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Since she took over the direction of the Wuppertal Tanztheater 25 years ago, Pina Bausch has used her training and experience as a soloist in classical ballet to literally invent a new genre, a combination of theatre, dance, music, and visual arts in which score and improvisation come together, very close to the dream of a total theatre that juxtaposes the individual talents of an extraordinary ensemble with a precise concept of time and space. The results are deconstructions of Stravinsky or Bartok, reconstructions of Shakespeare or Brecht, or productions based on a theme - an anniversary, a dance, a farewell, a city - conceived as children's games or parlour games and orchestrated like review acts in order to rummage in the everyday life of the dancers, who pretend to have stopped dancing, subjected to public questioning and left to the flow of free associations, citing over and over but without ruling out psychoanalytical stripteases.
In these group productions, the great teacher Pina Bausch, who never forgets that she was once the blind princess in a visionary film by Fellini, forces her actors to assume a role and a type of ceremonial, where extremely varied personal experiences and backgrounds combine with the precise geometry of the rhythmic movements. Although the motifs change, from one animal or flower to another, each show extends into the next to become part of a hypothetical single continuum, in other words the rite of a show, the story of the community that performs it with the joy of disguise and the solitude of cohabitation. However, behind the often heartbreaking splendour of the visual tableaux, the seductive feline and ineluctable manner in which the troupe advances in single file, and the pattern of the movements, regular but cleverly out of tune, through this lifelong self-portrayal the great artist offers all her spectators an ironic and desperate mirror in which to reflect their existential condition.

ROYAL COURT THEATRE

What is modern British theatre famous for? Its actors? Certainly. Its directors? Possibly. But it is living dramatists who are the most potent symbol of the British theatre's vitality; and the Royal Court Theatre, winner of the Europe Prize New Theatrical Realities, has done more than any other institution to promote new writing. Since 1956 it has premiered the work of many of the best-known British dramatists: Osborne, Wesker, Pinter, Bond, Barker, Hare and Churchill. But this Award is given not so much for the Court's distinguished history as for its championship, in recent years, of new generation of challenging, often profondly disturbing, writers whose work has travelled widely throughout Europe: writers like Sarah Kane (Blasted and Cleansed), Mark Ravenhill (Shopping and Fucking) and Jez Butterworth (Mojo) who graphically express their horror at the moral emptiness and crude materialism of the world they have inherited. Their plays are filled with images of violence, but behind the violence lies an anger and confusion at the difficulty of existing in a post-Marxist, post-Christian, post-Utopian society. Forced to leave its permanent home in London's Sloane Square in 1996, so that the building could be restored, the Royal Court has since operated in two West End venues. But it has lost none of its danger and vitality. Under the direction first of Stephen Daldry and now of Ian Rickson, it has staged coproductions with companies such as Out of Joint and Théâtre de Complicité (including a sensational revival of Ionesco's The Chairs). It has presented outstanding plays by young Irish writers such Conor McPherson and Martin McDonagh. It has also launched an international programme involving exchanges with other theatres throughout the world. But, above all, it has given voice to a new generation of young writers whose moral anger, urban despair and political disillusion have sent shockwaves throughout the whole of Europe.