Interview with Peter Pabst, Sadler’s Wells, London, 2 February 2002 and Cologne, 22 February 2008

Abstract

The interview with Peter Pabst, Pina Bausch’s scenographer, that follows is an edited version of a public interview Peter kindly agreed to give as part of a Pina Bausch Study Day we organised at Sadler’s Wells Theatre on the occasion of the Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal’s visit to London in 2002. The edited transcription was discussed and extended with Peter Pabst when we visited him in Cologne in 2008 and he agreed to answer further questions about his collaborative work with Pina Bausch. Subsequently, he has seen and agreed this final edited version combining the two conversations. Working on this interview with Peter has been fittingly collaborative in more than one sense. This book is essentially about collaboration — collaborative practices and processes — that we have engaged in whilst writing dancing together over several years. Our discussions and correspondence with Peter Pabst have been collaborative in the ways the three of us have worked together on this text and also in the sense that Peter has been interested in the book as a collaborative project and, as is clear below, he also discusses openly his collaborative process working with Pina Bausch. This collaboration that has lasted now for more than a quarter of a century is characterised by generosity, patience and trust. In his discussion with us, Peter underlined these three terms as keys to his working relationship with Pina Bausch.