German Ballerina and Choreographer. She was known for productions involving innovative staging and somewhat erotic male-female interaction. Raised in western Germany, she enrolled at the Folkwang School in Essen in 1955, and received a scholarship to New York’s Juilliard in 1960. After dancing with the New American Ballet and the Metropolitan Opera, she returned to Germany in 1962 to perform with the Folk Ballet of Essen. Thru the 1960s, Bausch was to move gradually into choreography, though she never did completely stop dancing. She became director of the Wuppertal Opera Ballet (now called Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch) in 1972, and there was to stage her most noted productions. While she was quite capable of putting-on the standards (such as a well-received “The Rite of Spring” in 1975), she was most associated with modern dance. Her settings had everything from flower petals to peat moss to large boulders. Over the years, she continued to please audiences with such works as “Cafe Muller” (1978) and Nelken (2005). On the silver screen, she was La Principessa Lherimia in Fellini’s 1983 “And the Ship Sails On”, and danced in the 2002 “Talk to Her”. Her honors were several: the 2006 Laurence Olivier Prize (for “Carnations” and “Palmero, Palmero”), the Japanese Kyoto Prize in 2007, and, in 2008, the Goethe Prize of Frankfurt-am-Main. Miss Bausch was married once, to costume designer Rolf Borzik (deceased 1980). She gave her last performance on June 21, 2009, and died five days after receiving a diagnosis of cancer. Of her art, she said: “When I started choreographing, I never thought of it as choreography, but as expressing feelings”. (bio by: Bob Hufford)