Longtime Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch dancer Julie Shanahan has just returned from New York. She arrives at the Lichtburg in Wuppertal, Germany, a charmingly ancient cinema that has been the rehearsal space for Bausch's company since the 1980s, wearing a navy silk dress. You can hear the suspended train that snakes across the city rattling overhead. In fact, crane your neck and a particularly memorable location – a roundabout under the train tracks – featured in Wim Wenders' 2011 film Pina is before you.

Shanahan was born in Australia; she is classically trained. She first saw the work of Bausch in 1982 when the German choreographer brought her company to the Adelaide Festival. Following stints dancing in Sydney, Shanahan moved to Europe, eventually auditioning for Bausch in 1988. She has performed in classics such as The Rite of Spring, 1980 and Sweet Mambo. She is a rehearsal director for the company – Bausch died in 2009 – and also creates works of her own.

Meanwhile, Danish artist Eva Helene Pade arrives at the Lichtburg from Paris in jeans and a leather jacket. Her recent debut institutional solo show at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art in Ishøj, which featured ten large-scale, free-standing canvases initially took inspiration from The Rite of Spring created by Igor Stravinsky in 1913. Though she says it was Bausch's relentlessly intense iteration of this landmark piece, which places the dancers on a stage with a floor covered in peat, which particularly inspired her. It also sent her down a rabbit hole, exploring the influential choreographer's work further.

Pade received a BFA and MFA from The Danish Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 2024, with her first solo show staged at Galleri Nicolai Wallner in Copenhagen in 2022. She joined the Thaddaeus Ropac roster – the youngest artist on the books – in 2024, and a new show, Søgelys, opens at the gallery's Ely House location during Frieze London in October 2025.

From a curved upper balcony that looks down onto a newly refreshed black dance floor, various props sit on the stage, from colourful stilettos to wine glasses or exercise balls – a typically Bauschian array of the seemingly gloriously random. They are perfectly backdropped by the old cinema screen, which Shanahan says they still sometimes watch things on, through the dust. Pade, meanwhile, is beginning to recount how a photograph of Shanahan had made its way into one of her paintings, long before she knew this meeting would take place.

Let’s begin.

Simon Chilvers: Julie, tell us about this amazing space that we are sitting in. I had goosebumps walking in knowing that Pina [Bausch] created so many of her incredible pieces here.

Julie Shanahan: I'm not great with dates but before I arrived here this was already an iconic studio. I don't know when Pina started to work here [it was around 1977] but most of her pieces were created here. A lot were made over in the opera house – in a very small studio. She made Le Sacre du printemps [The Rite of Spring] in a very small space. So when I came to the company we were rehearsing that piece in a studio that was too small for it – which was actually fantastic. Pina actually insisted we do it in that tiny studio.

Eva Helene Pade: It's interesting that Le Sacre du printemps was made in such a small place because it – and the set – has that incredibly claustrophobic feeling. The story is also built around the person being sacrificed which adds to that of course.

Julie: Dancing Sacre is maybe the only piece that makes me nervous before performing. You don't stop. It's pure dance, and that makes me more nervous – you want to be technically strong. But it's amazing. It's so freeing. You work so much on the form and technique, but once you're on stage you gain power from freedom. That freedom only comes from form. You take the structure and extend it with the idea that you'll never fully reach where you want to go. It's not humanly possible, but you try again and again. That's why repetition exists in Pina's work – someone asked her once in an interview, 'Why are you always repeating?' She said, 'It's never repeating, they're trying again.'

Eva: That's in Stravinsky, too. His music relies on rhythm more than melody. When you're confronted with something and it repeats over and over again, new things emerge each time. At some point you give in, and it becomes something else.

Julie: And within the piece it's a constant build-up, explosions, and then tenderness. There's so much tenderness and yearning in it – for love, for belonging. With all of Pina's work, yes it's art, but we are also doing it for something bigger than us. In her work you feel the physicality in it, but it's so much more.

Simon: Eva, you've talked about the lasting impression Sacre by Pina has had on you, and that it inspired some paintings. Can you talk a little about how you felt when you first saw it?

