Coffee with Pina | Lee Yanor
“It looks very chaotic but somehow makes sense,” Pina tells me in the rehearsal room, where she dances and rehearses parts of her solo in the “Danzon” production. The dancing is interrupted from time to time, allowing us to photograph intimate silences, conversations, and laughter of relief. “I met the choreographer Pina Bausch for the first time at Le Mistral Cafe in Paris in 1993. The dialog between us continued for 12 years and from there, the idea for the film ‘Coffee with Pina’. This is a documentary from a personal and intimate point of view about Pina and her world. The film begins in Paris in 2002, the place where we first met, and continues in Wuppertal, Germany in 2005, the home city of Pina and her band.”
Something between a dream and a memory guides the associative development of the film. The camera wanders between the cafe, the fountains of Paris, rehearsal rooms, industrial chimneys, railway tracks, endless forest plots, and underwater polar bear “dances”, integrated into dance sequences from the works: “Agua”, and “Rough-Cut”. Internal, deep, experiential ‒ choreography of state of mind. (Lee Yanor)
“Coffee with Pina” is neither a narrative nor a documentary film, but a reflection on documentation, on memory, on experience. It is the closest illustration to a chain of associations, flooding the viewer with beauty and a very strong feeling of the celebration of life. In all this, one can find what can be defined as sober optimism, a rare commodity.
The starting point of the film is the acquaintance between the artist Lee Yanor and Pina Bausch ‒ one of the greatest dance artists of the last 40 years in theater and the visual arts. Yanor (a guest of the 2023 'Artist Residency' program at the Weizmann Institute) created the film in 2006, from a personal and intimate point of view on Pina and her world: from the cafe to the fountains of Paris, rehearsal rooms, industrial chimneys, train tracks, endless forest plots, and Polar bear “dances” underwater, integrated into dance pieces from artworks, internal, deep, experiential, whose every moment can be frozen and framed as a valid impression. It ends with Bausch’s black-and-white photographs and leaves the viewer with a new insight into the power of movement as a way of connecting with the soul, with the innermost self.
Germany 2006 | 52 minutes | English with English subtitles
