Indifference to Pina Bausch’s work wasn’t possible — it inspired either impassioned devotion or revulsion. Bausch, who died last week aged 68, was a choreographer, but much more than that suggests. She didn’t extend the dance repertoire so much as mine ways of being human. Staged on a vaunting scale, her productions always felt personal; they felt like they belonged to us. As the actress Fiona Shaw once expressed it to me, Bausch could infuse the smallest moments with meaning, repeating them until they were transmuted into poetry.

Bausch was born in Solingen, Germany, and the nearby industrial town of Wuppertal became her home when she founded her company there in 1973. Generations of dance pilgrims marvelled that such sophisticated work emerged from this uncosmopolitan, even dowdy, place. Just as Fassbinder did in film, she made small-town Germany the centre of her vision: its tight smile and needling compromises, its barely repressed nightmares. She didn’t mention the war, exactly, but collusion and coercion were among her recurring concerns. The punishing extended sequences that clawed through her pieces asked what people might endure; the scenes based on clothes and cosmetics questioned what people would do to pass muster.

The collective impulse is most forcefully staged in Bausch’s terrifying Rite of Spring (1975), an early work on a peat floor, in which every step raises a small spume of soil. The menacing, stamping community selects its sacrificial victim, a woman staring through fearful eyes. Then, when she dances in exultant fury, she goes so far beyond her oppressors’ experience that they can only stare as she dances herself to death.

However epic in scale, the pieces recognised what it was like to be trapped inside a peculiar human psyche. As Alan Rickman says: “It’s like meeting your own imagination.” The intrusions of everyday life were often hilariously unexpected. In the hunger-panged Palermo, Palermo (1989), Wuppertal veteran Nazareth Panadero (hatchet face, sandpaper voice) brandished a bundle of dry pasta. “These are my spaghetti,” she exulted, cooing over each parched strand.The dancers were always asked to draw on their own memories and fantasies: you felt as if you were meeting fully engaged individuals. At the end of Nelken (1982), they explain why they chose a career in dance, offering a beguiling collage of deluded hopes and impulsive romances.

I saw my first Bausch piece only 10 years ago. It was winter, I wasn’t well, and the idea of four hours of gruelling performance was a dubious draw. I emerged from Viktor exhilarated, mind buzzing, lurgy banished. Soil tumbled down from its huge earthworks set — design was elemental in Bausch, but never ornamental. She heaped the stage with leaves in Bluebeard, carpeted it with pink carnations in Nelken and flooded it in Arien (which includes a cameo for a hippo). Her women were typically dressed up and cast down: evening dresses, floral prints, always heels.

I never saw Bausch herself dance. On the company’s London visit last year, she was due to reprise a signature role, the sleepwalking centre of Café Müller, but was unwell. The piece is like a melancholy dream, recalling her childhood in her parents’ restaurant. Bausch devotees craved that scalpel in the psyche, and some of the more recent pieces seemed unnervingly mellow. Yet however punishing or relatively pallid, Bausch’s pieces were always, urgently, about life. Even when her dancers are merely walking, as Shaw told me: “They don’t just walk — they walk on behalf of humanity.” It’s terrible that Bausch isn’t here to help them walk again.

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