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I pressed play and as the music rose on the speakers she closed her eyes to listen.

Just after the first crescendo in Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls she exploded out along her seams.

You must love Stravinsky.

I shook my head.

She reached passed me to pause the CD.

Get out! A dubious look. What have you heard?

I mentioned Fantasia.

A look of abject horror.

…

Later that same night in her living room—as Pierre Boulez led the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra through Le Sacre du Rrintemps—the aural awe ripped my soul from my body where it sat near her on the carpet and tossed me up amongst the stars.

…

Not three months later, she and I sat in the terrifying mezzanine at Carnegie Hall as Pierre Boulez explained in his heavily accented English aspects of the trickier passages of the piece before guided the London Symphony Orchestra through the piece.

The entire performance is an out of body blur in my memory—the second most amazing live music experience of my life. But I remember looking over at her and seeing her face wet with tears and in an effort to wipe them away touched my own face and realized I was crying too.

I had no idea then that this woman was my soulmate or that three years later we would become lovers.

…

I knew nothing of Pina Bausch before I saw Wim Wenders gorgeously uneven 3D biopic-umentary of her life.

And I would’ve known nothing about dance if it hadn’t been for an erstwhile friend who is a talented dancer.

I made a show at her annual performances to be supportive but was dubious about the whole dance scene. This attitude changed over time. First, I realized that dancers seem to categorically possess a precocious knack for effortlessly interrogating knotty conceptual concerns pertaining to art.

By the time my friend and I were seated with our 3D glasses on as the house lights dimmed and Pina began I had seen a lot of work I hated, several performances I enjoyed and even one or two I loved. But I was still straddling the fence with regard to whether dance was Art or not.

One of my all-time favorite quotes is Emily Dickinson’s response to the question of how she knows whether or not something is poetry:

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?

Bausch’s vision of Le Sacre du Printemps is nothing short of poetry. The earth covered stage, the intensity of the movements always edging over into violence but remaining a beautiful idea. Short of paroxysm of pain, orgasm or death, I don’t know of anything that is so purely physical as this piece. The movements feed the music which feeds the movement. What you see is not something assembled piecemeal over more than half a century, it is something born with all the insistence of a burning moth.

There are hundreds of things I want to point out about this video—the way the dancers skin becomes sweat-muddied, the way the movement illustrates both the story and the manner of its telling and you can see hints of it in this but the degree to which the exerted breathing of the dancers becomes a part of the score stacks Goosebumps upon Goosebumps.