About the work
Kontakthof is a full-length dance-theatre work by Pina Bausch, premiered in 1978 by the Tanztheater Wuppertal. It is among the most formative works of German Tanztheater and combines dance, speech, everyday gestures, and 1930s music into a haunting study of human relationships.
Plot
In a shabby-elegant ballroom—the "Kontakthof," a place for making contact—men and women meet in ever-new constellations. In repetitive gestures, tender and cruel approaches, humiliations, and brief moments of closeness, Bausch lays bare the mechanisms of longing, courtship, rejection, and loneliness. Without a continuous plot, a moving panorama emerges of the search for tenderness and the fear of being hurt—at times comic, at times painful, always profoundly human.
Cultural significance
Kontakthof is a key work of Pina Bausch's revolutionary dance theatre, which dissolved the boundary between dance and drama. It also became famous through later restagings with non-professionals—once with ladies and gentlemen "over 65," once with teenagers—which showed the work's universal validity across all ages. The work is regarded as a milestone and shaped contemporary dance theatre worldwide.