The Lichtburg

Die Lichtburg in Wuppertal
This is where Pina Bausch 's work was created: the Lichtburg in Wuppertal-Barmen

Frank Herfeld

is essentially just a poorly-ventilated, windowless room, bathed in unpleasant light. A former movie theater from the post-war period, it now serves as the rehearsal venue of the Tanztheater Wuppertal.

The building is wedged between a video peep show and a burger chain on a noisy main road in the Barmen district, and the overhead monorail rattles along in front of it. Next to it, the Romantika Bar advertises (“girls, girls, girls”). In a past life, the Lichtburg was a cinema that Raimund Hoghe, who was Pina Bausch’s dramaturg for many years, remembers “for its poorly-attended afternoon performances and for the fact that you were kicked out if fewer than eight people wanted to see the film.” In the 1970s, the cinema closed. Today, there is a fast-food restaurant at the front, and a staircase behind an unassuming door leads to the rehearsal room of the Wuppertal Dance Theater. The lettering on the roof still reads: Lichtburg.

Pina Bausch was at home here on a black dance floor, surrounded by ballet barres and clothes rails of worn costumes, large mirrors on wheels and props. A piano stands at the side. In the middle, in front of the grandstand, is the table from which she observed her company for over thirty years. It is said that she sometimes slept under that table, which was always stocked with a pencil, cigarettes, a Thermos flask, tissues, an eyeglasses case and an ashtray. When she was awarded the Kyoto Prize in 2007, Bausch said the following about the rehearsal space she managed to snatch from the Wuppertal city fathers in 1977: “When I walk past a bus stop to the Lichtburg theater, I see many people there almost every day who look very sad and tired. These feelings are suspended in our pieces.”

Die Lichtburg in Wuppertal
Frank Herfeld

Her son Salomon Bausch calls the place “magical”: “You don’t really know what decade it is; you don’t know whether it’s morning or evening, day or night, you don’t know whether it’s spring or winter – you don’t notice any of that.” Stephan Brinkmann, a long-standing dancer with the company, describes the space like an art historian: “A water dispenser at the entrance is a recent acquisition and suggests that you will work up a sweat within these walls. The walls themselves are lined with worn, green fabric and bear witness to past festivities. The lights mounted on them were recently repaired and give off a warm glow. But most of the light comes from harsh spotlights” – this latter remark is directed at the familiar regular spots that the ensemble, completely shielded as it is from the outside world, has claimed and positioned on old chairs.

Die Lichtburg in Wuppertal
Frank Herfeld

In 2016, the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn worked with the Pina Bausch Foundation to recreate the Lichtburg, first in the Bundeskunsthalle and then in the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin. The replica was an exhibition space, a place of pilgrimage, a temporary monument. A rehearsal room that only insiders were allowed to enter was transformed into a 1:1 cult object that people could walk through and dance in, where “the costumes still hang on the walls, her table and chair are still in the same place” (Boris Charmatz) – a place of eternity that is still used by the ensemble of the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch Terrain Boris Charmatz as a place to rehearse, where new pieces are created or resurrected and where guests and alumni, such as Judith Kuckart and Urs Kaufmann, also come together.

These two – Judith Kuckart and Urs Kaufmann – have now created a masterpiece, a story about this place. It is a place which Urs Kaufmann knows inside out, having helped to design ten new productions by Pina Bausch and performed in a dozen repertoire pieces including 250 performances of “Nelken,” 300 performances of “Le Sacre du Printemps” and just as many performances of “Kontakthof” along with the 2,500 rehearsals in the Lichtburg.

Judith Kuckart comes from Schwelm, a neighboring town near Wuppertal. She experienced Pina Bausch’s work from an early age, studied in Essen with Hans Züllig, with whom Pina Bausch had also studied, and then worked with Johann Kresnik before founding her own company, the Skoronel dance theater in Berlin. She became a successful director and author, most recently publishing “Die Welt zwischen den Nachrichten” (“The World Between the News”) in 2024, the same year she was first given the opportunity to use the Lichtburg for her dance piece “Von Wandermenschen und Sofamenschen.” The collaboration between Judith Kuckart and Urs Kaufmann takes us to this legendary place at night. In the rain. The overhead railway shakes the steel. The passengers look sad and tired, as they did in Pina Bausch’s day. A roller shutter. Let’s go in.

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Drehtüre

In the Lichtburg

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It happened in a legendary old movie theater, the Lichtburg, where almost the entire oeuvre of Pina Bausch had been rehearsed, and which is now staging a new generation. A place to prick up the ears and listen to what’s happening outside. Rain is falling, as usual.

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