undoubtedly strict regulations with regard to safety in such instances, and they must have found a way to solve such a problem. Public swimming pools for example, I thought, are just such a place.

At this time, the Olympic Winter Games were taking place in Turin. An Italian friend had designed a place for the Games that was used in the evenings to host presentation ceremonies. We had spoken earlier about his design for this place. So, I called up this friend and I asked, “What did you use for the floor?” I figured it was similar to what I was looking for in that there were many spectators who walked around on it even though it was wet and often subject to snow.

Anyway, I was always just poking around in these practical corners. That’s how I found a man in Hamburg who works with surfaces that are covered with water; more specifically, he designs surfaces so that they can be walked upon when wet—perfect for my river.

I also found a company that produces nonslip synthetic floors. They were, however, not perfect for the theater…they were very expensive, very heavy, and very rough—but it was something. Only then, unfortunately, it turned out that when the dance floor was dry that it was too nonslip. It was hurting the dancers’ feet.

So I experimented over and over again with the dancers rehearsing on small pieces of test material. But all of those materials were never really all that good and they needed to be very good. The end of the story then sounds almost like a joke: I took the flooring that was not slippery enough and sprayed it with a somewhat “less efficient” nonslip paint and that seemed to do the trick.

Wim Wenders: Apart from that, have you always limited yourself to black and/or white floors? What other type of dance floors have you designed?

Peter Pabst: I have never used colored dance floors while here in Wuppertal. I’ve used dance carpets in other colors elsewhere in the theater, but never for dance purposes.

Wim Wenders: So, with Pina, only black-and-white?

Peter Pabst: Here it’s black-and-white and nothing else.

Wim Wenders: It does seem as if it’s the best option if one hopes to emphasize the dancers.

Peter Pabst: Yes, and while I was here I was never all that interested in colored floors. There are a number of different materials to work with; I even toyed around with a transparent dance floor once. That one went up in France at some point.

Wim Wenders: What was beneath it then?

Peter Pabst: I played around with the model nonstop, using light and colors and then I laid photographs underneath of it. It was crazy.

Wim Wenders: I did something similar in my office once.

Peter Pabst: Oh?

Wim Wenders: I had a large office space, something like 80 square meters and I laid out an aerial photograph of Venice. It was a beautiful shot of Venice, you could see every canal and every house. We fused it together with some plexi-glass, laid it down, and you could walk over Venice. It was beautiful.

Peter Pabst: It’s beautiful because it’s crazy.

I remember that being a really joyful time for me; I actually amused myself quite a bit. The dance carpet that I found was actually similar to milk glass. You couldn’t actually see through it at all—something that we could have used when filming the door in Café Müller now that I think about—but when you laid it down and put something beneath it, you could see it as if you were looking through clear glass except, of course, the clear glass was a dance floor.

Wim Wenders: But that floor was never danced on?

Peter Pabst: No, we ended up not using that one because I came up with a different design. It was going to be for Nefés originally, but we ended up using it later in Água…there’s a short, comical scene where two dancers creep around beneath it. It looked as if they were just immersed in cloudy water.

Wim Wenders: Tell me about how you came to work with Pina? You did your first piece with her in 1980, so did you begin your longstanding partnership then?

Peter Pabst: Not right then, but soon thereafter, yes.

Wim Wenders: It must have been difficult to take over stage design in Wuppertal following Rolf’s death.

Peter Pabst: Yes, it was difficult for a number of reasons.

Wim Wenders: Talk to me about your piece 1980. In it, there is a deer standing in a meadow.

Peter Pabst: Well, before the deer could stand in the meadow, there had to first be a meadow…

Wim Wenders: …talk about a “playing field”…

Peter Pabst: In the most literal sense…and, once again, we begin with the floor.

The first thing that comes to mind when I think about working on 1980 is a groping sort of sensation, which was born out of my own shyness and cautiousness. That was really difficult. I knew of the sorrow and the loss. I knew of the close relationship that Pina and Rolf shared and the meaning Rolf Borzik held for Pina. And it was difficult at first to make a decision and say: “Okay, I’m doing this.” “I’ll give it a try.”

You can’t say, “I’ll do that,” you have to say, “I’ll try that.”

Wim Wenders: That shyness then was brought to life in the deer?

Peter Pabst: Probably. (laughs) That’s why in the many years since, the shy deer has been plucked clean. (laughs) Whatever the reason, he has managed to stick around and, in the meantime, has become one of the oldest members of our company.

Yes, it went something like this… Naturally, you are under enormous pressure and you think to yourself, I have to create something wonderful. I just have to. And I tried and tried, created every possible stage design and every imaginable model I could think of. And we kept trying - I think you could say it like that - we tried to converse, to talk to one another, something that one, surprisingly enough, always has to learn and relearn so that you can speak with each other. And then, possibly, at some point you no longer have to speak.

Wim Wenders: Pina wasn’t the most talkative person either.

Peter Pabst: No, not at all really, but that wasn’t much of a problem for us actually.

Not terribly long ago we had our first guest performance in China, in Peking, and the Director of the Chinese National Ballet, Zhao Ruhend, asked that Pina and I arrive two or three days early in order to attend a press conference and meet the people there. She also wanted to organize a meeting for us with some local Chinese artists. In this meeting, someone asked, “How do you two work together? How do you debate? How do you talk to each other?” And I said, “Well, by now, we’ve been working together for such a long time” - because it had been some 25 years by then - “After 25 years, we don’t have to talk that much.” Our minds played host to so many of the same images, more than we ever actually realized, we thought thousands of thoughts and had thousands of visions, which we never even realized.

Anyway, Pina interrupted me then and said, “My dear, we’ve never had to talk to each other all that much.” And I thought that was just wonderful because that’s probably one of the secrets as to why we were able to work with each other for so long, so fruitfully, and with such joy.

Wim Wenders: And the two of you did that for the very first time with the making of 1980… the meadow… how did all of that come about? The deer and the spotlight and the first stage design that you created with Pina?

Peter Pabst: It’s actually quite silly how it all happened because of the never-ending, roundabout process with which it began. Because we were running short on time, we discussed using a previous design. I even thought of planting a vegetable garden in the room used in Kontakthof. (laughs) As I said, this was the phase when there was not an excessive amount of dancing happening. But then, I remember, I had - in another context - leafed through a beautiful book about Fellini that Peter Zadek had just given to me as a gift - and in there, there was a photograph from the filming of La Dolce Vita, I think…a picture from a night shoot. And there was a field with all of the technical equipment from the film strewn about on it. The scene was immersed in such an unreal light, which is normal when one tries to light the nighttime as if it were daytime. I thought, “Wow, that’s beautiful!” If I just completely cleared the stage except for the walls and then covered it in real grass, then the theater is in a meadow…it would smell like grass and insects would move about freely in the light from the spotlights. I showed Pina the picture then and she was all for the idea, so I began. And that’s how it all came about.

Wim Wenders: So, grass that can be rolled out in strips?

Peter Pabst: Yes, the kind you can buy.

Wim Wenders: Do you have to water it?

Peter Pabst: Yes, you have to water it…and give it light, aerate it, sometimes even mow it. And at the beginning you have to clean it. That’s one of my favorite memories. Back in 1980, sod was still pulled directly from the ground. A special husking machine was used to skim about 5-6 cm below the surface of the field. There were three layers: the blades of grass, the roots, and the dirt. The pieces were then rolled in individual widths and delivered to the theater. Well, when we rolled out the first shipment on the stage it was obviously very dirty because the dirt from the underside was stuck to the blades of grass on the topside of the strip. In a normal garden, the rain takes cares of washing this away, but we weren’t expecting rain on the stage anytime soon. So, I went to the facilities manager here and asked him if he could send two cleaning ladies down to the stage with vacuum cleaners to vacuum the fresh grass. And he did. Well, I sat in the auditorium, not making a sound and watching these two women in their blue work uniforms. They were the very first “visitors” to this meadow that I had created and I heard what they had to say about what must have seemed like nothing more than a joke that some utterly absurd person had come up with. That’s just a memory now though because it’s been a long time since sod was taken directly from the ground like that, now it is grown using nylon nets and its free of dirt and germs.

Wim Wenders: Were the dancers able to move about properly on such a surface? Was that the first time that most of them had performed on such a surface?

Peter Pabst: No, the meadow was quite a new idea, but they had already gained some experience with similarly challenging surfaces…

Das Frühlingsopfer (The Rite of Spring), for example, had already been there, with peat moss. Then there was Arien, which featured water. Both of these remained quite unruly surfaces that were difficult to work with. I think the leaves that were used in Blaubart … (Bluebeard …) weren’t that influential, by which I mean that their effect on the elongation of the body and on the dancers’ movements was minimal. So the experience was not entirely new, only the grass and the technique used on it were new.

Wim Wenders: You made visible that which, thus far, had remained invisible…

Peter Pabst: …we took those things that one normally hides - the lighting techniques, the cameras, the monitors - and we simply put them on display in the field. And that’s something that I really like to do. I am a slovenly kind of man, not much of an aesthete, but rather someone who prefers things to be a bit sloppy. Anyway, this field was always more and more cramped. And then, at some point, I dragged a deer onstage. And that - getting that deer on that stage - that was far from easy.

Wim Wenders: Where did you find it?

Peter Pabst: Well, I called around a bit to a few natural history museums and to some taxidermists just to see what people had available.

Wim Wenders: It looks like Bambi…

Peter Pabst: I remember that both Pina and I briefly entertained the idea of calling the piece Bambi. (laughs)

Anyway, I just called around asking if anyone had a deer until I found one. I only discovered later that in many countries it can be quite difficult to travel with a stuffed deer.

There was also a sprinkler on the field. These things, these banalities, they suddenly worked, things that you otherwise could never design or do - in the meadow, they work.

Wim Wenders: I bet that interests you, piques your interest, when something doesn’t work or when someone says, “Impossible.” You’re the one always ready to give it a try, right?

Peter Pabst: Yes.

Wim Wenders: Then you want to be the one to do it…

Peter Pabst: Well, otherwise I think to myself, maybe I’m actually just kind of lame. But, if something doesn’t work, I just can’t have that…I’m not good at losing…I have to admit that. (laughs) I just don’t like it.

Wim Wenders: But when exactly are certain things introduced? I don’t fully understand that side of things yet. On the one hand you have Pina’s scenic ideas, her ideas with regard to dancing, but then there is this huge puzzle, if you can call it that, related to this topic, if you can even call it a “topic” per say… Where do the visual ideas come into play? At which point do you include yourself, or, do you just kind of slide in somewhere along the line? How did you productively interact with each other? I’d like to know more about that. When do ideas come to you from out of the rehearsal phase and you’re able to say, “Now I can get started.”

Peter Pabst: One always thinks that there must be some kind of point of departure, a concrete starting point. This, “Now we’re starting, now I’m ready to go!” that you mentioned, in my experience such a moment does exist when you’re working on a film or an opera, and even most times when you’re working in the theater, but that was never the case with Pina. Yes, with Pina there really wasn’t any assumption that there was a single point of departure: a single text, a singular idea about the piece, about the music, anything like that. Actually, it always became clear to me after the fact that I had actually already begun.

At the beginning I had this problem when designing my model boxes, they always seemed like these gaping black holes. And this wasn’t a problem that Pina could really help me with either; she didn’t have much of anything yet either. So I just began to play around so that there was at least something filling the emptiness that plagued my model boxes. Sometimes I put something in that I had already had.

We never talked about it beforehand, how something could come to be, probably because doing so early on would have limited Pina’s work. There should be, must be an entire adventure, a journey of discovery that takes place.

Wim Wenders: Nevertheless, it interests me, the way in which you both pushed each other along.

Peter Pabst: It sounds like a contradiction, I know. On the one hand, the process of approaching a new piece never really changed in the nearly thirty years that Pina and I worked together. On the other hand, we never really developed a strict recipe by which we worked that would allow me to clearly answer your question. We both began independent of one another. And in that stage I am certain that Pina had more concrete thoughts than I did. She just never talked about them, most likely because she couldn’t yet formulate them or didn’t yet want to. She was extremely cautious with her words.

Wim Wenders: Then it’s probably better if, rather than talking about things in a general sense, we take each piece individually and consider how things moved back and forth between you both within the context of each of them.

Peter Pabst: I know that I snuck up on many of the things I attempted rather unexpectedly, sometimes using pictures, sometimes using things that were already in model form. Mine was a search for small worlds that could play host to the world of one of Pina’s future pieces and the world of her dancers. At the beginning though this search was always somewhat aimless, diffuse, a game played amidst the fog if you will.

Wim Wenders: But at some point you must have known what could reasonably be put into one of your boxes and that, whatever that was, it had work with Pina’s ideas as well.

Peter Pabst: Yes, of course. It would have been idiotic to push for a set design that was absent of Pina or that went against her. But the beginning stages were never heavily formulated for us, everything was much more playful than that, much more tentative. And at first, Pina didn’t usually have very concrete ideas either. In our first five years working together, I was constantly asking her if she had any idea as to where something was going or where it could possibly go. And for five years I got the same answer, “You know, I am always trying to listen to what’s inside of me, but there is something covering it up, it’s not yet coming to the surface.” And after five years, I stopped asking.

Wim Wenders: Then it’s probably the case that she was actually quite happy when you came up with something concrete because it gave her something she could take hold of.

