They may be accompanying the Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, 1909-1929 exhibition but the dance videos being screened at CaixaForum Barcelona this month are a running leap away from the glass-encased slippers and dusted chalk storybook illustrations of the main show.

Represented by projections of pivotal works Changing Steps (1975) and Café Müller (1978) respectively, choreographers Merce Cunningham and Pina Bausch are two names equally deserving not just of all the high honors and accolades to have showered them over the long years, but also of all the subsequent hyperbolic characterizations such as visionary, revolutionary and iconic. It is difficult to overstate their cumulative impact on the course of Western contemporary dance.

At the knife-edge of American modern dance innovation for most of his life, Merce Cunningham, who got an early leg-up from dance grand dame Martha Graham, soon formed his own dance company, which went from touring in an old Volkswagen to choreographing over 200 dances and 800 site-specific events – “choreographic collages” which pioneered the performative use of urban public spaces.

While Cunningham’s stylistic hallmarks was the isolation of dance from music within the same time and space, relying heavily on chance and improvisation for an abstract, mechanical and purist kind of dance, that of German dance matriarch Pina Bausch was grounded in theatricality. As recently reprised to magisterial effect in the recent Wim Wenders film Pina – all the more profound as the choreographer passed away before its completion – Bausch’s style was a cinematically charged narrative. Rhythmic, plot-driven and darkly brooding, her dances were made for the stage, with props and her characteristic repeated movement – tales of violence and haunting heartbreak often set to the melodramatic backdrop of opera music.

Essential viewing for any dance fan, these videos capture the language of dance being written.

November 13

Café Müller (49 minutes)

November 27

Changing Steps (35 minutes)

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