A motivation to move: juxtaposing the practices of Ingemar Lindh and Pina Bausch

This article investigates an overlapping concern between the tanztheater practice of Pina Bausch and the laboratory theatre work of Ingemar Lindh: that, whether called 'movement' or 'action', a performer's work needs to be motivated by one's personal input (memories, thoughts, images, and other mental processes) rather than executed as a dictated, and often estranged, vocabulary of movement. This premise was largely a result of two major influential figures in Bausch's and Lindh's careers: Rudolph von Laban and Etienne Decroux. The work of these two practitioners is indispensable to an optimal understanding of Bausch's and Lindh's work on embodiment. This article thus starts with a juxtaposition of Laban's and Decroux's reflections on the matter, leading to Bausch and Lindh's overlapping concern with embodiment and of the core difference in their use of improvisation.