Dancing Dreams

Like a meaty extra that escaped from the DVD of Wim Wenders’s ‘Pina 3D’, this routine fly-on-the-wall doc chronicles how a diverse group of German teens attempt to get their heads and feet around Pina Bausch’s fêted dance piece ‘Kontakth of’. The requirements of the routine demand that these fledgling performers leave their schoolyard scruples at the door, as they jut and swerve with a spooky rictus grin pasted across their face and are occasionally asked to strip down and erotically caress their bodies in front of their giggling peers. Interviews with the teens are largely unrevealing, delivering the expected platitudes about how the study of dance gives them confidence and control. But even in this rough-around-the-edges form, the radical genius of Bausch’s choreography shines through, and her warm presence and articulate instruction (the film was completed just before she died in 2009) largely annul the airy-fairy musings that peppered Wenders’s (otherwise great) film.