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Let's Talk About Sets: Peter Pabst on Like Moss on a Stone

Designer Peter Pabst explains what it was like working with the pioneering German dance legend Pina Bausch and her last piece which opens at Sadler’s Wells this week.

Como el musguito en la piedra by Pina Bausch
Como el musguito en la piedra by Pina Bausch
© Bo Lahola

It’s hard to talk about the process with this piece, because there wasn't really a process. There was barely any discussion with the director which is of course what happens when I’m working in theatre and opera. But it was not like that in the collaboration with Pina Bausch.

If you looked at …como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si… [or Like Moss on a Stone], it looks like a very classical ballet stage. White floor and black masking. And that’s it. But it is not that simple. At a certain point, the floor begins to move and cracks into pieces, like ice cracking, from downstage to upstage. It slides apart and then it closes and it’s a classical floor again. That of course makes a big difference for dancers. All of a sudden it becomes a much more difficult floor to dance on.

The dancers didn’t have the floor during rehearsals. With Pina Bausch it was always very very late, for a simple reason: when she starts rehearsing a new production there was no text, there was no music or score, no image, no title, no idea. So she would start from scratch and that would mean – this was the same in most of her productions – for the designer there was nothing to design for. In opera you have a structure in the score, in theatre you have a structure in the text, in dance, with Pina, you had nothing.

In the work with Pina Bausch it’s a very soft approach. For a long time, she didn’t know what kind of piece she was doing and so I had no idea too. When we started our collaboration I would ask her ‘do you have an idea already?’ and she would always say that ‘I can’t tell you, it hasn’t come out yet’. After five years of working with her, even I learnt not to ask the question.

Como el musguito en la piedra
Como el musguito en la piedra
© Zerrin Aydin Herwegh

At a certain point in the process I just started to design. I remember thinking that a moving floor might be nice for dancers: I thought they would enjoy it. And they did.

As there was no indication about where we would go with the piece, in the first phase, I would often make several designs. We would sit down with Pina, and she would think about each individual scene and what it would be like in each of the sets. Or the other way around: we would see how the set would behave if a dance came into it.

All the sets I’ve made for her are totally different and very complex. She trusted me. It’s been an adventure working with her.

— Peter Pabst

…como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si… runs at Sadler's Wells from 11 to 14 February.