THE AMERICAN WEST, STRIPPED BARE : BAUSCH REVEALS A SELF-OBSESSED POPULATION.

Byline: Donna Perlmutter Special to the Daily News

When Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal unveils ``Nur Du'' tonight, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion will not seem like its polite, chandeliered self.

At long last, the avant-garde takes center stage at the pavilion - and in very expensive raiments to boot.

Thanks to a precedent-setting alliance of six major presenters - UCLA, UC Berkeley, the Southern California Theatre Association, the Music Center, the University of Texas and Arizona State University - the $1.2 million commission will serve up the German choreographer's wily vision of America's culture emporium.

As in Bausch's other bold works - which have variously featured a ton of fresh peat on the stage floor, thousands of carnations, a gigantic brick wall crumbling - this one has seven full-size redwood trees, collectively weighing more than 17,000 pounds.

``Nur Du (Only You),'' which had its premiere last Thursday in Berkeley, was described by The New York Times as ``one of (Bausch's) most ambitious and richly imaginative works in recent years.''

As the first piece Bausch has created outside Europe, ``Nur Du'' takes an amused look at the American West. One of its themes deals with our obsession with our bodies. Dancers take off their clothes throughout the show. What they find either pleases or horrifies them. In other moments, dancers strut their stuff, showing off their bodies in provocative ways. One, then, simply confesses that she is naked under her clothes.

As usual, Bausch taps into nostalgia. Thus, you'll hear not only the doo-wop Platters' song ``Only You,'' but authentic fado and tango recordings, mixed in with jazz cognoscenti favorites like Jeri Southern singing Cole Porter's ``Ev'rytime We Say Goodbye'' or Sidney Bechet playing ``What Is This Thing Called Love?'' juxtaposed with '50s hit tunes by Jo Stafford and Les Paul.

The tone here is comparatively cheery, but don't expect anything less than full-bore Bausch. Ever since her company made its 1984 U.S. debut at the Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival, Bausch has made her name as a hard-driving iconoclast, an adventurer who dares to shake her audiences to the core of their psychic recesses.

Bausch is, variously, a fearless primitive, a keen yet loving satirist, a punster who bridges the arcane and simplistic, a mensch with a worldview that does not shy away from sorrow, a purveyor of the unmitigated unconscious. She seems to live in her art and demand that others do likewise - even against great resistance to its occasional and hyper-realistic tedium. Her scripts - Bausch brought the spoken word to the dance stage - spring from close collaborations with the dancers, who go through group mind exercises to dredge up material that can give depth to the movement.

Not much less significant is the set design, or ``environment,'' for her work. Bausch's first designer, the brilliant Rolf Borzik, was her great love and mentor. She lived with him until he died of cancer in 1980. Music, which comes from every spectrum, also figures crucially in the pieces. And costumes are the retro stuff of thrift shops.

But when tallied, the theatrical whole is greater than the sum of its parts. What Tanztheater Wuppertal comes down to is psychodrama of high specifics tempered with a healthy dose of expressionist absurdity. Bausch's work distills the interior turbulence we live with and, for the most part, successfully suppress. She searches out those shared ghosts - both the unspeakable and laughable ones. She not only fosters their artistic realization but watches over them zealously.

``I am not so much interested in how people move as in what moves them,'' Bausch said, explaining that steps and movement for their own sake are insufficient.

And that is the key to her genius, although it has made for a divided press, offending, for instance, the sensibilities of most New York dance critics - whose embrace of abstract or ``pure'' dance serves as a buttress against the threatening realities of life as so vividly portrayed by Bausch.

The New Yorker's Arlene Croce started the ball rolling when, in 1984, she coined the term ``Eurotrash'' to define Bausch and labeled her work ``the pornography of pain.'' But today, there is hardly an avant-garde company putting on stage productions that does not bear the Bausch influence.

The controversial innovator is used to the strong reactions she generates - both the yeas and the nays. And perhaps her reclusive aura, aided by a strategic modesty, is a way of defending against those reactions. She was and is an anxious person. When invited 22 years ago to start a state-supported company in Wuppertal, a drab industrial city in Germany's northern Ruhr district, her first instincts were to decline. She confessed to being ``completely scared of all the people and feelings'' that such a post would call forth.

As it turned out, the simple burghers were, in her words, ``provoked'' by what she wrought. They could not grasp the strange, dreamlike, violent, disturbing brand of dance-theater she put on stage. But eventually, with the help of major European recognition and glowing notices, she became the object of civic pride.

Bausch, named Philippine by parents who ran a modest hotel cafe in the town of Solingen, was shy and fearful as a child. She remembers ``hardly ever speaking.''

Her imagination soared, though, as she lurked on the sidelines and observed the diners. Several patrons, theater people, took her to a dance class where the children were asked to do flexing and stretching exercises. The teacher singled her out for praise. ``He said I was a real snake girl, and it filled me with such pride that from then on all my dreams were about the theater.''

That theater, as it evolved for her, began with ballet classes, then study under Kurt Jooss, the great German choreographer who rendered his social observations through an expressionist prism. At 19, Bausch attended Juilliard in New York, where she connected with Antony Tudor and Jose Limon and collaborated with Paul Taylor, among others, before returning to Germany. At least part of her success owes to that country's largess in the area of arts funding. Without it, her extravagant productions would not be possible.

And that is quite a different situation than she found in Los Angeles during the three weeks she and her company were here searching out material for the commissioned work. What she came face-to-face with was the American way of making art, which was terribly foreign to her. Once, when a major dinner party in her honor had been arranged by local VIPs, she vanished at the very last minute - shades of Greta Garbo. But Bausch showed no reticence when it came to scouring the city's byways, bars and barrios for impressions and incidents to be used in ``Nur Du.''

First, starting in the morning, came the usual six hours of rehearsals; then, from 6 p.m. to roughly 3 a.m. the night prowls. She shies away from telling what ``Nur Du'' is about - although on her visit here a dozen years ago she had said that her work, in general, was ``about the relationship between man and woman, about how much we want to be loved and how we are all afraid of death.'' Small issues like that.

Now, thinking about the slew of superlatives used to introduce her at a recent press conference, she says, ``I am just a human being. All that incredible praise frightens me. I'm sure that what comes out will be very sincere. But remember, it was made just by little humans.''

Last year, when her company appeared in Budapest, Hungary, she had a more considered opinion about why viewers must trust their own feelings.

``I can't judge the work for people, only for myself,'' she said. If I tell you what it means to me, you will undersatand me, not the piece.''

THE FACTS

What: Pina Bausch's ``Nur Du (Only You).''

Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown.

When: 8 p.m. today, Friday and Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday.

Tickets: $20 to $65. Available through Ticketmaster, [phone].

Information: Call [phone] or [phone].

CAPTION(S):

Photo

Photo: Dancers frolic in a scene from ``Nur Du (Only You),' ' German choreographer Pina Bausch's wily vision of the American West.