Bausch’s Tanztheater, or dance theatre, was formed in 1973, a fusion of theatrical elements, aberrant storytelling techniques punctuated with laughter and tears, twinned with a patina of deviant arabesques, inversions of traditional dance, forming something altogether more existential – “I am not interested in how people move, but what moves them,’’ Bausch once proclaimed – her motivation to explore no lesser terrain than that of the human heart, the capricious, mysterious trajectories of instinct.   
 
Pina’s dance came out of a different source, she wasn’t interested in the aesthetics of dance, she was interested in what dance can tell us about each other and what that language is able to communicate that words can’t, and photography can’t, and any other language can’t. There is something that you can only understand in the movement of the body and that is a territory that a lot of us have not explored – and even if you see classic dance you don’t see that territory, you don’t know what dance really can do.
 
The director, whose filmography spans both documentary and narrative films – from the watchful angels of Wings of Desire (1984) to the Palme-D’or winning Paris, Texas (1987) – spent two decades considering how to reconcile the disparate mediums of dance and cinema.