Peter Pabst: Yes, but not at first. In the beginning, Pina didn’t want anything. I think she wanted nothing more than to not be disturbed. Now that we’re discussing it, I think she wanted to see what she was discovering with the dancers at the beginning of a production, or what she was trying to discover with them, in a pure manner, unbiased by a geography or an atmosphere that I had created. She was simply looking without distraction and checking to see if what she found was any good. On a neutral surface - black dance carpets. And I didn’t push back against that. Maybe once or twice I mentioned an idea or laid a picture on the table, a sketch. But if Pina did not immediately react, I packed it away by the end of the rehearsal. I thought to myself, the suggestion is either not good enough or she doesn’t want to see anything right now. I never tried to push anything through. My philosophy was that an idea must already be so good in its first moments that it just radiates…

Wim Wenders: Then countless ideas must have fallen by the wayside.

Peter Pabst: Many, an unbelievable number actually. It was similar to a lavishly filmed movie, a shooting ratio of at least 1 to 10 or something like that.

Wim Wenders: Then let’s go through everything starting from the beginning. We’ve already talked about 1980, what were things like with Nelken (Carnations)?

Peter Pabst: With Nelken…

Wim Wenders: ...a classic!

Peter Pabst: At some point, Pina and I talked about flowers, about Holland. In spring they play host to these countless fields of flowers.

Wim Wenders: But those are tulips!

Peter Pabst: Yes, you’re right, they’re fields of tulips. And they are breathtaking, it’s like something out of a fairy tale and when you see them...

Wim Wenders: A huge colored surface…

Peter Pabst: ...it’s just incredible! The way that it was sowed with this intensity and in which the color combinations were disseminated…it was as if the farmers were all painters. You think to yourself, I must be crazy, this frenzy of color. Pina had also talked about fields blossoming with carnations. She had seen them in Chile. And I found carnations fascinating because in the sixties they maintained a rather formal disposition; they conformed to a middle-class sensibility. For whatever reason, one always brought carnations along when visiting someone…normally, small bouquets of five or seven flowers. And later on, for this reason, carnations were seen as quite bourgeois despite the fact that they’re actually lovely flowers.

At the time, we hadn’t yet settled on this as our stage design, but it was at least a possibility that was out there. And then I took the idea and tinkered around with it until I came up with some crafty, off-the-wall piece of work, that much I know.

Wim Wenders: Using plastic flowers or what?

Peter Pabst: No, this was a model. It’s impossible to draw a field of carnations.

Wim Wenders: How did you do it then?

Peter Pabst: I tore sponges into the smallest bits possible, stuck each piece on a pin, and then dipped each pin into some pink paint. Then I just stuck them wherever I could to allow them to dry. I did that until I had about (laughs) 3000 of them. It was a really contemplative process; I didn’t see or speak to another person for an entire week. Me! But when I was done, I had created a field of pink carnations in my model box. But then I thought, that’s probably a bit too saccharin. Just around that time I made a film with Tankred Dorst. We filmed it on the border with the former East Germany. And there was always this border fence, staggered across the varying levels of the area, and between those areas—chained to running wires—ran these half-starving German shepherds who tried to catch anyone who dared to jump the border. Horrible!

So this crossed my mind and I thought, maybe I should have the field of carnations being patrolled by German shepherds, combat against that sugary sensation. Pina liked the idea of dogs barking…

Wim Wenders: Sure…

Peter Pabst: I wanted to stretch running wires to the right and left of the stage and thought, I’ll call the police and they’ll give me two German shepherds. They just have such beautiful, well-trained and behaved German shepherds. Unfortunately, an official with the Wuppertal Police Department explained to me that there was no way I would get the dogs from them. Why not? “Because when a riot breaks out, our dogs are trained to run in amongst it all. And if they were to be put on a stage with loud music and dancers moving all over the place, then for them it might as well be a riot and no one will be able to hold them back anymore.” He gave me some good advice though: I would be better off looking for privately owned dogs, preferably from families with children.

Wim Wenders: …and where they make a lot of music.

Peter Pabst: And where they make a lot of music! And where they have become accustomed to everything and (laughs) are ready for just about anything. So I found two German shepherds who met all of these requirements, but they didn’t work out that well either. The one discovered the chairs on the side of the stage that was being used for Nelken. It was soft and upholstered with velvet and he laid down on that chair—obviously the most comfortable he had yet to encounter in his entire dog life thus far—and absolutely refused to come down off of his seat…and he proved successful in his refusal.

Wim Wenders: He was the wrong dog for the job.

Peter Pabst: He was the wrong dog for the job and the second one wasn’t much better. He actually had a nervous breakdown the first time that the music was turned up. He planted himself and didn’t stop peeing after that. (laughs) Anyway, it didn’t really come together. They did whatever they wanted to do and were constantly barking, the thing that Pina was really looking forward to pairing with the pink carnations, at least in theory. But after a while, as background noise goes, it became very stressful and we both thought that there must also be moments in the piece during which no dogs were barking. And so, what we ended up with in the end was four dogs that were controlled by their owners the whole time.

Wim Wenders: That’s wonderful…how an idea like that develops over time.

Peter Pabst: Yes, it has a life of its own. That’s why it’s so difficult to answer the question: how does something originate, or how does something begin?

Wim Wenders: And then the dancers had to learn how to move amidst all of the carnations?

Peter Pabst: Then they had to learn how to dance in the carnations. Yet another thing that was far from easy! And again, first, the carnations had to be there.

I had a very small budget for the piece. You could buy plastic flowers in Germany, but they were only available at a high price. And no one had carnations. As I said before, they were seen as being bourgeois and no one wanted to buy carnations anymore, let alone plastic ones…so no one was manufacturing them anymore.

I calculated that for the Wuppertal Stage I would need about 8000 flowers. They didn’t have that many flowers at the market, I couldn’t afford to pay for that many flowers, and we were about four weeks away from the premiere. Now, there’s a reason or two to lose some sleep at night.

But, I woke up around five one morning; I was drenched in sweat and in a real panic about the whole situation, wondering where else in the world people make plastic flowers. And then - it just came to me - I saw hardworking yellow hands before me…making flowers. Of course, I thought, Asia! I was in a frenzy, found the number, waited until nine, and then called the business sections of every Asian embassy in Bonn. “Are plastic flowers made in your country?”

I got lucky with the Thai Embassy. They gave me the name of a contact in Hamburg and put me in touch with a manufacturer in Bangkok. Mr. Rumpf, the importer in Hamburg, called me back after a few hours and made an offer, 8000 carnations in three different colors to be delivered via airfreight to the Wuppertal Opera House within twenty days.

Out of that, a friendship was formed, because he has handled all of our flower needs for a long time now. He had an older Chinese man working in manufacturing - he made, I assume, jeans and t-shirts - who had manufactured plastic flowers at one point in time. And whenever I came to them with an order, then this man would switch jobs and take to producing pink carnations for us, and - later on - other types of flowers as well.

Wim Wenders: Always 8000 of them right off the bat?

Peter Pabst: No, it worked just as well with two thousand of them. In any case, I received the flowers and did so with enough time to spare, and I’d even managed to get them for a price I could afford. It was a small miracle.

But, the first time they were planted, now that was really miraculous…this glowing field of pink carnations on the stage of the Wuppertal Opera House… it wasn’t saccharin at all, it was like something from a dream.

And, of course, then came a very rude awakening: they break when the dancers dance in them!

Wim Wenders: Yeah...

Peter Pabst: …I never forgot that. I really loved Pina and one reason was that in this particular situation she showed how easy she made it for someone think and act in an entirely crazy manner, even when it comes to stage design.

What she said to me was, “We could create a scene where all of the carnations are consoled.” She referred to this as “consoling carnations” and what she meant was that the bent flowers would be straightened once again. (laughs) And I never forgot that gesture from her…Pina wanted to console my carnations. We didn’t end up doing that though because it turned out that their deterioration was equally beautiful. There was an unbelievable aesthetic effect created by the field of carnations…the way in which it glowed with warmth at the start of the piece. Then later on there is this moment when, in a deaf and dumb language, Lutz Förster tells, or dances The Man I Love and suddenly the lights come up…the entire stage just shone in this blazing shade of pink. So we realized at some point that it was actually very beautiful that the flowers would break throughout, beautiful that they were in some way ruined. Excuse me; I’m probably talking too much…

Wim Wenders: ...no, this is wonderful; I always wanted to know these things.

Peter Pabst: Let me say one more thing about the whole “consoling carnations” situation. That’s a small example of the free, complicated, and yet breezy fantasy that Pina displayed in her work. It was unique. And that’s how she handled difficulties: not burdened by or complaining about them, she approached them rather imaginatively. She disposed of difficulties in that she immediately made them into something else. Consoling carnations!

And now, having spoken so much about the uncertainties, it’s striking for me to see that, yes, in fact, there was one great certainty: no matter what type of design I came up with or wanted to make, I could always be certain that Pina and the dancers would put it to absolutely beautiful use… they would make it a part of their world as best as they possibly could. And to think of the freedom that such a certainty brought to the set designs… Maybe that’s another part of the symbiotic relationship: I always designed the sets for them and they freed me from them by taking them over.

The field of carnations also had another side effect… take Amsterdam for example. We put Nelken up there and on the day following the premiere, sitting in front of the theater, there were these loud stagehands - the kind with missing teeth and broken nose bones and big tattoos… nothing was as normal as it is nowadays. Anyway, they were sitting there in the sun and straightening pink carnations. On the street, along a canal! It was a wonderfully absurd sight to see: these men, who most people would be scared to run into on the street, sitting there and making pink carnations.

Wim Wenders: Were there wires in the flowers?

Peter Pabst: Yes, there is wire in each of them.

Wim Wenders: Did that pose a danger to the dancers?

Peter Pabst: Sure, it could have, but that remained highly unlikely. I thought a great deal about the floor from the earliest stages… so I ended up with a floor that I could stick the carnations into without them flying back out as soon as someone came in contact with them. The greater the number of loose flowers scattered about on the floor, the greater the danger of injury. Thus, the floor itself became a relatively complex creation: wooden panels with holes in them, under those a fibrous insulating material that was used for thermal and/or acoustic insulation in homes at the time.

Wim Wenders: That’s a somewhat softer material?

Peter Pabst: That’s right, it is a soft material. Today it’s most often made of foam, but back then you still got fiber insulating board. It was similar to pressed coconut fibers or something along those lines…

Wim Wenders: ...so sound dampers like those on your ceiling here?

Peter Pabst: Exactly. They serve two functions: first, the fibers held the flower stems very tightly, and, second, they made the floor anechoic, meaning that the wooden surface no longer came in contact with the stage floor and, as such, no longer made such a terrible banging sound…

Wim Wenders: Let’s move on to Auf dem Gebirge hat man ein Geschrei gehört (On The Mountain A Cry Was Heard) – what kind of “field” did you play with and on for that piece?

Peter Pabst: That, like so many of my ideas, came from a photo. I have to think…it could have been one by Diane Arbus though I’m not certain. Either way, I found a photo…all that was depicted was the edge of a forest, a pine forest in the mist. Earth and fog…heavy earth, a field that was raked over everyday… But then I thought, that’s not what it is…I added a slightly warped slope to the field that was hardly noticeable when one looked at it, but that nevertheless lent a new tension to the picture. From front to back, the surface rises 20 cm on the left hand side and 30 cm on the right hand side. The sloping curves into itself, but only minimally…it’s not visible, but it’s palpable.

Wim Wenders: For the dancers it was probably quite an incline though.

Peter Pabst: No, they barely noticed it. It’s only about a 2% incline. The normal gradient of a stage upon which dancers are able to dance with no problem is between 3 and 5.5%. Of course, people looked at me strangely, not understanding why I would want to build such a surface - a slanted area of such a large-scale that cannot even be seen. And it was a massive construction effort. But, the one time that I omitted it from a rehearsal because we were running short on time, I allowed the dirt to be shoveled directly on to the stage surface and it was as if someone had unexpectedly covered your ears. That’s what it felt like…so boring, so unsatisfying. It just didn’t work without the slanted surface…that was now clear to everyone involved. Still, it remained, in every respect, a difficult floor.

Wim Wenders: Did the dirt stick to the dancers’ feet?

Peter Pabst: Sometimes. We were always walking a thin line between keeping it wet enough so that it didn’t raise up dust and dry enough so that no one lost their balance or had mud sticking to their feet. In any case, it was challenging for the dancers because it’s an irregular surface. The larger clumps of dirt had to be both coarse and secured. You notice those beneath your feet quite plainly. And then…

Wim Wenders: Then you...

Peter Pabst: ...then, at some point, I began to play around with fog.

Wim Wenders: Yes, the fog. Let’s talk about the fog.

Peter Pabst: I’ll get there, but I want to do it in a roundabout fashion. In the 1970s, I did set and costume design for Peter Zadek’s production of Hamlet in Bochum. The production was taking place in a renovated factory building. It featured an exceedingly poetic Hamlet, though that poeticism was very raw and brittle. Magdalena Montezuma was playing the ghost of Hamlet’s father. All I did for her was simply set up a crate that had a golden Baroque mirror frame set up before it. Magdalena would sit on the crate in the frame and was the picture of Hamlet’s father. And whenever the ghost would appear, she would stand up and step out of the frame…and then I would be there with my fog machine and I made her a cloud. (laughs) That was her ghostly guise. She always moved about in a cloud while I hissed and sputtered at her side.