Eva: I saw it at Sadler's Wells in London. I sat there and was completely overwhelmed. It didn't lose me for a second. It took me weeks, in the studio, processing it – the imagery stuck in my head. My conclusion is that it hit something so contemporary. Seeing it as a woman, it was incredibly moving. It made me feel present and I had to work with it. It opened up the narrative of sacrifice in a bigger sense.

Simon: How did that manifest in the paintings?

Eva: The way I make my paintings is not by sitting down to plan. They happen spontaneously. I had photos to recall that very primal movement and these draw you back into the feelings. You can't listen to that piece of music all the time, it would be almost torture! And then I let go, and enter what I call an in-between state. A non-filtered, or censored state, trying to translate the music into painting. Translate the experience of having seen it [the performance] into paintings. I'm jealous of dance or music because at its core it is movement. It's different translating things, it's more fleeting, in the sense that you can take a photo and make it stand still, but the core of it is fleeting. When you work with painting you're stuck in this two-dimensional space. I constantly use things to take me back to that state which allows me to keep movement and dynamism in the painting, so it doesn't become static.

Julie: What I love about your paintings is that they're so layered. I was looking at some of them and they have so many faces in them that almost every time I look at them I see a new painting. One of the magical things about Pina was the way that she would piece different ideas and improvised movements together. The first time we did Sweet Mambo I worked on an idea where I asked the men to hit me with a table, so I get almost thrown by the table. The first time we did it, it kind of hurt. Then we found how to do it without it hurting and Pina put it together with another improv piece where I was walking forward and they [the male dancers] pull me back, and I say, 'Let me go.' This idea came from those dreams where you can't scream or you can't move. Every night I take something from the world with me to be able to perform.

What's beautiful about art is that the image is never the same image. With real art the image is constantly changing. So when I saw your paintings... When I have tried to paint or draw, I have the feeling that I paint like I dance; the page was telling me what was going to happen. This might stem from an idea that talks to you, that gets its own momentum and then you become the vessel.

Eva: It's something you have to train. You have to focus on staying in that in-between place. Sometimes when I'm completely lost and staring at a painting it helps to close my eyes, and then you get little coordinates within the painting. It's a way to find the feeling between what you want to express and the reality you have to deal with. When you spoke about the idea that you developed about being pulled, about a dream where you can't let go, that resonates so much with me. The sense of not being able to escape your mind and that there are so many layers to it... but you make it seem so simple, and then when they're put together, and it hits you! It's a craft, a skill, making all of this look effortless. That's why painters like [Edvard] Munch mean a lot to me. It's so effortless yet so raw. It captures a feeling as though you're trying to recall a dream or a memory or a feeling. It feels like an object we can touch but we can't – that's why we have art and why we do what we do.

Simon: Eva, you don't often use photographs as references in your work but interestingly for the painting Offerdansen you did look at an image of Julie in movement.

Eva: I mean, it doesn't look like Julie [in the finished painting], but it has that idea of being pulled forward. You need these little tokens to pull you back to a certain state of mind, and that's what this image did for me.

Julie: The picture is from Sweet Mambo and is the men hitting me with the table idea! It's really like slow motion. Like a wave in the ocean. You stand up and turn around, then it's coming again. It's like life, you get knocked down, you stand up, it keeps coming.

Simon: Where do you think this intent to create originates from? Were there people in your childhood inspiring you to dance? To paint? To become artists?

Julie: To me it was always obvious. I was a crazy kid. We're six children in our family, but I'm really a middle child that lived completely in my own world. My mother tried to get me into dance when I was about six. She was a dancer, but in those days young women didn't really leave home to pursue a dancing career, so she didn't. My father was an amazing singer. He studied at the conservatoire of music, a beautiful tenor, but he also had a normal job. Every weekend he sang at weddings. I'm sure that shaped me, because I loved going with him. So, there's creativity from both my parents' sides.

Eventually, my mother and her best friend Margaret, a beautiful woman, also a professional dancer, set up a ballet school. They were my first teachers, though Margaret contracted polio and was paralysed from the waist down and then in a wheelchair. Only years later did I realise she had showed me what dance really is. She couldn't move, but I never thought of her as someone who couldn't move. She was so alive in her upper body and I would sit on her lap, watch her dance, feel her dance. The beauty inside her meant I never saw restriction. My mother was running around, but it was Margaret who gave me the sense of dance.

