I passed the Bausch Haus the other day. On my way to see my friend Katerina who lives next door. It’s early summer on this Cycladic island and all the way down the hundred or so steps that pass the house and lead to Katerina’s gate the path was lined with poppies and wild cistus and strewn with broken stones and bits of rubble washed down in winter rains. Few people walk down these steps now, and there’s no other way to get to the Bausch Haus than down this stairway from the road or up from the village below. I say the Bausch Haus as if that was its official name but of course it isn’t. It’s just that it is where I met Pina Bausch one late summer morning in the early 1990s. It has been the Bausch Haus to me ever since.
When I walked down the other day, I hadn’t been past it for maybe a year. I noticed a new padlock on the gate but the gate itself was unpainted, peeling and a little more decayed, the shutters of the windows on the path side too. The sun has burned off the blue and the winter rains have rotted the wood, but the house itself is still sturdy. The roof looks okay, the stonework isn’t crumbling. It was built by a local stonemason in the nineteenth century for his beloved single disabled daughter and it’s bigger and more handsome than anything else around it. It stands up from the path, two stories high, and looks far out across the bay a couple of kilometers away, and to the mountains to the south.
It had been my first visit to Andros. A short break with a newish friend. A stay in the village house her father had bought in the 1970s, a smaller, lower, whitewashed stone building with a big terraced orchard of walnut trees and apricots, pears and oranges. It’s a close-in village, near enough to the main town for people to own small properties on land they cultivated with fruit trees and family vegetable plots—artichokes and tomatoes, vines and nuts. The Bausch Haus never had land, just a high balcony shading a lower courtyard with a narrow terrace in front. It was to that lower courtyard that Katerina called me the morning after I arrived. At the time of our holiday, I was emerging from working in theatre and making my way as a writer of short experimental theatre texts, essays, and articles. I later taught performance and started a journal called Performance Research with two old theatre friends. Katerina and I had met in Cambridge, where I had a writer’s fellowship when I stopped performing.
Kat had gone over early to see her next-door neighbor Kyveli, a Greek academic teaching at the Sorbonne who bought the Bausch Haus as a summer retreat. Come and have breakfast with us, Katerina said when she returned—Kyveli has a friend who is also something in theatre, maybe a director, or a choreographer. I’m not sure why I was reluctant, not ready for breakfast-time theatre small talk maybe, but off we went, through the blue courtyard gate—the one that is now broken and peeled—to arrive at the breakfast table (I remember there were figs and coffee) and meet the woman sitting with her back to the view. As I remember it, she stretched out an arm to greet me, an arm that seems in retrospect very long and very languid and pale and said, “I am Pina.” I was, I think, speechless. It wasn’t only that my reluctance had left me unprepared. This was a culture clash of monumental proportions. I had left the theatre and dance world back in England. This was Greece. This was a small obscure village on an island with almost no tourist imprint. And yet this was Pina. “I know,” I mumbled, and sat down at the table. I wasn’t confident enough then, or wise enough, or collected enough mentally, to do more than say I had seen her work and loved it. I didn’t ask her how she came to be there or suggest that we all go up to the taverna that night and have a meal. I was both starstruck and suddenly shy. I had nothing to say. Kyveli’s partner, a poet, was also there. He and Pina were working together. We had coffee, we chatted, and we left. Do you know who she is? I asked Kat when we were safely back on her property. No, she said, who is she?
Like many artists of my generation, I first saw Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal in 1982, at Sadler’s Wells in London, performing 1980 and Kontakthof. Perhaps it was the words that come to mind about that experience—“nothing could have prepared me” or “words fail me”—that explain my inability to converse with her when I finally met her. The experience of being in the theatre those nights changed me, changed us, changed my sense of theatre itself, of what could be done on a stage or even my idea of what a stage could be. For the first time I understood that I was witnessing a space constructed through emotional histories written on the body. It was as if all that had led up to that moment in terms of my understanding of performance had failed to prepare me for what I saw. I felt as if I dreamed the entire show that first evening. It was not that I was naïve: I had been making professional ensemble theatre for about four years in a collaborative company that itself made unusually audacious, powerful work. As makers we knew German film directors, we had seen Tarkovsky, and we had seen Kantor’s work. Encountering Pina Bausch’s work (and in writing now) seemed an inevitable part of my journey and an unexpected but deeply influential one. More than that it was as if other parts of my life were touched by the work.