So I came to the idea because I sensed that Pina and Peter Zadek - both of whom incidentally liked each other and held the other in great esteem - were quite similar. In a certain manner of speaking, both always thought quite simply. That always had something to do with their honesty on the stage… never cheating. What that translates to is: except when the fog is made of tulle, a fog machine makes fog. There is a person, he has a machine, he pushes a button, and when he does that a stream of hissing vapor pours out of a nozzle. This vapor then becomes a cloud, spreads itself out, and eventually envelopes the people onstage in fog. And when that is what is happening, Pina thought the same thing that Zadek did: you should be able to see it as such!

For Pina - at least during the time when we worked together - there was never any interest hiding or concealing anything with the help of large-scale, technical efforts. The reality of what was happening on the stage was the truth of the stage. In Das Frühlingsopfer, when the dancers exhaust themselves so thoroughly that they are panting and sweating and then throw themselves into the peat moss on the stage, then they are “dirty.” It’s just like in Zadek’s Othello where I painted Ulrich Wildgruber black and once the white-skinned Eva Matthes, playing Desdemona, threw herself into his arms out of love, then she too became black. Neither Pina nor Zadek were worried that this would come off as unrefined. Luckily, a crucial part of our cooperation was unquestionably that, from the very start, we shared this carefree nature. Neither of us had to be refined, neither wanted to exaggerate, and neither of us were that interested in technology. I can work with it, but I don’t need it.

Wim Wenders: Who operated the fog machine then? The dancers themselves?

Peter Pabst: No, I was the one holding on to the fog machine most of the time. It was like a paintbrush for me and I painted the air with it, sometimes quite expressively…I veiled dancers and I frightened them, broke up dance lines with fog, they would vanish and emerge once again. It was great fun and resulted in some beautiful images…not to mention a continually shifting mood that could go from the absolutely romantic to the totally frightening and threateningly chaotic from one moment to the next.

Later on then, as the fog found its form, a colleague of mine from the props departments took over.

Wim Wenders: Two Cigarettes In The Dark. In that piece you created a house that, proportionally speaking, was an impossibility and that seemed to falling apart in every way imaginable. It was a really off-the-wall piece. What was that? Where did it come from?

Peter Pabst: It originated out of desperation. I felt at the time as if I had already picked every possible field clean. (laughs) It was as if floors had become totally unfamiliar to me in some way. I just couldn’t do another floor at that moment.

So I took to looking for a room…spoke with Pina about rooms. She understood that I didn’t want to - or couldn’t even - think about floors anymore, and she seemed to be in need of a room as well. I don’t know anymore what the impetus was there. Perhaps it was a picture of a museum space, thus the large windows. They are like display windows. During the time in which I was sketching the room, it became a kind of loony Hotel New Hampshire for me. The doors are to small or too big and you don’t know where they lead to… and the people within it are all a bit crazy or at least behave as if they are.

Wim Wenders: It seems to call on German Expressionism a bit because of the disproportionality of everything…

Peter Pabst: Yes, completely...

Wim Wenders: ... you can see it in the behavior of the people as well.

Was that the first time you used a projection? Those Super 8 images projected on the naked breasts of…I think it was Helena…

Peter Pabst: Yes, that was Helena. They had tried that out in rehearsal and Pina ended up keeping it in the piece.

Wim Wenders: For me, as best as I can remember, that was the first time that something was projected in Pina’s work.

Peter Pabst: Well, prior to that, Pina had shown the film of a birth on a small screen in Walzer. Plus, there was the duck film from Kontakthof.

But, returning to the room. I just started to build and this room is what turned up. I wanted to set up various landscapes outside of each of the window so that they became stages unto themselves.

Wim Wenders: And such strange steps…

Peter Pabst: The steps… they are, architecturally-speaking completely senseless, they lead uselessly to floors above and below. And outside of each window there are further sets: a jungle behind one, a desert with a cactus growing in it behind another, and on the left...

Wim Wenders: That looks to be an aquarium of sorts…

Peter Pabst: Behind the other window, on the left-hand side there, that was indeed an aquarium. In fact, there were three aquariums, which I filled with goldfish. That was somewhat complicated. I always picked the fish up from a breeder, each in its own plastic bag filled with water. Then I would have to set the bag in the aquarium and allow the water within it to slowly even out with the temperature in the aquarium. Only then could I let the fish out of their bags and know that they would be fine. I also, incidentally, learned during this process that wild fish are not the least bit shy. I was able to pet them! They weren’t yet familiar with people.

Later, Dominique Mercy joined the goldfish in the water wearing nothing but white underwear and flippers.

Wim Wenders: Nice. I quite enjoy swimming with fish as well. I have a friend who filled his swimming pool with fresh running water and there were fish in it so you always knew that there was no chlorine or anything of that sort in the water. The fish felt completely at home and were like dogs wagging their tails through the water…and they were always happy to have someone swimming with them…

Peter Pabst: ...they had formed a society then, you know, its not only dolphins that are that curious.

Wim Wenders: Tell me about Viktor. In that piece, anything and everything is brought out onto the stage. You could have decorated multiple stages with all of the things that were on that single stage. Are you also responsible for all of the props and the things that are brought out on the stage?

Peter Pabst: Basically, yes. But, that’s not to say that I invent or design every piece of furniture or every prop that is used. Marion Cito takes care of that in addition to wonderfully costuming our dancers.

Many of these things are already present in the early rehearsals. The dancers will often take care of getting props that they need for their various dance concepts from Jan Szito or Alf Eichholz, our two prop masters. That we have two prop masters in our relatively small company should tell you something about how important the procurement of materials for our pieces is to us. If the dancers want to try something out and need some sort of item to help in that process, then it has to be readily available, otherwise the moment is over before it can be had.

Oftentimes the props remain as they were during rehearsals. Sometimes though, I realize, that from an aesthetic or practical standpoint - or even in some instances for safety reasons - they could or should look different. If so, then I change them, begin to create… but normally time limitations play a role in this process. During the dress rehearsals for Viktor, Pina wanted to have a scene that looked like an auction… and something like that then has to take form in just a few minutes. So you really don’t have much time to think, well, how should this look?

I value that process highly, for me it is educational because it often leads to completely unpretentious solutions. As a designer, normally I wouldn’t think myself a person who would trust such solutions, but sometimes they are exactly what are needed in a given moment. Stepping in without a design idea in mind is very often more refreshing and livelier than the most beautiful design could ever be. In “Viktor”, that took the form of a rather crazed blending of antiques, banalities, and a number of other things…

Wim Wenders: ...an unbelievable amount of furniture.

Peter Pabst: Yes, a ton of furniture. Almost all of those pieces where taken from Die sieben Todsünden (The Seven Deadly Sins) because that was what was most readily accessible… and those also happened to be the only “good” pieces of furniture we had.

Wim Wenders: Used twice, right?

Peter Pabst: Our only options were always to either buy things new or make use of the materials we already had. Renting or borrowing didn’t work for us because we would essentially be kidnapping someone else’s pieces if we were to go on tour.

Wim Wenders: What was in the background there? As far as I remember they looked like pyramids, Incan constructions of sorts on the left and right. What were those things?

Peter Pabst: Where?

Wim Wenders: In Viktor, on both the left and right-hand sides there were these things that rose up from the floor… yes, what were those?

Peter Pabst: Oh, I never thought of them as buildings. They are walls of earth. I just never decided on what they actually were… Perhaps the whole stage was actually a giant pit. Maybe a world remains up above or perhaps reality is just down below. I never reached a definitive conclusion on that.

Wim Wenders: Oh, okay!

Peter Pabst: That was the first time that we did that sort of coproduction.

Wim Wenders: You introduced the concept of coproduction with that piece then?

Peter Pabst: Yes.

Wim Wenders: With the Romans!

Peter Pabst: I think some people in the audience were disappointed with the stage design because they expected broken columns or something like that. But that’s not what we had. It was just earth and overhead Jan Minarik was constantly going back and forth with a shovel. Before every performance, I had tons of dirt brought overhead so that he could be shoveling it onto the stage below for the next three and a half hours.

Wim Wenders: He must have really been slaving away.

Peter Pabst: Yes, that was an extremely labor intensive set design.

On the evening of the first day of technical setup everything looked terrible… the parts were all covered in scratches from being transported, it was noticeable that they were individual parts, white spots and crumbs all over the place. Terrible! It was enough to make you want to cry. I was horrified and indescribably disappointed. Realizing how disappointed I was, Pina modestly suggested I clear away some of it, cordon it off with red-and-white plastic tape and effectively convert it into a construction site. It was actually a rather brilliant idea. I responded quite virulently against it though because I wanted to finish the design properly first. And if she had continued to prefer it, then I would have happily organized her construction site.

The next day we took to improving the design with painstaking care and, in the end, I sprayed the entire thing with glue and threw fresh dirt against it. The result was stunning. The earth shimmered like brown velvet in the light. This extremely dark space was like a warm blanket enveloping the dancers. It protected them. Every time we assembled it thereafter, we would spray the whole construction down with glue again and throw fresh dirt against it. Just as you said: slaving away. It was madness! It was so much effort and so much earth that after 17 years the pieces could no longer be lifted because they were too heavy and we had to build the set anew. But, I think, the design deserved such meticulousness…and Pina’s piece deserved it even more. For me, Viktor remains one of the most multifaceted and richest pieces from Pina’s oeuvre. And this stage space that was created was not only filled with life, but the space itself lived at some point. A large space that is entirely clean at the beginning slowly but surely becomes overgrown… thanks especially to Jan who unrelentingly shoveled a vast amount of dirt from above onto the stage surface below.

Wim Wenders: Thereafter, things were a bit off-the-wall, like with Ahnen and the cactuses that were on the stage. How did you make those?

Peter Pabst: I think I found a photo of some cactus-covered landscape, something that wasn’t especially nice, even a bit boring actually. Still, I really love large cactuses. I have always dreamed of one day having a house in the desert of Arizona, a simple house made of wood… but there would have to be at least three large cactuses standing in front of it. Anyhow, Pina liked the idea of cactuses onstage as well, but it was all a bit off kilter at first, at least when I began to make the models. I wondered how could I make miniature cactuses? Somehow, they needed to look as if they were alive. Sure, you can sit down and whittle them… carve them out, but then they always end up looking stiff. There is no possibility for irregularity. That’s one of the basic problems you face with such forms when working with small-scale models. I can’t properly imitate the properties of materials - flexibility, elasticity, mobility, exact weight, and surface structure - on a 1:25 scale. These pieces are almost always too thick, too heavy, too brittle, or too rigid. These pitfalls of working with model forms work against creating a model that is true to life. But still, I wanted “living” cactuses! I always thought of cactuses as figures, as people of sorts…

Wim Wenders: ... especially those with what look like bending arms.

Peter Pabst: ... they’re such representative things, aren’t they? In any case, Pina had just picked up some pastries from her favorite café. Café Best, just down on the corner, was a traditional café with its own bakery… and then it came to me. I went over and asked if I couldn’t have a pastry bag. Bakeries have these plastic piping bags, you know, that have metal tips on the end…

Wim Wenders: Sure...

Peter Pabst: ... and they use them to put those dabs of butter cream on their pastries.

Wim Wenders: ... and shortbread cookies!

Peter Pabst: That sums it up nicely! I simply mixed plaster instead of butter cream - it has the same consistency - and I used the pastry bag to “pipe out” cactuses. Then I just had to wait for them to harden.

Wim Wenders: ... for your model?

Peter Pabst: … for my model. Utterly life-like forms… Remembering them pleases me even now because it was such a naïve idea. That’s yet another topic worth discussing. Naivety is so important! You will end up closing so many doors if you approach everything professionally. Pina once said something that gets right to the heart to this point. She said, “For everything that you learn, you also lose something.”

So that is how the cactuses came into being, in the model at least, and I think, in this particular instance, we didn’t really hesitate…we were decided rather quickly. It should be a strange world. And it worked well because the most off-the-wall thing about the evening of the premiere was the piece itself in its entirety. And the fact that we made our decisions so quickly was also a good thing because I wanted to have 50-60 pieces, each between 4 and 6 meters high. And to have that, well, it was already - as often was the case - too late. But the design had to be strong… just like in Arizona…

Wim Wenders: Was that a coproduction as well?

Peter Pabst: No, just Wuppertal…

So anyway, the technical director and the workshop bristled and balked because of how close we were cutting it - as I said, this back-and-forth had become a tradition of sorts - until finally the manager of the workshop - at the time, Leo Haase - said, “If the first sketches are left with the porter by seven in the morning tomorrow, then I’ll get started.” So, overnight I drew three cacti as I thought they should look and the workshop produced samples from them. That way we were able to get a feel for them and discuss how they could be improved. Luckily enough though, the samples were so good that we were able to take them as they were. In the meantime then, I sketched the rest of them and the workshop made those additional 50 pieces for us.

Wim Wenders: From what type of material?

Peter Pabst: Wood, steel, Styrofoam, and laminated surfaces… classic theater materials. I have a very precise sense of sculptural forms… most of my set designs for Pina’s pieces are large-scale sculptures, that was the case with Viktor, Ahnen, O Dido, Wiesenland, Rough Cut, Ten Chi, and Vollmond. In each of these pieces I remained very conservative with regard to my choice of materials and technique. That has something to do with my sense of form and the way I design my molds, but also something to do with Herbert Rettig, a dear friend and wonderful set sculptor who helped make each of these pieces a reality.