Then I went to a horrible ballet teacher, a proper old-school one, all about technique, whereas I'd come from two crazy women who were about expression and dancing. Suddenly it was competitions, weigh-ins, all the things in ballet that damage women.

Simon: A wild upbringing, followed by strictness, technique. The foundations for the career that followed?

Julie: Yes. My mother would choreograph something in the garage and I'd be thrown onto a stage at an old people's home. She'd be sewing the costumes, pins still in them, and you'd still be dancing.

Of course you draw on your past to find your craziness, but also your strengths and possibilities. My first company in Sydney was fantastic. We had a Chinese choreographer, trans women, singers, actors, dancers, Aboriginal themes. We were political. It was the 1970s. Then I saw Pina. We had heard the name but we had no real idea about what she was doing. Sometimes you should just be thrown into something and see.

Eva: That was what happened when I saw Sweet Mambo. One of my friends hadn't prepared me at all. It was the first Pina I saw. He was like, 'Do you want go to the ballet with me?' I was hungover, sat down, and holy shit, I was completely blown away.

Julie: Kontakthof was the first piece I saw. They came out with their made-up bodies and faces, all their unique nationalities, the strength of those dresses. I thought, 'Oh my God, I want to do this.' Then I saw 1980. It was so long, three and a half hours. By the end you felt like they were in your living room, as if you knew them all. I thought, this is amazing! What kind of worlds can this woman make? And I wanted to know all of those people. When I watch dance I think, do I want to know them? They might be amazing, beautiful, but do they interest me? With Pina's dancers, I wanted to know every single one.

Simon: You really do sit and wonder about Pina's performers. How did they come to be on that stage? How do they feel about what they're doing on that stage? What will they be doing later when they come off the stage?

Julie: The earlier works were very theatrical. One of the marvels of her work was that I thought they were just people on a stage and then suddenly they started to dance. Dance became something else for me then: a human being dancing, not a dancer dancing. It became another language. Not just a physical language, which is also moving, but a real language. She put them in suits and dresses and made them dance and I thought, 'Wow.'

Simon: When you were watching Pina in Australia, you were thinking, 'I want to do this'; but were you wondering, 'Can I do this'?

Julie: Interesting question. I never asked myself that. I just thought, 'I want to do this, this is me.' I had strong training. I could have gone into a classical company. But in Australia, classical dancers were like Margot Fonteyn, 5ft 5in, dark hair. You got measured – height, everything. I was too tall, and blonde, which was rare. So I knew I'd have to go into contemporary [dance] anyway, which is crazy.

Eva: From your story, it makes sense you would find Pina!

Julie: I love the spontaneity of her work. And not thinking whether you can act and dance. People say to me now, 'Oh, you do theatre but you never studied acting?' And I say, 'Have you never seen Pina's work?'

Simon: Did you ever think about what you were going to do when you first picked up a paint brush, Eva?

Eva: Not really. It's a question you curse because people ask, 'When did you start?' With dance, people see it as a skill. With painting and drawing, they say you have to learn how to draw a hand in this academic way. I never did that. It always felt natural. The moments when I feel most in balance are the same as when I was a kid sitting at my desk by the window with this big tree. That's where I'd go, making sense of the world, translating what was going on. I never really had a mentor or role model. I looked for one for a bit but instead I had a lot of open-minded and encouraging people around me and I am thankful for that.

Simon: Is your family artistic?

Eva: I grew up in a small town in Denmark, on one of the islands in the middle. Not much happens there, not much art comes there. My parents were in medicine but were very focused on bringing culture into our worlds, making it important. So we all played music, did theatre and performed a lot. It was a creative household. They expressed their creativity in building and making things, always resourceful and capable.

Julie: How many siblings?

Eva: Three girls. But it never felt gendered, whatever we chose to do.

Simon: How did you go from just drawing as a child to art school?

