Pina Bausch was born 1940 in Solingen and died 2009 in Wuppertal. She received her dance training at the Folkwang School in Essen under Kurt Jooss, where she achieved technical excellence. Soon after the director of Wuppertal's theatres, Arno Wüstenhöfer, engaged her as choreographer, from autumn 1973, she renamed the ensemble the Tanztheater Wuppertal. Under this name, although controversial at the beginning, the company gradually achieved international recognition. Its combination of poetic and everyday elements influenced the international development of dance decisively. Awarded some of the greatest prizes and honours world-wide, Pina Bausch is one of the most significant choreographers of our time.

The Pina Bausch Foundation was established in 2009 shortly after the death of Pina Bausch by her son Salomon Bausch. The charitable foundation based in Wuppertal owns the rights to the works and choreographies of Pina Bausch along with the set and costume designs of Rolf Borzik and the extensive Pina Bausch archive. The foundation’s role is to carry Pina Bausch’s oeuvre forward into the future, to disseminate it and enable its performance. Preserving a work of choreographic art requires much more ongoing work than most other forms, as no sooner is it realised, it is gone again, and must be brought back to life on stage again with each performance.

The Pina Bausch Archive, which consists first and foremost of production details and documentation, serves as a knowledge resource. This resource, combined with the unique knowledge of the Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble, is the basis for the continued performance of the pieces. For this process, it is not only important to pass on the knowledge continually to new dancers, but also to train people to pass this knowledge on.

In recent years, dancers took on the role of stagers, transmitting choreographies directly to dancers within and outside the Tanztheater Wuppertal. Thus pieces have been rehearsed with companies such as the Bavarian State Ballet, the English National Ballet, the Opera Ballet Vlaanderen and the Paris Opera. The positive experiences from these transmission projects encouraged the Pina Bausch Foundation to mark its 10th anniversary by looking to the future and searching for new forms and objectives for the transferal of Pina Bausch’s works, thus widening access to them, under the heading ‘Reimagining Transmission’.