Wim Wenders: Did the cactuses have spines?

Peter Pabst: Now there’s a “prickly” subject! Up to that point, they didn’t have any spines, but I always thought that that was stupid…

Wim Wenders: That’s what I would think...

Peter Pabst: ... a cactus without spines isn’t really a cactus at all. But what do you make cactus spines out of? So the search began. And this search in particular was another one of those wonderful Wuppertal experiences…

Wim Wenders: (laughs)

Peter Pabst: So many ugly things have been said about Wuppertal…it’s boring, bland, there is nothing going on and so on - maybe it appears as such at first glance - but behind that surface you always find something surprising. So I drove around and kept an eye out for something that could be transformed into cactus spines. Most of the time, Leo Hasse joined me in this quest. He knew all of Wuppertal’s hidden corners and he and I were good friends. In any case, at some point in our searching we came to this place. I wouldn’t even be able to find it today… it must have been on the other side of Tal heading toward Varresbeck or something. But there, beneath the trees, there was an old manufacturing hall and an office building, both very small. There was a woman in her late sixties there, wearing a floral print blouse with gray woolen gloves on - funny that I still remember that now, woolen gloves with the fingers cut out of them. The whole scene looked like something out of a film set in the 1930s. Two men came out from the warehouse and they were wearing these long gray coats, woolen gloves, and flat caps. They produced brooms to sweep the streets with there...

Wim Wenders: Ah ha!

Peter Pabst: I was, of course, interested in the material they were using for the bristles. And I was able to buy it from them directly as a raw material, a bundle about 1.5 meters long made out of nylon rods that were about 1-1.5 millimeters thick.

Wim Wenders: Earlier something like that would have been made of brushwood, right?

Peter Pabst: They were nylon bristles by now...

Wim Wenders: ... and you stuck them into the cacti.

Peter Pabst: Yes, but not right away. At first, these nylon bristles were so tough that I couldn’t even break them. I had to cut them into short pieces for the spines. And then as soon as I entered the workshop and mentioned the word spines, they were ready to declare me insane…I just missed out on being committed. They knew right away that we were talking about thousands upon thousands of spines. And, as usual, we were running short on time.

It was clear to me that only setting a precedent would help get the job done properly and on time. So I hid away one evening and allowed myself to be locked in the theater overnight. Then, I worked through the night and outfitted a cactus with the bristles…bored holes and then glued the spines into them.

Wim Wenders: You actually bored holes?

Peter Pabst: Well, no. I would just poke holes in the cactus and then stuck a small bundle of spines into it. I thought to myself, if there is a cactus with spines standing there when they walk in tomorrow morning, then there’s no turning back. And they got the message first thing at seven the next morning when they arrived. I’ve rarely raised such a racket in the theater. But then, sure enough, one of the most wonderful theater miracles I have seen in my life took place.

Wim Wenders: That doesn’t surprise me...

Peter Pabst: Well, word of the problem spread quickly and soon everyone was coming by to help. Not just the workmen either. Not only were there metalworkers, carpenters, painters, stage technicians, lighting technicians there, but people from the management and the script departments as well, all of them. If someone had twenty minutes to spare, they came by to help put spines in these cactuses. The whole theater shared the responsibility and little by little the cactuses grew more and more spiny. It was truly magical.

Wim Wenders: You must have guarded them jealously thereafter, these cactuses…

Peter Pabst: Yes, that’s another topic. I really wish that they were handled in a manner that reflected just how precious they were… how costly they were in both the literal and figurative sense of the word.

But, that is not where the story ends because soon enough I realized that these new bushes of spines were too straight…

Wim Wenders: Oh no! What now?

Peter Pabst: … they really didn’t look authentic. They were all parallel to one another and completely uniform. I thought about what else I could do to these cactuses and then I thought, I wonder if they’re sensitive to heat. Well, I got a hold of a superheated air fan, which is often used to remove varnish, and as soon as the hot air hit the spines they shot out in every direction.

Wim Wenders: Great.

Peter Pabst: So then I spent hours blow - drying - a hairdresser for cactuses, that’s me!

Wim Wenders: Somehow that makes perfect sense when considering the obliqueness of the piece.

Peter Pabst: Yes.

Wim Wenders: After that then, if we can move on to the next piece, there was an even bigger bang if you will. (laughs) It was another of these…

Peter Pabst: Which piece came next?

Wim Wenders: …seemingly impossible sets, this time because of the wall that collapses in it. Palermo Palermo: that must have been the piece where you were, once and for all, deemed insane.

Peter Pabst: Yes, well, in that piece the challenges faces were much more serious in nature.

Wim Wenders: Did you consider what you were going to do with the wall from a structural engineering point of view at first? How did you go about the whole thing? You can’t just topple a wall like that…

Peter Pabst: I don’t know if I’ve shared this before… it was the autumn of 1989.

Wim Wenders: Oh, well, of course, there were a few walls coming down at that time

Peter Pabst: Which proved problematic in some ways because there was no longer any way for us to make clear to people that our wall coming down had nothing to do with the one that fell in Berlin.

Wim Wenders: Sure.

Peter Pabst: It was really in the autumn of ’89! (laughs) But, we brought down our wall 14 days earlier.

That was yet another period of desperation. We weren’t coming up with anything. Pina was exasperated and so was I. I had already tried a number of things out for the new piece, among them an orchard in bloom. Everything was very pretty, but nothing more than that… and you always know when that’s the case…you feel when something isn’t there or when something isn’t the way it should be. Well, during a break between two rehearsals, Pina and I sat there alone in the Lichtburg - you know the Lichtburg, the former movie theater from back in the 1950s?

Wim Wenders: Okay, yes.

Peter Pabst: And as was the case with movie theaters in the fifties, the walls of the Lichtburg were covered with this sort of corrugated plastic film called Acella. Over time though this wall covering in the Lichtburg had been torn in certain places and you could see the bare masonry behind it. And in the midst of our silent despair, Pina turned to me with a timid smile and said, “Look at that, it looks like a wall behind a curtain.” Silence…maybe ten minutes of nothing… and then I said, “We could build a wall.” And after another ten minutes Pina asked, “How so?” Me: “We could wall up the stage portal.” Finally she said, “And how do we get rid it of after that?” And I thought about it and then, “We could knock it over.” Pina thought about it for a minute and then said, “You know, I don’t think I like it. When I think about the noise that Styrofoam makes when it falls… I don’t think I like it…” And then I said, “I mean a real wall…” And then came another of those long silences. After four, maybe five minutes Pina looked at me and said, “You’re crazy!”

Wim Wenders: Like a Beckett piece.

Peter Pabst: It was totally a Beckett piece…that was the birth of the wall in Palermo Palermo.

Wim Wenders: You don’t respond well to that, do you… someone refusing you something?

Peter Pabst: No, I don’t.

For the wall then, I first took to looking for the proper material, for stones with which I could not only build a wall in a reasonable amount of time, but for stones that would also allow me to do so safely so that it could be trusted when other people were near it on the stage. It was already clear to me that the wall could not be built of bricks…

Wim Wenders: Is this where you used the hollow blocks?

Peter Pabst: Yes, I used those in a few of my early attempts. I don’t actually have any experience in the area. I know nothing about stones, about their strength or about structural engineering. I just had to approach the whole task rather empirically: I purchased an assortment of stone and whenever we had rehearsals onstage I would just build a small wall backstage about three meters high… as high as I could get using a ladder. And when I was finished, I would shield my head and (laughs) push it over using my hand. I was always scared doing that; I worried that one would fall forward and land on my head. But having such a fear is also useful because it forces you to be continually cognizant of potential problems and possible ways of dealing with them.

During these early experiments, I was always looking to see how the stones compared with one another, how they bounced or if they broke, what kind of noise they made on impact, and how many of them remained intact. Doing this, eventually, I was able to discover my material.

Wim Wenders: Was that this material made of pressed pellets?

Peter Pabst: No, no it wasn’t Ytong. I experimented with Ytong because of how light and stable it is, for my purposes it didn’t have enough elasticity to it… using it resulted in too much breakage. So, I ended up using a different material, a hollow block as well, but one made of wood shavings pressed together and then soaked in cement. These blocks actually have positive and negative profiles on the sides, something that was especially important for my wall. It allowed them to interlock with one another. That meant that the wall stood securely even before cement was used on it and, thus, we were able to dispense with the cementing process entirely on the stage.

Wim Wenders: Were they lighter?

Peter Pabst: No, unfortunately they were a bit heavier than the others. The manufacturer produced a special line of products for me that included a larger proportion of cement, which translated to greater overall strength.

Wim Wenders: And how did you knock the wall over then?

Peter Pabst: Above all else the wall could not, under any circumstances, fall forward; therefore, the wall was held on both sides by stabilization brackets that made it impossible for anyone to push over. It was too strong and stable for that anyway. In the end then we used a wince to pull the wall down from behind. Two engineers stationed below the stage were responsible for that. In order to have greater control over the falling wall, a sophisticated system for distributing the pulling force across the entire wall was developed. And the engineers below were given earplugs.

Wim Wenders: It made quite a lot of noise I imagine. And did a structural engineer check it out to make sure that nothing…

Peter Pabst: All of them said no; I’ll never forget that. The first time that we built up the wall, all of them were really standing right there: the theater’s engineering supervisors, the union representatives, the personnel committee, a representative from the municipal building department, and so on and so forth. It was unbelievable. They were all on the stage and said no. It was a very lonely day for me. I was somehow there, all alone saying “yes” while everyone else was saying “no.” In the end, we reached an agreement and I built the wall up until it reached its maximum - and somewhat menacing - height. During that evening’s rehearsal, I asked Pina if we should knock it over. And she said yes.

Wim Wenders: I bet that raised your blood pressure a bit?

Peter Pabst: I was on the brink of having a heart attack. (laughs) My God, did it ever raise my blood pressure! The problem in such situations is that I can always only hope that I have thought through everything precisely enough. I don’t have any experiential or empirical information to work from and no one could really help me be certain. But that’s also very satisfying.

I’ve often thought about why I have so much fun doing what I do… discrediting others’ reservations and discovering technical solutions for and by myself.

I think, in my mind, I draw a distinction between two aspects of my work as a stage designer. There is, first and foremost, the artistic aspect, the concept, which I most often draw from my own gut instinct. If I already began to think about the technical consequences in the midst of this early phase, then I would be utterly dismayed, so much so that I would no longer have the courage necessary to dream. To conceive of and design something, your fantasies must be allowed to run free. I enjoy that. Also, during this phase, I would often promise Pina anything and everything under the sun, without knowing if or how whatever I’ve promised was even possible. Pina and I were nearly identical in this regard. She always invented in an uninhibited fashion, without knowing how everything should or would eventually fit together. Somehow we both always managed to position ourselves with our backs up against the wall. That is what is required, I think, in order to generate the drive one needs to realize something that seems impossible. And for that I have to use my head. It wants to do something too, needs to do something.

I have absolutely no training in things technical, mechanical, or physical. When I was younger, I couldn’t even grasp such things. I didn’t even finish my Abitur (comprehensive examinations at the end of secondary school in Germany). I left school because I just couldn’t understand scientific subjects… not math, not physics, not chemistry. This mental block finally came to end much later. Today, I take great joy in this kind of logical thinking. I realized at some point that I actually didn’t need to know all that much. I just had to observe everything closely and think logically. If you do that, than you can precisely analyze any problem. And as soon as you understand what is situated at the heart of a problem, then you also end up discovering precisely how you can begin to resolve it.

Wim Wenders: I’m familiar with that from my film work. It basically comes down to you figuring out why something in particular doesn’t work…

Peter Pabst: So that you can do it anyway.

Wim Wenders: It’s the same in theater then?

Peter Pabst: Exactly the same.

Wim Wenders: Well in Palermo Palermo there is actually something that was unusual for Pina’s work, I believe: a curtain.

Peter Pabst: Yes, it’s the only piece that uses a curtain and only does so because of the wall.

Wim Wenders: Why did you want to have the curtain there?

Peter Pabst: Because we wanted to have a wall behind a curtain. (laughs) That way the audience wouldn’t see it right away. That was how we first envisioned it when the idea was born at the Lichtburg.

Wim Wenders: Ah, okay.

Peter Pabst: We afforded ourselves the luxury and the pathos of the rising curtain. That is always, in a certain way, a ritualistic sort of moment in the theater - the curtain is rising! It signals that a world is about to be unveiled and a story is about to begin. But, in Palermo Palermo, the curtain went up and nothing began. The stage was walled up!

Wim Wenders: Yet the curtain maintained that pathos nonetheless?

Peter Pabst: Yes.

Wim Wenders: And were there curtains present in any of Pina’s other pieces?

Peter Pabst: No, none as far as I can remember.

Wim Wenders: And the dog? There was a dog in the piece as well, wasn’t there? What kind was it?

Peter Pabst: Well, originally that was Jean’s dog, Jean Sasportes. He had a dog that he called Truia. Jean also had a motorcycle - a Honda 750 - and was from Morocco. And on the front of the motorcycle, on the tank, there was a pillow and a folded blanket fastened to it and…

Wim Wenders: ...that’s where the dog rode.

Peter Pabst: Exactly, Jean would sit on his motorcycle, whistle, and Truia would jump up and sit on this blanket. And that’s how they would ride together, even all the way to Morocco. That dog was unbelievable! It was completely insane and played that part in Palermo Palermo at first.