Eva: It was never a question. I wouldn't call it confidence, more like a calling. As a teenager I thought maybe I'd be an opera singer, but I wasn't good enough, so I kept drawing.

Simon: How did Pina work, Julie?

Julie: Non-judgementally. She'd ask questions and we'd answer. In the early days it wasn't filmed, but later she brought a video camera to record our movements and improvisations. But they weren't really improvisations. She asked a question. We thought about it, and then gave an answer in movement. She'd sit smoking, watching, then she would put her cigarette down, take out her pen, write notes in her special handwriting, close the book, sit back, take another drag, and wait for the next one. Everything she did was thoughtful, digesting what she saw, but never judging. If something was funny she'd laugh. If something went wrong, she reacted. She rarely stopped an improvisation. She didn't want to be too precise, because sometimes when it was misunderstood an amazing answer would come. Any answer was valid because she never knew what she needed. You could do something you thought was stupid and it would end up in the piece. Or you could do something you thought was wonderful and she wouldn't want to see it again. You learned to bring everything, even things you thought were bad. That's what she wanted. She didn't want us separating good from bad. You didn't know what would be used or how it would change when it was used. It's the same with colour – colour is not just colour. Nothing is really what it is until you use it. Everything changes.

Simon: How do you see colour, Eva?

Eva: It's interesting to hear how she used the whole troupe like a colour box, mixing everything to see what came through. When you work with dance or painting, something can appear effortless if done well, it feels natural. You take it in and accept it. Especially in theatre or dance – you sit, watch and must accept what's given. With Pina, it becomes powerful because it exceeds that. It made sense without making sense.

I mostly paint figurative work with abstract elements. People categorise it as figurative and say, 'You painted this posture, so it must mean this' – reading it like a photograph. Even more so today because people are so used to photographs. But I approach figures more like a colour palette, vessels for emotions. There has to be choreography in it – how you express emotion in a face, how you let it come out effortlessly. Because I'm composing. But I'm not using bodies as a stage. It's the colours, dynamics, movements and layers that morph together. I try to break the fixed image people expect. For example, Lucian Freud's faces are twisted just enough that you engage emotionally but still accept them as faces. Francis Bacon takes it further, completely morphed but still recognisable, holding emotions and in-between states. It's a fine craft, but it has to come effortlessly. When I paint, I go over faces again and again. Not to perfect proportions but to capture expression quickly. The moment I over-think, it becomes horrible and I have to wipe it away.

Julie: I saw one of your paintings with three naked women and a big red area. That red was incredible, it went deep and kept evolving. It was another painting within the painting, an energy within the energy – or an inside layer. It's the same as doing this movement [Julie contorts her body in her chair] but with a different intention – the brush stroke is the same, the intention changes everything. Sometimes you don't even know your intention until it happens.

Eva: Exactly. People call it negative and positive space, but I don't like those terms. I call them gaps in paintings, because they add balance. A protagonist in a painting might stand alone, but the surrounding colour creates distance, loneliness, or another layer. Sometimes I erase half a painting to create this space. It's like listening to intense music – you need a break. In that break, the other parts speak more strongly, and they play together. That's why I try to keep breathing space in my work, which enhances the other parts. Without it, it's too intense and doesn't allow someone to enter it.

Julie: Going back to Stravinsky. When he worked with The Ballets Russes [influential dance company from 1909-1929], a ballerina was crying because she didn't know how to dance to the music. He told her, 'Listen to every instrument.' What seems harsh actually has tenderness, yearning and love. You can't have one without the other. That was part of Pina's work. She often asked us to layer those contradictions in a single action. Vulnerability is a powerful force. In your most vulnerable place you discover how many layers you have. That's where delicacy meets strength. That is your strength – your delicacy.

Working with Pina was a philosophy. Sixteen years after her death, people think her repertoire is her legacy. But her legacy is how she created, how she taught us to see, to listen, to perceive. Not just watching with eyes or listening with ears, but listening with your eyes, watching with your ears. Perceiving with your whole being, holding and giving with the most tiny cell in your body.

Simon: You have both talked about being in the middle of something, realising it's going too far or becoming over-thought. When do you know something is ready to share?

