Pairs: Eva Helene Pade & Julie Shanahan A conversation about art and life
By Simon Chilvers
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.