Wim Wenders: And he took direction well?

Peter Pabst: He took stage directions well, liked to eat and loved Jean!

Wim Wenders: In the next piece you returned to a field, but this time one covered in snow. What kind of field was that?

Peter Pabst: That was a dream of mine for some time. Now we’re returning to the topic of floors because, well, this is actually a story about the flooring.

Wim Wenders: Well, we left the topic for a while and now, I guess, it’s about time we turn back to it.

Peter Pabst: It belongs to a set of images that had been running through my head for years. I had wanted to create a winter landscape for quite some time, and I was always playing around and getting crafty with the idea, but somehow it never turned into anything, possibly due to the fact that I didn’t know what I should make such a wintery scene out of.

And then, at some point, I thought to myself: salt! I bought some salt at the grocery store, allowed it to “snow” all over my model box… and it turned out good. It was obvious, however, that I couldn’t very well use normal table salt. It’s an aggressive substance that would begin to rust all of the machinery on the stage almost immediately. If that were to happen, I would surely be banned from the building. But an even bigger problem still was the dancers. In so many of our pieces they dance barefoot and their feet are so often in bad shape. And I was going to pour salt on their wounds…that would just be mean. But, I found some neutral salt at the pharmacy that wasn’t corrosive: Epsom salt. You can buy it in these 100g packages and its meant to help with digestion…

Wim Wenders: Is it similar to Glauber salt? You can take it to clean yourself out as well. And it’s easy on the stomach.

Peter Pabst: It’s similar.

Wim Wenders: So, the floor was covered in Epsom salt. Is that something only available at the pharmacy?

Peter Pabst: No, I don’t think so. It’s just very expensive.

I ate some before using it in order to see what it would do to my stomach, if it would give me diarrhea. Because, well, the dancers were going to be rolling around in it, and they could very easily swallow some of it, and then all of them would have a problem on their hands. Nothing happened to me though. And from there I just had to trace the route back from the pharmacy to the saltworks so that I could find some at an affordable bulk price. According to my calculations, it was going to take about ten tons of salt to fill the area beneath the dancers’ feet. And thus, the snowy landscape came to be. It was beautiful because of the way in which the salt glistened like fresh snow does in the sunlight. And fresh snow crunches beneath your feet, something that the salt did as well. All of it came together perfectly.

Wim Wenders: And it fell directly on to the dance floor from above?

Peter Pabst: It was spread about on the dance floor, yes.

So, the wintery scene was there, but there were still so many other images that Pina liked as well. I had already given thought to the salt crystals and to the fact that many projection surfaces are crystalline. But Pina and projections, those two things just didn’t go together at the time.

Then, one time, she said to me very sadly, “It’s a shame that we can’t make use of more images, but we can’t very well reconstruct the stage each time we want to create a new picture.” And at that moment, (laughs) after making my apologies up front, I very carefully asked if she could ever envision projecting images. And she said that she could. That was the real beginning of projecting in Tanztheater.

The use of projections made the wintry scene colorful and sometimes made it feel completely like a fairy tale; and yet it also maintained a sense of absurdity to it. Salt was made into sand; a snowy patch into a desert… and sometimes flowers even bloomed there. And then it was winter once again. Dancers ran about in colorful summer dresses through a tropical forest and, just a few meters away, Dominique Mercy froze between snow-covered birch trees.

Wim Wenders: So, essentially they were acting upon a screen.

Peter Pabst: You’re totally right. I actually never thought about it like that, but that’s exactly what it was.

Wim Wenders: So that was the beginning of your extended period of working with projection.

Directly thereafter though you moved from a snow-covered landscape to a moonscape, only there was a regular ship stranded there rather than a spaceship.

Peter Pabst: Didn’t that come earlier?

Wim Wenders: Das Stück mit dem Schiff (The Piece With The Ship) immediately followed the last one we discussed, I think.

Peter Pabst: Das Stück mit them Schiff … I don’t remember anymore everything we were thinking at that time. Among other things, I had read an article about the Aral Sea. Because of environmental changes, the shore of the Aral Sea had retreated by some sixty kilometers at that point. All of the ships stayed right where they had been before though. One time, on a return flight from Asia, I was able to see the sea from above; it looked totally insane and was very sad, something that was reflected in my stage design.

Wim Wenders: A strong sense of being stranded...?

Peter Pabst: It draws upon the feeling of being stranded and the feeling of utter distress. A ship wants, of course, to be sailing upon the water. In my design, the ship was situated in a slanted manner as if it was floating on a stormy sea as a huge wave moved through beneath it. But, my wave was made of sand and the ship remained rigid and silent. I really liked my model, despite having some big doubts. The reason for these lingering doubts was that out of all of my designs, this was the most epic one, the design about which the most has already been told. I wasn’t at all certain whether this was a good thing or whether there were huge risks just waiting beneath the surface. Pina, however, was fearful of something else. She was afraid - she told me this some time later - that it would too closely resemble The Flying Dutchman.

Wim Wenders: Or Fellini’s And the Ship Sails On?

Peter Pabst: That, I don’t think, worried her. She was actually scared that it could end up looking like it had in the Wagner opera. Now, I’m a lover of boats and enjoy sailing very much. Because of that, all I said to Pina was, “Pina, I can’t tell you whether or not this design is right for your piece. I can only promise you one thing: if I build a ship for you, it will not look like The Flying Dutchman.

Wim Wenders: And that was a three-masted ship.

Peter Pabst: Yes, and I made every possible effort to ensure that the fish trawler was as realistic as possible.

Wim Wenders: Is it just half of a ship or is it seafaring?

Peter Pabst: Following the premiere I actually received bids from two doctors who were interested in buying it. They wanted the boat following the end of the show’s run. I had to laugh to myself because I thought: if you only knew what it looked like beneath deck!

Wim Wenders: Well the ship was already sad in some way and it gave way to a proper tragedy. (laughs) In Trauerspiel, there is something truly tragic about the stage, the sparse remains of some sort of ruins or something similar?

Peter Pabst: No, Trauerspiel, features an island.

Wim Wenders: Isn’t there an outline of some ruins on the floor?

Peter Pabst: No, that’s the shape of the island.

Wim Wenders: I can remember though that it looked as if something had been unearthed allowing one to see the contours of a foundation.

Peter Pabst: Ah, I can understand how you could see something like that because the set featured both the outer banks surrounding the island in addition to the island itself…

Wim Wenders: Is this the same island that we talked about at the beginning, the one that would shift?

Peter Pabst: Yes, I thought to myself that maybe it would be nice if I built the dancers a moving floor, an island floating in the water.

Wim Wenders: And how did you go about achieving that, making the island so that it was able to shift and move about? It was, after all, some 100 square meters large.

Peter Pabst: A solid 100 square meters. I just wanted to build a basin, fill it with water, and allow the island to float in it. The ironic thing about that project, which I didn’t know at the time, was that not long before our production there had been another show put on by the artistic director of the playhouse in which water was used. Because of that, there was some falling out with the regulatory agencies and the fire department… so much so that they said, “Not another drop of water on this stage ever!”

And after that, here I come, having calculated that I would need about 23,000 liters of water! (laughs) 23,000 liters to make the thing float. So, at first, there was this head-on collision. As soon as the conflict came to my attention though, my first thought was that I would have to make the fire department love my design as if it were their own! I had built a very precise model depicting my vision, I lighted it properly, photographed it, and then arranged to meet with the fire department’s head of security. I spread out my model photographs before him and said, “I would really like to do this. I just don’t yet know how to do it… I thought about it long and hard and there is only one person I could think of who could possibly know how to do this, and that person is you. I am desperate, please help me!”

Wim Wenders: Did he know how to go about doing it?

Peter Pabst: Of course! We both knew, but it was a necessary step because we both had to be on the same side.

Wim Wenders: And, did he love it?

Peter Pabst: He was happy that I had come to him and he took me immediately to show me what kind of materials they had and what they are able to do with water. He talked to me about how everything could be realized and about what kind of equipment he would be able to make available to us.

Wim Wenders: And so what was the trick with the island?

Peter Pabst: I had already thought up the island on my own, but the head of the fire department gave me a great many suggestions and proved to be especially important when it came to convincing the remaining regulatory offices that were still not onboard with the design. One of their requirements was that we had to be able to remove all of the water from the premises within ten minutes if there should be an emergency. Now, 23,000 liters of water is no small amount and it has to go somewhere.

Wim Wenders: In the Wupper River!

Peter Pabst: Exactly! I went back to him and asked what the fire department used to pump water out of basements when, for example, the Rhine overflows in Cologne. And he gave me a pump that was able to remove 5000 liters of water in a single minute. In so doing, he got me out of the mess I was in. And things continued in a similar fashion. It even became a friendship of sorts because of the way in which the fire department had become so engaged in the stage design and had helped convince the regulatory officials that they should sign off on the project. It had, in some way, become their set design. When the regulatory officials had reservations, the fire department stepped in to dispel any doubts. We were very fortunate.

Finding the island itself, or perhaps better, how one has to go about making such an island involved yet another empirical approach on my part. (laughs) In the middle of January!

Wim Wenders: Was it some type of raft?

Peter Pabst: Yes, but I didn’t know anything precise about the load-bearing capacity of the island or how such a thing would behave in water. My thoughts on the matter were somewhat rudimentary. First, I improvised a bit using a small water basin in the courtyard of the opera house. I got myself a piece of Styrofoam - two meters by one meter and about 10 centimeters thick - and laid it in the water. And then I stood on it… within in a second it was clear just how good of an idea it had been to use warm water in the experimental design. The slab of Styrofoam flew out from underneath me like a surfboard and I just laid there in that pool of water on a day when the temperature topped out at 23°F. I looked around while lying there and knew one thing for certain: there have to be brakes beneath this thing!

So I constructed an island with a system of laths on its underside, which swirls the water about and thus moderates and smoothes out the island’s movements.

Wim Wenders: Did you build in any sort of air elements beneath it?

Peter Pabst: No, the core was made of Styrofoam whose buoyancy was sufficient enough to support the whole thing. The mold of the surface is made of polyester and then laminated in fiberglass mats. And on the topmost level was the ground blast furnace slag.

The stage was filled with employees when we mounted the island in the basin and filled it with water five days prior to the premiere. Everyone was so anxious and excited that they had made bets as to whether the island would float or not. I had calculated that we would need around 15 or 16 centimeters of water to make the thing float with 20 dancers on it. And, really, when we reached 16 ½ centimeters, the island started to move! That was wonderful, truly one of those moments of pure happiness.

Wim Wenders: And it wasn’t moored below?

Peter Pabst: No, the island floats freely. Only the shape of the embankments inhibited its movement in some way. I wasn’t yet familiar with the piece and with Pina’s choreography and, as such, didn’t yet know how and where the dancers would enter or exit the island. Anyway, the rather complicated shape of the embankments was designed in such a way as to ensure that the island could move freely but could never rotate out of control. And in the design I also wanted to ensure that, under no circumstances, would there ever be a distance of more than a meter between the island and the embankment. These banks would catch the island on its front side and then propel it back in the other direction.

Wim Wenders: But the distances between must have been fluctuating, sometimes larger and sometimes smaller, right?

Peter Pabst: Of course, they were continuously shifting, but within a certain range.

The help the fire department offered also had another wonderful side effect: I had been dreaming about having a waterfall for years. I just didn’t know how I should or could go about creating one. Having a waterfall necessitates having a lot of water and had I tried to pack, let’s say, 10,000 liters of water on the stage gallery, it would have come down along with the waterfall itself. Using that gigantic pump from the fire department, however, it was actually possible to transport enough water upwards…

Wim Wenders: Without all of the weight being stored up above…

Peter Pabst: Exactly! And it was able to continually cascade down, without end.

Where the water was falling, I made the large, stable basin I had designed earlier even deeper so that it was in a position to field the pressure of the falling water thanks to its increased depth. And thus, finally, we had a waterfall.

Wim Wenders: One thing always seems to lead to the next.

Peter Pabst: You said it. After I had solved these problems, I got a bit cocky. I thought that it would be interesting - it was actually a crazy idea - if the water began to burn at some point…

Wim Wenders: Well, now things are starting to get really exciting!

Peter Pabst: I won’t go into that any further otherwise this discussion will go on forever. But it did burn.

Wim Wenders: Thereafter though you created something so sparse that many were left wondering if it was even possible to go any sparser after that….

Peter Pabst: Yes, Danzón… there we had an empty stage.

Wim Wenders: At first, but then, eventually, a projected image appears over the entire space of the stage. It became the exact opposite of sparse. Was that the largest projection project you had undertaken up to that point in time?

Peter Pabst: At that point in time, yes. Video projection was something quite new. Prior to that, like in the Madrid piece, we had made use of slides.

Wim Wenders: So, in the beginning it was only slides?

Peter Pabst: At first, yes, I only used slides because I needed a lot of light on the dancers and video projectors at the time did not yet have powerful lighting capabilities. Danzón also featured many slides. But, when it came to working on Danzón, I found myself in a tight spot initially because I was dividing my time between two theater productions from Berlin and Hamburg that had been postponed and only ended up coming to Wuppertal about a month before we were set to premiere. So, I wanted to try something simple, something fleeting, that would return focus to the empty stage again and again.