Eva: Difficult question. I don't follow criteria. It's not about ticking a list. It's more a feeling – is it saying what I hoped it would? Not a perfect image in my head, but does it hold the core of what I wanted? You don't really question it. People ask, 'How do you know it's finished?' You can always add another colour. But at some point it stops being interesting in the sense of adding things.

For me, it starts with free, unfiltered, wet brush strokes, dripping paint. Then I mould and balance it. I often leave pieces, pretending they're not finished for months, turn them around and if they're still alive when I see them again, then they're done. You don't want to kill something that is very fragile. So if I can flip it around after a month and see that it's still doing what it needs to do, why should I change anything?

Julie: That's very close to Pina. She said, 'I have to sit and watch it in 25 years and still want to laugh or cry or be interested.' Often she would leave a piece, then return to see if anything needed changing. Pieces would change. But it's important to leave things.

Eva: That's the same with painting. People ask how long it takes, but that process is the most important. I could finish a painting in two weeks, but it wouldn't be finished without that time [to rest]. It needs to sit, leave your mind and then you return and see it again in a new way. It's like seeing an ex – you can finally see clearly why it ended.

Simon: Julie, tell us what it was like when you first auditioned for Pina.

Julie: I met her when I was in another company. I got the courage to go up to her and I said, 'I really loved the show.' Then I realised she never called her pieces 'shows.' She looked at me, didn't say anything. But it didn't matter. I understood. That was the first time I saw her. The second was probably my audition.

Simon: Were you scared?

Julie: No. I loved her work. I was doing what I loved and I wanted to do it and learn it. I was warming up, she looked at me, I looked at her, and I knew she would take me.

Simon: What fascinates me is what you said earlier – when you see a piece you want to know each person, their stories. She obviously chose people like you for those reasons. It's fascinating she could pick such different people to collaborate with. Her pieces are timeless because they're about humanity. It's endlessly fascinating that someone could work this way.

Julie: She worked on detail. Detail, detail, detail. That famous sentence, ‘it doesn’t matter how people move, but what moves them,’ has been taken out of context. Of course she cared about what moved people, but in the company, of course, she cared about how you moved. She was the most detailed person in the world about how you move. Everything mattered. 

We see classical forms in our bodies. Look at old statues - the hand, the tilt - it’s all body language. Within movement we create humanity because we’re using the body language of humanity in our dance.

Eva: Working with figurative painting or movement in dance is about the same thing. Of course there’s technique, but at the core it’s basic: translating everyday feelings and actions we never think about. What do intense emotions look like when you move through them? How do you express them? Fix them in movement? We rarely ask that.

Julie: That’s the hardest thing to pass to the new generation. Dancers train so much they separate themselves from that. They focus on perfection but there’s a sensation in the movement. For example, in ‘Sacre’ we used technique but it was always about reaching. With one movement you’re doing the impossible. Even though you only have a limited possibility your yearning goes further than you can. Your intent is bigger than you. That weight of understanding is what makes us look human on stage. I keep that with me - my whole life experience is still there when I dance. That’s where the poetry begins. 

Eva: Isn’t it exhausting, carrying that every night?

Julie: I love it.

Eva: It’s so intense. I hope you love it because otherwise I don’t think you’d survive it.

Julie: It’s also freeing. It is exhausting, and you can get burnt out. We [the Pina Bausch company] are the oldest dancers on the planet! No one’s older than us, and we’re still doing all that crazy stuff. Where do we get that desire to keep going? I’ve worked in other companies, and the 35-year-old was the oldest there. I can’t even remember when I was 35. So what is this elixir, this Pina Bausch elixir, that keeps us going on and on and on?

Simon: She set you free? 

Julie: We were such collaborators. Every year of our life we were giving our answers. The movement was close to us, like speaking our own language. In the beginning Pina gave movements you could combine with yours. But at one point she stopped giving movements at all. Everything came from us.

Eva: Why is 35 often considered the cut-off? Is it about an aesthetic? When you see Pina’s pieces, what makes it universal is that every age is present in the piece. It’s not just adolescent dreams or romanticised images. It carries across generations, almost ancestrally. That universality makes it timeless. It’s a pity dance hasn’t fully understood that.

