“Your weakness is your strength”

These are the words of the great choreographer Pina Bausch, as quoted in her old friend Wim Wenders’ magnificent film. Several other great sayings of hers are quoted: “Dance, or we are lost” and “Show us what you yearn for” – but it’s not for the words that this film is so profoundly worth seeing.

Words can never capture the truth, they can only point to it, and worse than that, they need interpreting, so your interpretation may be different from mine. Anyway, words are not our fundamental reality or our deepest truth – which is why it’s so easy to tell lies. People can lie with their bodies too, but the body can be trained to tell the truth – and that was Pina Bausch’s life work.

And the moment one tries to describe the effect of the film in words one falls into paradox – like the title of this posting. Her dancers show us the vulnerability of desire and the strength of that vulnerability; how at our most physically powerful and triumphant we’re also terrifyingly weak and lost – how the knowledge that we’ll one day die casts a long and sorrowful shadow over all of us, the young and vigorous included.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the film is the extensive use of older dancers, in their 40s and 50s, even in their 60s – and we see the marks of time on these bodies not as a curse or a blemish, but as tokens of an inner beauty and dignity.

In fact, everyone we see in the film has a beauty and dignity which, although it’s our birthright, easily gets covered over with compromises, lies, evasions and self-deceptions – all of which Pina Bausch worked with her dancers to strip away, showing the naked, tragic, joyful essence of human-ness which lies beneath. It takes work to do this: sustained, concentrated, focused work, guided by a compassionate wisdom which is in all of us, but which itself takes work to uncover. This kind of wisdom isn’t taught in schools, unfortunately, but we can recognize it when we see it. And the person this film reveals to us was above all a great spiritual teacher.

As the film reminds us, focused, conscious and disciplined physical movement is one of the oldest and deepest forms of spiritual practice – whether we’re talking about Tai Chi, yoga, or more modern traditions such as Gabrielle Roth’s Five Rhythms. This is maybe the deepest paradox of all, that somehow we become most open to transcendence when we’re most embodied – wholly holy, one might say.

At a time when, as Marcus Anthony points out in a recent post, all-pervasive digital technology and ubiquitous gadgets are disconnecting all of us, and especially children, from self-presence and physical groundedness, this truth needs to be embodied, quite literally, in all programmes of education and personal development.

Go and see “Pina” if you possibly can (to further pick up Marcus’s point, technology enables us to view it in 3D and with fantastic high-definition sound), to be reminded that the fragility, vulnerability and need of the body is the gateway through which we must pass to experience all of life’s greatest gifts. Here's to you Pina, and to you Wim – and to all brave and beautiful dancers everywhere.