In addition to the unconventional, the “local” materials that we’ve already talked about, I’ve always also been quite interested in the more classic materials and techniques of stage design. One time there was this ballet performance from the nineteenth century that the Paris Opera reconstructed. I saw it and found it stunning… the effects, spatial and otherwise, that they were able to produce using only painted and glued tulle. So, I designed a “system” of tulle whose colors and thicknesses were perfectly coordinated and hung at varied focal planes. This was finished off with a projection screen that was hung at the back of the stage. When you projected something on and into this “system,” the result was these very large images of space, almost like holograms. Only from the most expensive seats directly in the middle was this unable to be seen. The dancers could dance in front of or between the various parts of this tulle system and became a part of this picture, which for its part also became a part of the dancer’s world. And these pictorial spaces were constantly changing in that there were always layers being added or taken away. The whole thing was very versatile and flexible… and sometimes the projected images would simply remain projected on the vast empty space of the stage. That was also the time when I began to become interested in the delicateness of projecting in and on black spaces.

Everything was going quite well. We finally had a stage design that could be implemented quickly and easily, but we were using it in such a variety of ways that, instead of saving time thanks to its quite simplified set-up, we ended up spending all of our time rehearsing the complicated processes necessary involved in ensuring that everything ran smoothly.

And at some point during all of this, Pina turned to me quietly and said that after many years, she was considering dancing in this piece! I still remember my first reaction to this news: that’s so lousy! I already have almost no time at all and now she’s going to be onstage and the whole world, all of them will flock here excitedly and get to see her grace the stage once more.

Pina thought that she might like to have images of fish showing while she danced. And I thought: very well then, I’ll pick up a nice underwater film from the city’s film center or from some other film library. Only there wasn’t anything of use available there, all of the films they had were focused on learning and teaching and no one had taken the time to ensure that the selection of images available was expanded. Bit by bit it dawned on me that I would probably have to make a film for Pina myself. So I struck out on a journey through various zoos and aquariums with my small video camera, looked around, and filmed what I found. After that, I brought the resulting film to Pina at the Lichtburg. Now, Pina could be very hurtful if she was suffering herself. Not because she wanted to be hurtful, but rather because she showed her own pain. She oohed and aahed a bit, but made a terrible face all the while…and that’s how things went then… just terrible.

Wim Wenders: (laughs)

Peter Pabst: I remember it as if it were yesterday. I walked in with my little film and she was already making a face before I even had the chance to say, “Good morning.” I don’t need this right now, I thought, and I set the cassette on the table, turned around, got in my car, and drove back home to Cologne. And I barely had time to get through the door when the phone rang. It was Pina, she had watched the film and found the images unbelievable. She said she was completely excited and asked if I could come back. So I drove back and, thus, we were agreed on the nature of the pictures.

I was with a friend who worked at the Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex’s media institute in Essen when I witnessed the first attempts at using a new Barco video projector. I had never imagined seeing what I did there. Even if by today’s standards it would all seem completely outdated, the projector offered such luminosity, such vibrant colors, and a sharpness of image that I had yet to experience. Seeing this, it was clear that we could film on video and that doing so would make things much easier.

Wim Wenders: Not to mention more practical, at each show then you…

Peter Pabst: Yes, yes.

They had also received one of the first digital cameras. I think it was called Digibeta and they sent one to me along with a camerawoman who filmed the different images that I needed. Among them was a film of this small red fish that was constantly rushing back and forth across the screen. It was that fish that Pina was able to breathe even more life into even while she stood with both feet firmly planted.

Wim Wenders: With that then we’ve arrived in the digital age.

Peter Pabst: Yes, we have.

Pina always practiced at night after the actual rehearsals had ended and everyone else had gone. And while she was doing that, I was back in the auditorium cutting the film together. It was utterly frustrating though! Pina wouldn’t have been Pina if she didn’t leave the question as to whether or not she would actually appear in the piece open until the start of the premiere. (laughs) We began the premiere performance with two plans of action in mind: if Pina took to the stage at some given moment, then we would show the film; if she didn’t, then the show would continue in some other way. But, she did take the stage and she danced.

Wim Wenders: And thereafter?

Peter Pabst: Thereafter, always. She always danced.

Wim Wenders: One time without the fish according to what I saw in the archives.

Peter Pabst: Yes, one time without the fish because the projector wasn’t working properly. I wasn’t there for that performance.

Wim Wenders: You went from a red fish to a red pyramid, which was picked apart with pleasure. What was the pyramid in Der Fensterputzer (The Window Washer) made from?

Peter Pabst: You know, Hong Kong is another one of those places that nearly knocks visitors over with the lasting impressions it offers - the people, the landscape, the advertisements, the architecture, the subtropical nature that seems to stretch on forever - all of these images are striking. And you can’t help but be captivated by it all. So, I began experimenting with a stage that was extremely picturesque and vibrantly colored. But, that all changed rather fast. I quickly grew more cautious and finally arrived at what amounted to pure abstraction: a mountain some eight or nine meters in diameter and some four-and-a-half meters high made of luminous red blossoms standing on a traditional black stage. It was actually rather absurd.

Wim Wenders: And what was beneath this mountain of flower blossoms?

Peter Pabst: I will come to that shortly. I showed it to Pina first and though she liked it as well, her first question was, “Does it have to be there the whole time?” (laughs) And I, of course, replied immediately, somewhat carelessly, “ No, we can move it.” Right there, the difficulty level increased ten-fold once again.

From the earliest moments it was clear to me that this floral mountain had to be like a delightful toy upon which the dancers could play. I would have to build it as beautiful, as soft, and as comfortable as possible so that they would want nothing more than to romp around on the mountain of flowers as if they were children. So, I designed a steel structure on special castors that could easily move in any and all directions, and then I covered it with wood so that it was like a hill. Then I had these wooden parts upholstered in a circular fashion and made sure that the upholstery covering them was very thick, soft all over the place. When the structure was still in its shell-like form it kind of looked like the Michelin Man.

Wim Wenders: It had a ring-like shape to it?

Peter Pabst: Yes, there were these ring-like shapes all around the mountain in order to ensure that the blossoms that were being put on wouldn’t immediately slip off. I mean it was really thickly upholstered and as soft as a great big pillow. This pillow was then painted red and covered, densely covered, with blossoms that we glued to it. This ensured the blossoms were firmly attached to the surface and that it had a “flowery” substratum to it. And then I just continuously dumped more and more red flowers on the surface. When all was said and done, I think we used about 800,000 blossoms.

Wim Wenders: What kind of blossoms were they?

Peter Pabst: They were rose and bauhinia blossoms, the latter being the official flower of Hong Kong. I had to have those produced though, at least at first, because they weren’t to be found anywhere.

Wim Wenders: Did your contact in Hamburg do that?

Peter Pabst: Yes, it was my contact in Hamburg who helped with them.

Wim Wenders: The projections used in the piece were very sophisticated, I was really impressed with them.

Peter Pabst: What all was there?

Wim Wenders: If I remember correctly, all sorts of pictures from Hong Kong.

Peter Pabst: Yes, many of those striking images that I mentioned already came back into play. They had now found a familiar world on the stage. That was another pleasant and unexpected discovery, the way that this mountain of red blossoms - which I thought of as not being able to do much else outside of being a mountain of red blossoms - was able to take on these pictures, allowing its structure to change and the images to bring it to life.

Wim Wenders: And instead of a ship there was a car? A Mercedes. You manufactured that using a lightweight design, or did you…

Peter Pabst: Well, that was actually inspired in some way by the burial traditions of the Chinese. They give their dead everything that they could possibly need on the other side. Food, clothing, money, and anything else that they can think of.

Wim Wenders: In Palermo, incidentally enough, in a somewhat inverted manner, the dead bring gifts on the Day of the Dead.

Peter Pabst: Everything has to be burnt, so they construct all of the gifts from paper.

Wim Wenders: It burns more easily...

Peter Pabst: In addition to that tradition, many believe that the dead return to the earth once a year and, should they be missing something, they can utilize this day on earth to retrieve it. For that reason, people there think more closely about everything, for example, transportation. I found a photo of a Ford Model-T from the late 1920s that was given to its owner, a factory manager, to take with him upon his death. With a chauffeur! And the whole thing was made out of paper!

So, I purchased an old Mercedes S Class for a few hundred German Marks and used it as the form for the yellow car we were constructing out of paper. That saved us a lot of time in the workshop. Related to that, I think that the paper car only makes such a strong impression because the dimensions and proportions are so accurate. We just continued to laminate the real Mercedes with paper, and if it began to wear or tear, we would do it over again. For that reason, we’ve held on to the old Mercedes.

Wim Wenders: Ah, okay, so you can pull it out and use it as a template at any time.

Peter Pabst: Yes.

Wim Wenders: There is also a great deal that happens in the air during this piece: suspension bridges, trapezes, and the like. All of these things are significantly more complex than the designs that came before and after.

Peter Pabst: Well, it’s a very playful stage design that spreads out across the entire area, that’s true. In it, a number of these fantasies and images from Hong Kong came back into play. In addition to the bridges and trapezes, there was also a dragon.

In one of the most luxurious neighborhoods of Hong Kong, I saw a huge apartment building that was situated almost like a dam at the side of this mountain, effectively blocking it. The apartments there were unbelievably expensive. Now, in China, everyone knows that dragons live on mountaintops and that, every once in a while, they come down to the sea in order to drink. And here, this apartment building stood in its way. As a result, the owner of the building had it constructed in such a way that he left a hole in it - five apartments wide and six stories high… a nearly immeasurable financial loss for the owner when you think about the apartments that could have been built in the hole’s place - just so that the dragon would have a passageway through the building to get down to the sea for a drink.

Anyway, I wanted to have a dragon on our stage as well. And the reason that dragon’s have such an insatiable thirst - as everyone knows - is because they breathe fire. To replicate that I thought about the way that hot air balloons hiss when they make fire… just like a dragon.

Wim Wenders: ...schuuuuuhh…

Peter Pabst: So, I called up a local balloonist’s club and asked if I could come by and see how everything worked. In the end, I was able to purchase a large burner from them. I built an iron box around the burner with a small window on the front of it. At some point, rather inconspicuously, this box was brought out and suddenly it would make that “schuuuuuuhh” noise you mention and spit fire. And that was my dragon.

Wim Wenders: And the fire department was okay with that?

Peter Pabst: Yes, we spoke about it in great detail, about how it was constructed and about what aspects required special attention.

Wim Wenders: Well, following all of these dangerous experiments, you finally landed on solid ground once again with “Masurca Fogo”. In that piece, there is a large cube full of…what is that? Dirt?

Peter Pabst: Well, in this instance, all I know is what I intended.

The stage design that is known now emerged somewhat accidentally. We had once again discussed a number of different possibilities. One of the many things I tried out was a crudely sloping landscape made of stone with glass walls that stood within it. But there was also a warped, very claustrophobic white room. Pina came; she looked at it, and quickly left without saying a word. Neither part of the design had excited her. It was actually a situation similar to many others we had shared before, paired with the fact that this time we were really cutting it close with regard to time. Still, it doesn’t make much sense to want or try to force something through in situations like that.

So, I practiced patience and, in an effort to have something to do, I integrated the stony landscape into the strange white room and it came to look as if lava had flowed in through the single opening at the upper right hand side, filling this claustrophobic, white room. Pina came by once again and had a look at what I had come up with… she seemed somewhat impatient. “I was not expecting that,” she mumbled gruffly and left. Even though all of the workshop deadlines had already come and gone, I waited. First one day, then two, and after the third day I finally said to her, “Pina, we have to decide on something now, otherwise we won’t have anything in the end.” She looked at me somewhat astonished and said, “But I already told you!” Me: “What did you tell me?” “That I liked it.” And to that I said, “ Oh, okay, I must have missed that. (laughs) I didn’t hear you.” And with that we had the set design for Masurca Fogo…

Wim Wenders: After that you created something truly beautiful, a gorgeous meadow landscape.

Peter Pabst: Oh dear…

Wim Wenders: It was a stark contrast to the barren lava that had preceded it on the stage, don’t you think?

Peter Pabst: Oh dear…yes.

Wim Wenders: A wonderful landscape in the truest sense of the word wonder.

Peter Pabst: Yes. Cliffs, moss, and water…

Wim Wenders: It was mossy?

Peter Pabst: Well, actually, there was just one very large cliff that was covered with moss and ferns and a variety of small plants.

Wim Wenders: Of those various types of plants, moss has to be the most difficult to work with.

Peter Pabst: Yes, it is. And there was also water emerging from all over the cliff… it trickled down, glistening like a string of pearls and making hushed sounds as it landed. And the sounds that the water made were vastly different depending upon where it landed… whether it hit other plants as it fell or reached the stones at the bottom or ended up in a puddle. You could almost never hear it either. But, sometimes, when the music died down, these subtle water tones would fill the air.

Incidentally, Wiesenland was the first time that climbers came into play. Not that long ago I came across some model photos (from Wiesenland) and they reminded me that at some point I incorporated miniature climbers into the design.

Wim Wenders: But they only actually came in…

Peter Pabst: ...in Rough Cut, yes, that’s true. At that time, when Wiesenland was in production, they were only present in my thoughts. Pina had looked at the model for Wiesenland and asked, "Can we change it?” And I answered quite quickly, “We could bring it down onto its side.” “We could bring it down, transforming it from wall into a landscape so that the dancers can get on it and dance.”