Julie: Because that’s dance. It’s youth and beauty-obsessed. Now they even have ‘second companies’ where they separate the young from the old - ridiculous! The best thing is dancing together. That’s how you learn from each other. I learn so much from the younger generation.

Simon: Julie, you’re also a rehearsal director. How does that role differ for you?

Julie: The beauty of rehearsal direction is learning that a role isn’t about the original person. I’ve learned many roles not created by me, so I know how to make something my own. That’s always been part of Pina’s work - roles passed on. For me it was natural: I’d watch, understand the person, find that feeling in myself, and then make the movement my language. But I’ve realised not everyone can shift so easily. As a rehearsal director you respect each dancer’s process, give them space to come into it. 

In the old days, rehearsals were harsh, you were thrown in, no one waited, they were more like - ‘can she do it?’ Now, with few original members left, it’s different. The choreography can be taught easily but choreography alone isn’t the work. The work is language, not form. The dancer has to feel like they created it, that they’re speaking it. Otherwise it’s just movements. That’s the biggest challenge.

I now also do many projects outside of the company. One close to my heart is bringing ‘Kontakthof’ to Australia with people with disabilities. It’s changed everything for me. There’s a woman who is blind, another deaf, two in wheelchairs, people with Down’s syndrome, autism - so many differences. And they don’t need me to explain the work; they tell me what they feel in it. It’s the best project I’ve ever been involved in.

Simon: I can’t wait to see that piece, Julie. Eva, what can we expect from your new London show? 

Eva: It will touch on many themes we’ve discussed - in-between states, depth, light, shadow. I’ve been experimenting with smoke, shadows, layering. I’ve become fascinated by smoke and shadows as poetic objects which aren't objects, they aren't tangible and it became a vessel to abstract the characters in these paintings. 

I haven’t seen them in the space yet and a lot will come down to the choreography, the curation. I will install it so they’re freestanding. In my last show we lit the paintings with spotlights, so when you stood on the backside of the painting there was a whole new painting coming through; the aftermath of what you’d seen on the front. It adds this element of continuity in the painting. They don't just die on the front when people pass them. It forces people to move within them. I’ll be doing my own choreography - in a humble sense - forcing the viewer to move in and out of the paintings but also to connect the paintings together. I create them together, like an ensemble; they talk together. 

They’re heavy paintings, emotionally violent, with people falling, held up, in ecstasy. 

Simon: We’ve touched a bit on what art is, but is art a kind of performance? 

Julie: I don’t know anymore.

Eva: Neither do I. It’s a difficult question. I don’t want to define what is or isn’t art. But when something touches me, then it becomes art to me

Julie: Maybe it becomes art when someone creates it for the purpose of being seen or felt. A mother hugging her child isn’t art - it wasn’t created for that purpose of being seen. But when something is made to be received, then it becomes art. Done for a purpose.

Eva: It’s easier to define great art.

Simon: What is great art?

Eva: When it goes beyond its purpose and touches people. Not just ‘I like that colour’ but when it leaves space for others to see themselves in it. When you feel understood by something made by someone you don’t know - a book, a painting, a piece of music - and you feel less alone. I didn’t know Pina, but I feel it. That’s great art.

Julie: And it’s curiosity too. The drive to go on, to find something that keeps you moving.

Simon: How would you define beauty?

Eva: Things with cracks in.

Julie: Beauty doesn’t have a definition. If it’s only what we see, then the blind woman in my piece has never known beauty. But she has. Beauty is something felt, it is not tangible, something present even in the worst moments. It is something we have tried to capture but you cannot capture. 

Eva: Beauty isn’t a perfect garment or hairstyle. It’s those fleeting moments when light hits, or a brushstroke captures something intangible.

Julie: Yet we teach children that beauty is about appearance. But there’s so much more beauty than how we look. Beauty is infinite. I can’t stop seeing it. I can’t stop feeling it. I can’t stop believing in it.

Eva: [Beauty] is about allowing yourself to open up to the world. The more you read, listen, and experience, the more the world speaks to you. That’s where beauty is.