Interview Josephine Anne Endicott and John Giffin
The former dancers Jo Anne Endicott and John Giffin talk about their time at the Tanztheater Wuppertal. It was here that they worked with Pina Bausch on Wind von West (Cantata), which was premiered in 1975. For the reconstruction, both dancers as well as Mari DiLena, Vivienne Newport and Dominique Mercy passed on their knowledge to dancers at the Folkwang Dance Studio, students at the Institute for Contemporary Dance at the Folkwang University of the Arts and students at the Juilliard School in New York.
Josephine Anne Endicott
was born in Sydney/Australia in 1950. In 1966, she was selected for the Australian Ballet School in Melbourne and was taken into the Australian Company two years later. She lived in London from 1972 onwards. It was here, in 1973, that she met Pina Bausch who took her as a solo dancer for her Wuppertal Dance Theatre. She broke her employment with the company in 1987 in order to start a family but returned four years later in 1991, mostly as a guest dancer, but also with fixed contracts, for example for Kontakthof or for revivals. Since February 2007, she has been working on a permanent contract with the ensemble in Wuppertal as head of rehearsals, assistant and dancer, and for the film archive of the Pina Bausch Foundation. Her working journal Ich bin eine anständige Frau was published in 1999. Her second book, Warten auf Pina, in which she reflects on her work with Pina Bausch, was published in 2009. She has also worked as a choreographer in all of Germany’s best-known opera houses. In 2002, she created her own one-woman show Gala for one. She has appeared in numerous films and received many awards. She gave her final performance as a dancer in the piece Komm tanz mit mir in June 2010 in Tokyo. Her most recent pieces for the Dance Theatre were Wind von West and Der Zweite Frühling for the festival marking 40 years of the Tanztheater Pina Bausch in November 2013.
John Giffin
earned a B.F.A. in dance from The Juilliard School and an M.A. in dance from The Ohio State University Department of Dance in which he is now Professor Emeritus. He has received Choreographic Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council for his creative works. These include six full-evening pieces, a commission from Rhythm in Shoes in Dayton and a co-production with the Contemporary American Theatre Company in Columbus. He has danced professionally with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens in Montreal, Agnes DeMille’s Heritage Dance Theatre and Brigadoon in NYC and has toured internationally with the Wuppertal Dance Theater directed by Pina Bausch. He created roles in many of Bausch’s seminal works including Fritz, Iphigenie auf Tauris, Blaubart, Komm tanz mit mir, Renate wander aus, Kontakthof, and Arien. In 2013, Giffin collaborated with the Pina Bausch Stiftung to reconstruct Bausch’s 1975 work Wind von West for performances by the Folkwang University of the Arts in Germany and The Juilliard School in the USA.