Wim Wenders: And that changes just about everything… a complete metamorphosis.

Peter Pabst: Well, I had also thought about situating it differently at the beginning - I recently found another photo of that original model as well. I gave Pina the option of having the cliffs hanging above the stage. A ceiling of moss. Then the dancers could all fall (laughs) from this ceiling of moss. Or we could have had ladders sticking out of it…have people enter from above. But, thank God, Pina wasn’t that interested in such an idea or I would have ended up with a broken neck most likely. (laughs)

Wim Wenders: I would have liked to see that construction process!

Peter Pabst: Whoops!

Well, what we ended up with actually wasn’t bad at all. This large wall was situated in a basin because of all of the water that was constantly escaping and dripping down its face. In order to turn it on its side, the wall had to first be lifted up about half a meter, the underside moved forward using a rope pull of some sort, and then the whole thing had to be lowered down outside of the basin as slowly as possible. From that point onward, it basically brought itself down, pushing its way slowly forward like some sort of green monster stalking the audience more and more closely with each passing moment. And, of course, I had to make the whole thing a bit more complicated. I thought it would be more exciting if the wall could be rotated on its longitudinal axis during this movement of the wall! Up until then I still actually thought that everything was going to be quite easy to achieve…

Then, Manfred Marczewski our technical director recalculated the weight of the wall and it turned out to weigh more than 5 tons! The technical director in charge of all the Wuppertal stages didn’t want to allow us to suspend and hoist some 5 ½ tons, no matter what we were doing.

A dance began that was truly crazy.

The pleas and the reservations regarding the whole situation just continued to grow.

Much later, after all of the obstacles had been done away with and the moss wall together with its onstage metamorphosis were well under way, I was sitting with my assistant and I said to her, “I thought that it would be simple to build and simple to setup, but now it’s become the most complicated, the most difficult, and the most expensive stage that we have ever made. I think it has to become the most beautiful as well!” Sometimes I think to myself that it was.

Wim Wenders: I think so too.

Peter Pabst: In the end, everything worked out and we put the show up quite often. We also traveled a lot with it.

Wim Wenders: And the wall traveled with you?

Peter Pabst: Yes, we played in Hungary, brought it with us to Tokyo, went to Paris with it twice.

Wim Wenders: Thereafter you used walls that were much lighter. In Água are walls that are not really walls at all. They look like walls, yet they were able to be hoisted quite easily into the air as if they were curtains, am I correct?

Peter Pabst: No, those were actually walls.

Wim Wenders: Real walls?

Peter Pabst: Yes, and they were anything but light. They only give the appearance of being light due to their design: they are slightly bent and extremely smooth. You can’t really call it architecture anymore because they are best described as abstract forms. The other reason for their seeming lightness was that they would breeze upwards and back down to the stage without making any noise.

From the earliest moments of working on the project, I envisioned these walls being used as projection surfaces as well. Água was a piece about Brazil and Brazil was lively and full of music, colorful and dancing…a never-ending stream of images and multifaceted impressions. I think I just wanted to dance with my stage design as well. The stage design for Água was born out of projected images even prior to the space itself being determined. And we had already done Masurca Fogo. The two pieces definitely share something in common. We already felt comfortable dealing with such streams of images.

But perhaps we should return to Masurca Fogo for just a moment. In Masurca Fogo we had this claustrophobic room that was full of lava and Pina had asked me if we could also incorporate a projection screen. When she was in Portugal, someone had given her a video from Cape Verde of musicians playing at a banana plantation, holding a dancing contest, and so on. She wanted to use certain images of this band in her piece and for that to happen we had to have a projection screen. Later when we were on the stage for a rehearsal, Pina asked for the images. The screen was lowered down and we projected onto it. Workers making music and singing while surrounded by the unbelievable green of the banana leaves through which the sun shone. I had seen something, however, when the screen was coming down, but only for the briefest of moments. “Pina, can I get rid of the screen?” Well, the colors, the men, their movements, their very rhythm all shot across the floor, walls, and ceiling. The whole space pulsed with movement…nothing was claustrophobic any longer… it was suddenly all very free and expansive and open. And that is when our playing with images actually began. A stormy sea of gigantic waves that crack against the lava cliffs and fill everything with their spray… and these flowers that bloom at the end, covering the entire stage in their colors… all of it completely larger than life. The whole thing was a constant back-and-forth between claustrophobic limitedness and infinite expansiveness.

Wim Wenders: I remember the space well. It was really fantastic.

Peter Pabst: Well that was what we already had as we began doing Água. And it soon became clear that Brazil could and would prevail in this space.

Wim Wenders: Was the sofa landscape inspired by Brazilian influences as well? Oscar Niemeyer, who also worked with furniture, could well have done it.

Peter Pabst: Nice. I like that you refer to it as a landscape. I didn’t, however, have any stylistic thoughts in mind when I was making it. The room itself - its coolness - could have something to do with Niemeyer. But my only thought was that at some point I’m going to make something out of sofas. (laughs) The sofa landscape becomes a sort of incidental form in the round room, but a lot of the time, the sofas “dance” as well. They are actually always on the go, very mobile…

The rainforest that encompasses the space, I had thought of that from the very beginning. In actuality, this round white room serves as a sort of island in the rainforest. Only when the walls are raised up is it made visible… like a natural frieze. And suddenly the whole thing becomes an elegant garden party invented by Pina for that space. All of it has a lot to do with Brazil.

Wim Wenders: They are absolutely a people who love partying.

Peter Pabst: I like the scene a lot. In the end, that was also one of the few scenes lit only by stage lights, no images or projection.

Wim Wenders: You mention lighting… Did you always work alongside the lighting technicians to set everything?

Peter Pabst: Yes, always. Even at the moment of conception, I can’t think of spaces in any other manner. I am, well - it’s different than with film - inside of this black box and have to create my entire world. And in that process, light is one of the most basic design mediums. The stage design for Danzón was composed almost entirely out of light. When I think of a stage or a space, then I also always think about light. I have a pretty good lighting system for my model boxes. With it I am able to try out a great many things…what the stage design needs and what possibilities and effects are implicit therein. Still, we never had a light designer, the only reason being that there was never time for someone like that. We just always designed everything together with our lighting director. Today that’s Fernando Jacon, you know him. He has also been part of stage rehearsals for a long time as well, meaning that he has observed a great deal with regard to what the dancers do.

Actually, the lighting for a stage design is always set beforehand in the model boxes that I create. Of course, though, that changes as the piece nears completion and, of course, the lighting is also adjusted based on the dancers and the atmosphere of particular dances or scenes. Just right before the premiere. And that is one thing that can always and continuously change. And with videos it is the same thing. Most of them are already designed in the model form.

Wim Wenders: Now we’ve arrived at another of these impossible, larger-than-life architectural designs: Für die Kinder von gestern, heute und morgen (For The Children Of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow). The stage appears at first to be unbelievably solid, but soon disintegrates in a manner of speaking. And then there is a white dance floor, which appears at first glance to be both compact and massive, yet it too dissipates. What was your starting point for this piece? Do you still remember?

Peter Pabst: Of course, once again, I don’t know exactly where it began… probably because I never knew where it began to begin with. It all started very realistically.

Wim Wenders: Nevertheless, tell me about it.

Peter Pabst: It was a very realistic looking room, architecture from around the turn of the century. The window offered a completely realistic view of a street in Wuppertal. A large format photograph, very sophisticated with precise perspectives and proportions. The apartment was on the second floor. I think, I just wanted to make it clear that I was in Wuppertal once again. But, of course, that didn’t work: “Something has to happen!” So I destroyed the room and from that was born a space that could disintegrate. The walls cave in and fall away.

Wim Wenders: And?

Peter Pabst: Well, once again, it was a complicated technique. And it looked too technical; it was too limited in its own possibilities. Absolutely boring! So I quieted the space down, made it simple - white and large - again. At first, it actually looked like a standard stage design. And then the only thing I was interested in doing was discovering how I could turn that single room into many varied spaces. In the process, a few private thoughts probably cropped up unconsciously. In particular, “Why have I never built a house for myself?” And if I were to build one now, what would it be like? Maybe simple, just like a large box with three or four walls insides of it that could be moved… and everyday I would move them as I would like to have them: small room, large hall, or even a nested room. And that’s how our huge white room became “mobile,” I allowed it to drive its own design. The idea of something being “mobile” has something to do with Tanztheater as well. I’m noticing as we speak that mobility is a recurring theme of sorts.

Wim Wenders: At first, the room seems solid. And then…

Peter Pabst: ... well it is very solid and heavy. We constructed it very carefully so that it would look like an actual piece of architecture. Otherwise it would have been boring. The audience should be surprised that these walls move… they might even worry that they will tip over, that they are unsecured, possibly out of control. Those feelings then are innately connected to the space itself and are subsequently transposed onto everything else in the piece.

Even when it was first designed, all of the architectural details of the walls seemed to contradict any possibility that they could be moved. There were a number of structural issues that arose including breakdown torques and heavy counterweights, powerful bending forces, kinetic problems and enormous torsional stress, and torsions resulting from sudden rolling friction.

It all looks very simple, but it’s actually one of the most complicated images I’ve created. I made the lives of our technical managers Manfred Marczewski and Jörg Ramershoven, not to mention the lives of their employees quite difficult with that design. But all of that was justified because of the overall effect that the space ended up having.

Wim Wenders: “Torsional stress” – that’s hard to imagine.

Peter Pabst: Well, all of the walls are open at the bottom. And there are doorway openings all over the place. They are actually as sensitive as the princess on her pea. Each of them alone had to have a mind-boggling counterweight to ensure that they wouldn’t fall over.

Wim Wenders: Like the streetcars in San Francisco where an equal weight has to hang on the other side of the car.

Peter Pabst: Yes, it’s quite similar.

I had also prepared about two hours worth of video for that piece, but at some point it became clear to me that no image could or should come into play.

Wim Wenders: After that though, with Nefés everything became quite sparse again.

Peter Pabst: Nefés gave rise to—something that even I tease myself about sometimes - my “Zen phase.” (laughs) I call it that because they are so simple… reduction par excellence.

Wim Wenders: That connects well with your latest piece, the Chile piece - I know I’m making quite a leap here, but we can go back to Nefés - but I should at least mention the white floor in this new design that opens up suggesting ice floes that have broken apart. But, aside from this floor, absolutely nothing happens on the stage…

If I allow all of the images you’ve created to pass in front of me, that is the sparsest of them all, at least from my perspective. But, we aren’t there yet, we are still talking about…

Peter Pabst: … Nefés. Nefés was our coproduction with Istanbul. Yet another city that you can hardly illustrate, let alone put into words!

It was actually more of a breakaway movement on my part from this stream of images, which ended up leading to this scarcity.

I absolutely love Istanbul. It is just one of those very few cities that I have visited in my life and upon arriving never wanted to leave again. Being there was just wonderful, but somehow I was unable to capture the city accurately. And, at the time, I made very many attempts to do so…

Wim Wenders: I can imagine - because of how picturesque it is - how difficult it must have been to stage Istanbul.

Peter Pabst: Yes, that’s exactly what I discovered and, thus, I was very happy with the reduction I created, which appears to be nothing, but remains somehow elegant. And thereafter, for the next while, I only occupied myself with this idea of “nothing” and finding the most complicated expression of it.

Wim Wenders: (unintelligible)

Peter Pabst: Well, you end up only finding extremes that don’t seem to work well with each other. A beautiful dark floor made of oiled wooden boards and the dancers. That doesn’t work well. Dancers just have a terrible fear of splinters. An elegant, oiled surface made of planks and covered with water isn’t good either.

Wim Wenders: Because it swells up and becomes deformed.

Peter Pabst: Yes, but what is even worse is when the water is only there part of the time. And, as I’m sure you can imagine, Pina asked right away, “Does the lake have to be there the whole time?” “No, of course not,” I replied. So, water that’s only temporarily present… and once again, everything’s been made more difficult!

If the lake can’t be there the whole time then it must not only come from somewhere, but must also be drained somewhere. I thought that if you could see where the water was entering from, then that’s just boring. Yes, the water had to enter from below, through the planks. Now, that meant that I needed a double floor, which could not be recognizable as such. If the water were to come seeping through the floor, it would be somewhat distracting. Imagine if all of the sudden spots became visible on the floor… It bore some resemblance to groundwater and in the moment that the water seeped up from underground, it was distracting… and I liked that.

Wim Wenders: In the theater, however, it’s very disconcerting when water spots suddenly start appearing on the floor…

Peter Pabst: … and no one ever knows if something is broken or if its oil or what is happening. And there’s always more and more appearing. For that reason, I thought it was important that in the end the water take on a nice shape. Completely round! So, I needed a circular shape to emerge.

In any case, I was so successful in this search for the most complicated solution to creating “nothing” on the stage - I had put together such a vast array of difficulties - that on the night before beginning construction on the stage all I wanted to do was cry. A little before midnight I sat down with Pina and said, “Pina, I have a feeling that tomorrow we won’t have a stage design anymore. The dancers are not going to want to dance on this floor and the water is not going to work properly. I did everything wrong, I’m sorry.”

But it all came together, Nefés went up and Pina enjoyed playing in it.

Wim Wenders: In the next piece the tail of a whale resembles the tail of an aircraft… and then it snows again. What was the snow that fell from the sky made from this time? And how were you able to convince Pina that something - in this piece, the whale - should remain onstage rather than being carted off?