Even though these performers were nothing like me, the confessional nature of their performances, the rawness and humor and sense of life’s shameful absurdity they brought into the room touched my psychic life. After 1982 I went on to make work that referenced in some way what she did. The company I worked with went to Italy and made a large visual performance called A Place in Europe. Later we worked with the writer Russell Hoban on The Carrier Frequency, a wild physical musical piece with echoes of a mythical past in a dystopian future. I had dedicated the first text in my own Utopia series to Andrei Tarkovsky who died just as it opened in late 1986. I had kept Pina Bausch’s expressionist work in play in my own artistic world. When I encountered her the shock was a mix of strangeness and fulfillment. It felt uncanny, perhaps even unheimlich. I also felt then, or began to feel, that time is not quite linear, that certain encounters transcend time.
Pina was there because her friend spent her summers on that island. It was that ordinary. I have no idea if there was anything about Greece that drew Pina there, other than friendship, and Katerina and I never became friends with Kyveli, who stopped coming so often after that summer. In the 1990s the house was usually uninhabited. And then Kyveli died. And then Pina died. Both too young. And the house started to go up for sale. I think. On islands it’s not always clear—maybe it’s for sale, maybe someone has a key but maybe not. I had bought a house nearby in the early 2000s, and in the summers we had been busy with family and keeping our own place going so it wasn’t on my radar. In 2014 Andros began an arts festival and at the opening the director, Pantelis Voulgaris, dedicated the festival to Pina’s memory. Katerina, who was there, said she thought almost no one knew what he was talking about.
It wasn’t until 2015 that I went into the house again, this time with my friend the theatre director Anna Furse. I had told Anna about Pina and the house because Anna wanted to buy a house in Greece. Let’s find a way to see it, she said, maybe we can buy it. In fact, it wasn’t hard to gain access. It was listed with an estate agent who met us at the top of the steps one day and let us in. It was for sale at an exorbitant price and it was in a poor state. The lower courtyard was deeply cracked now with roots pushing through the paving. The windows and shutters were warped and broken, and the drainpipes were falling apart. Inside it was gloomy, tiled floors piled with chairs that could have been in a Pina Bausch show. But the revelation lay upstairs. The entire empty top floor was clearly Pina’s studio. She did come back, she did work here, I thought when I saw it. A steeped sloping roof over a sprung floor, a tiny kitchenette and shower room, a narrow bed, books, and a full-length mirror.
Needs a lot of work, we said, as if we knew at all what work to do. Someone should buy it for a center, the Pina Bausch Center, or a retreat for artists to write and research, or a walking center or a nature center. Through the realtor we suggested to the family who had inherited it that we rent it for a couple of years with an option to buy, and we fantasized that we could raise the money to restore it, and then we gave up. Imagine, I thought, the project this would be, but it was too much. Anna bought a house on the coast of the mainland and I went back to my own island house and wild garden, visiting Katerina and musing on the Bausch Haus as I passed it on my way down to see her. The family took it off the market soon after that and one summer we even saw some chairs on the balcony, and then, nothing.
In the aftermath of the Greek economic crisis Andros changed. Younger people began to return to houses that maybe their great-grandparents had once owned, houses that are often in need of repair. That have been left. That are full of old chairs and paint pots and plastic tablecloths and cracked mirrors and all the stuff it is so hard to shift on an island. There is an organic farm in the valley below the house. A yoga festival. The old paths that link villages where once no one wanted to walk have been cleared by teams of people from all over Europe, Dutch and Belgian and German and British as well as island people—digital designers and teachers and musicians and architects and therapists and translators. I began to work with Greek artists in the 1990s and to continue to find the unusual, the unexpected, the extraordinary coming my way. So many travelers have crossed these islands. Perhaps islands are simply like that. They are inevitably places of crossing and encounter.
I think of Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan on Delos in the 1950s, hosted by the visionary architect Constantinos Doxiadis. I think about the painter Betty Ryan, the artist Remy Charlip, and Brice Marden, whose exquisitely minimal late works on his encounter with antiquity I saw at the Cycladic museum in 2022. In a video in the exhibition, he repeats something slowly, something like, the more you go on, the more you go on, the more you realize the light you’re in. There is something about the way encounter works, by chance, by the measure of a synergy way outside our ken, that keeps bringing that light. It isn’t really about place, though place is somewhere we have to be, and Greece is a place whose light runs through my own life. It’s merely about what is more than we are at any one moment and what connects us to that more. My domestic encounter with Pina on the island that later became my home, simply, I suppose, gave me what I can only call a sort of blessing. Here you are, it said, and here we are, in the light of Greece, with figs and coffee, on a summer’s day in 1991. I am Pina. Everything else that will happen starts here.