Peter Pabst: I had been working with the idea of whales for some time already. I had shown them to Pina earlier, but they never really went anywhere. But, I wanted to have them. So I started working on them again. They were also there because the piece was connected with Japan (we performed it in Saitama). I wasn’t interested in them as a means of commenting on the disputes about whaling in Japan, but rather because whales exuded a quality that, for me, was simply connected with Japan.

These feelings were also connected with the fact that something was totally different this time. Everything else I had made thus far was intended as a “toy” for the dancers. They were meant to take ownership of all of my designs and play with them. At some point though - not from the very beginning, but at some point - I realized that the whales were untouchable. And I was glad that the dancers didn’t touch them.

Wim Wenders: Hm. And the snow?

Peter Pabst: The snow was simple. To begin with, there was a very simple formal thought process behind the snow. The whales on the black stage, which was yet another instance of a meditative, dark image… What would it be like if this black image slowly turned white over the course of time? Black becomes white.

Wim Wenders: You got your transformation.

Peter Pabst: Yes, for everything to simply become white.

Wim Wenders: It all remains, but it changes nevertheless.

Peter Pabst: Exactly. And I did the snow very classically, with long, hanging snow cloths and paper flakes. As the stage technicians pull the cables very gently and continuously, the snow cloths move and the flakes fall out. That’s how it was done in the Baroque theater.

The fact that it snows so beautifully, as you say, is because of something that I am a bit proud of. I think - and it’s also partially my aim - that what I make isn’t really always new, but it’s always done better than before. And that’s how it was with the snow too: it always falls out of the snow cloths in a straight line. You can’t tell from the air, but on the ground you see one, two or three – more or less – wide lines and in between it’s black. I didn’t want that. So, I made a rigging loft. I think I put 46 fans up there that move and blow the snowflakes out of cloths for me – every flake in a different direction. That means that it snows over the entire stage! And perhaps it's also so beautiful because the snow falls harder and harder until, at the end of the piece, it becomes a real snowstorm. I also insisted that after it started to snow in the first part of Ten Chi, it just doesn’t stop. Not during the intermission and not even after the end of the production, not until the last audience member is gone.

Wim Wenders: The audience must think that it keeps going until the next day…

Peter Pabst: It’s perplexing for them. I also wanted to have a real blizzard at the end. There is this wild music playing that I love more than anything and the dancers are dancing so beautifully - when it's done really well, they come out of nowhere, they really emerge from the snowstorm. And disappear back into it. When there is an evening like that, it's glorious.

Wim Wenders: Mother Hulda could learn a thing or two from you.

Peter Pabst: Let’s just say: I could perhaps have passed Mother Hulda’s journeyman’s test. But that would be mean to do to the technicians! Their arms get pretty tired – two hours at the ropes for Mother Hulda. But, that's the great thing about them. They always have to work like crazy for me, building giant installations - we're always a little late getting it done, but in the end there are still two hours of snow. People often ask me if the theatre technicians hate me. You know, they curse and groan sometimes when they see me coming, but they love their work and, when it’s over their eyes are always shining, and they ask: “When are you coming back?”

Wim Wenders: I think that’s the playful impulse you bring with you, it’s just contagious.

Peter Pabst: It’s fun for them! And they know that I’m keeping them in mind. With me they have a competent partner that they can dialog with, even when they’re talking about craftsmanship or technical issues, they know that I’m listening to them. I don’t wag my finger at them and say, “But it’s my idea – it’s precious and it has to be done just so.”

Wim Wenders: As we move to the next piece, we see an iceberg that is also a projection screen that is also a climbing wall…

Peter Pabst: And as soon as that thing was onstage, the dancers knew it to… especially the part about them being able to climb around on it.

Wim Wenders: Back at the Lichtburg though, they couldn’t have possibly known what you would build for them… that stage and the possibility for the exploration of the space that it offered them. How are scenes like that developed if they can only come into being in the final phase of a piece, even after the rehearsals have finished?

Peter Pabst: I thought about how and where one could climb on the iceberg during its construction. Preparing for it was as complicated as preparing for a real mountain expedition. And of course I considered the various paths and movements that would emerge because of it. And I was able to win over an association of mountaineers who now climb with us in Rough Cut. But that was just part of the preparations.

The extraordinary thing about claiming ownership over the stage during the last few days before the premiere was always the grand, playful fantasy of it all, and the unbelievable speed with which Pina and her dancers grasped and vitalized the landscape. Pina had the ability to recognize the potential of a stage set in just a few moments, to adapt it to her own needs and to use it for herself and her dancers. She did that better than anyone I’ve known. I think that Pina was so free with new conditions because she was ready to dispose of everything she had made at any moment until she was ultimately satisfied. After that, though, she didn’t let go of it.

I think that the few days and hours that Pina and the dancers occupy my set are my happiest times. It has always been wonderful to witness; it was never a cheap experience… in almost thirty years there was never a single faux pas. Instead, it has always been imaginative, sophisticated, and full of elegance. That has been an underlying cause of my work’s freedom, which was only made freer through my working with Pina. Whatever I would make, I could be sure that it would be used and appreciated in a certain manner. That is truly a great privilege!

Wim Wenders: I know most of the details about your set for Vollmond from having filmed it. There’s an enormous boulder lying across a river. How did the form of this boulder emerge, and when and how did Pina and the dancers discover that they could swim in the river?

Peter Pabst: The form of the boulder emerged very simply. As the only 'bridge’ across the river, I wanted to have a boulder. I looked for such a long time until I found a stone that could represent this boulder in a model form (measuring 1:25). I finally found it in a stone quarry near Wuppertal – there it was.

The swimming came about in a way similar to the way in which the climbing came about. I made a beautiful, sensual river for the dancers, warm and comfortable, so that they would enjoy going in the water. And Pina’s inner freedom came into play here again. Of course, the water is much too shallow; any normal person would never have considered “swimming.” But, Pina wasn’t interested in that at all, “Go swim in the river.” And such beautiful movements came out of that! Truthfully though, she was more interested in the women’s smiles while they were swimming.

Wim Wenders: What can you tell me about the drizzling and the fierce rain that falls?

Peter Pabst: I refer to it as ’small rain’ and ‘big rain.’

The seasons played a role in my initial conversations with Pina. But, we always stumbled when we got to summer because one always thinks of the intensity of the sunlight. And of course that can’t be produced with floodlights. Then one starts to think of sunblinds and their stripes of shadow. But of course that’s all nonsense and gets nowhere. Then it occurred to me that, in the piece 1980, Pina had made a wonderful summer image on the stage. In that piece all of the dancers came onto the stage little by little - some unhurried, some rushing and direct, some hesitant and indecisive - and they all looked for a place in the sun. But they all wanted to have only a particular body part in the sun, so they only exposed that part and tried to stretch it out into the sun. I’m sure there has never been such a hot summer in the theatre. We only had a tiny bit of light then. And it was hot anyhow! Sometimes I think that the most beautiful part of theatre is the way you meander through it.

In any case, in thinking about the seasons I came to the idea of weather and that led me to rain. I always wanted to make a monsoon-like rain with thick drops that would burst on the pavement and spew bubbles. I think a childhood memory played a role there. When I was five or six years old, in the summertime I always rushed out of the house whenever there was a thunderstorm, and I would run, as if possessed, naked up and down the gutters on our street. I wasn’t afraid of thunder or lightning yet, but it was warm and I loved the way it splashed!

Anyway, I spent a long time tinkering with my two rains - I talked to interesting people about the technical and physical considerations and learned a lot.

I made the fine, dense drizzling rain because originally I wanted to project images on the fine drops of water. That looked totally crazy, but we didn’t have enough time to find the right place in the piece for it. So I left the projections out. I also knew that one could buy ready-made 'rain curtains' like that. They were too small for me and so expensive that I couldn’t pay for them. That’s why I made the 'small rain' myself.

When I first tried out the 'big rain’ between rehearsals, Pina was sitting in the house behind me. I remember as if it were yesterday how I turned to her and said: “Look Pina, there’s our summer.” Pina smiled and nodded. I had learned to value that as a sign of her utmost enthusiastic agreement.

Wim Wenders: In Bamboo Blues there’s a wave of curtains, curtains, and more curtains…and then suddenly behind them there’s all kinds of junk. As an exception, that must not have presented many technical challenges. Was that a kind of low-budget set?

Peter Pabst: That was my metaphor for India: delicate fabric and the wind.

If you have to tour a piece through the theatres of India, you'll do well to keep the technical aspects uncomplicated. But, “low-budget” it was not! There were 1.6 kilometers of fabric, some 6,400 square meters! Not to mention a wind machine that is normally used to ventilate highway tunnels, and about 40 moving fans. And I tried making the projections multi-layered. For instance, I tried letting the wind get caught in the fabric, then filmed it and projected the film back onto the blowing fabric, and I projected another layer from above onto the floor. So we soon tested the technical limits of theatre in India. The whole first part happens with practically no light; the dancers are only lit by these projections and by follow spots.

Wim Wenders: And finally the 2009 premiere of the piece about Chile, … Como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si si … as it is now called.

For a long time there is nothing more than a wonderful, huge, white surface. But then one starts to notice that the semblance can’t be trusted. The floor opens up, in this case the dance floor… One thinks of the Antarctic and of ice floes. Are there parallels between this and the icebergs in Rough Cut?

Peter Pabst: No, there aren’t any. I don’t know what else to say about this set. It too found its meaning through Pina.

Wim Wenders: Now that we've gone covered almost thirty years, the entire period of time that you worked with Pina, have we forgotten any pieces?

Peter Pabst: We forgot Nur du, the coproduction we did with UCLA, Berkley, Tempe in Arizona and the University of Texas - Austin. Pina even managed to smoke in the rehearsal space at UCLA!

And I managed to put onstage one of the few things that I hadn't laid my eyes on throughout my whole research period: seven enormous redwood tree trunks, which took up the entirety of six giant, 40-foot-long trailers. Those pieces made it so that we were only able to do the piece on rare occasions. It’s a shame really; it’s a very beautiful, very “out there” sort of piece.

And we forgot Sweet Mambo from 2008. In that season, we didn’t actually want to make any new productions because there was a huge deficit from the previous year and Pina decided to do 20 more showings to earn money and stop up the holes. In order to make that possible we decided, with heavy hearts, not to do a new piece.

She didn't end up following through with that promise and made Sweet Mambo with the dancers who hadn't been in India the previous year. In order to avoid spending more money, I used the set from Bamboo Blues as a base. What I really wanted to do was have the entire piece played in front of the black and white screen of a projected film from the 30s. The film was meant to be a homeland for the piece. I picked The Blue Fox starring Zarah Leander and Willy Birgel. Pina didn’t want to go quite that far, but we used a long sequence from that film and I found out what a great actor Willy Birgel was. And our dancers were great too. A beautiful piece, small but excellent.

Wim Wenders: The playful impulse that you’ve been letting loose over the past three decades, was that something you saw in yourself before or was it something that Pina drew out of you? Have you allowed yourself to get lost, so to speak, in your own fantasies in order to become a dancer, to imagine the possible stage designs and the obstacles inherent therein and the challenges they may present for the dancers?

Peter Pabst: I’ve always been playful actually. I think I’ve protected myself pretty well from growing up and I've tried to keep a fair amount of naiveté because it generates a fertile form of curiosity.

Peter Zadek taught me to love actors. He also taught me how to peer into their fantasies and to use the stage not only to give them a home, but also to present them with an obstacle, a challenge. The “physical dialog” with Pina’s dancers, though, is much more direct and intensive. And actors have never been as brave as our dancers.

But above all else, no one has ever allowed me as much freedom as Pina did. And through all the difficulties, no one else has ever let me play so freely.

Wim Wenders: How different is the work you create for Tanztheater productions versus the work you do in the opera or in “straight” theatre?

Peter Pabst: It’s very different. One reason is simply that in the theatre, the starting point is usually a very concrete structure: a written piece. In the opera, that structure is even more determined because in addition to the text there is a mathematically exact score. That translates to the work being made easily conceptual. That fact is equally due to the structure of the theatre world, at most of the world’s larger opera houses I have to deliver my designs at least 12 - 18 months before the beginning of rehearsals. If I were working with Tanztheater, I wouldn't have even started with the previous season's work by that time. The people think and feel quite differently in the worlds of opera and acting, and that makes the themes and focal points for my work very different. And when I’ve done films here and there, that was a totally different world entirely.

I’ve always considered it a privilege to have been able to work in all of these forms, and I've used their contrasts as an education, an education in forms. I’ve had many invaluable experiences because of this work.

Wim Wenders: What parts of your stage designs were dance-specific, and what parts would you refer to as “Pina-specific”?

Peter Pabst: For me, dance-specific is “Pina-specific.” With the exception of the ballet Hurlevent for the Paris Opera, the only dance pieces I have done have been with Pina. I don’t understand dance at all.

I’m afraid that most dance companies would have kicked me out if I had tried any of the things with them that I tried because of what I came to expect from Pina’s dancers over the course of our 29 years together. I’ve thrown stones and even boulders at their feet often enough.

Wim Wenders: Which didn’t keep them from dancing all the more freely. Even with your boulders, you created a “playing field” for them in the truest sense of the word.

Translated by Christopher Young.

The text was first published in Peter for Pina. Published in 2010 by Verlag Kettler.