Pornography of pain: Dancer Pina Bausch's turbulent career

In Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, the change of seasons is violent. Ice cracks to reveal the earth; a chosen maiden dances herself to death. In Pina Bausch's celebrated production, which comes to Sadler's Wells next month, the earth is there already. The stage floor is covered with a thick layer of peat. As the dancers drive themselves through a frantic ritual, heading towards sacrifice, peat is churned into mud, marking their clothes and their bodies.

When Bausch created her Rite in 1975, she was already controversial. In 1973, when she took over the ballet company in the German industrial city of Wuppertal, her work provoked furious reactions. Audiences walked out, banging doors as they left. Sometimes they threw things. Bausch kept going. By the early 1980s, she had established herself as a major figure in 20th-century dance. She is famously aloof, reluctant to give interviews: the high priestess of tanztheater.

Bausch was born in the German city of Solingen in 1940. Her early training was with the choreographer Kurt Jooss, best known now for his expressionist anti-war ballet The Green Table. Winning a grant to study in New York, she worked with a range of choreographers before returning to Germany. Working with her own company, she quickly established an international reputation. From 1974, she collaborated closely with the set and costume designer Rolf Borzik, whom she married. Borzik died in 1980.

Though Bausch has ardent fans in Britain, her company hasn't performed here regularly. There were long gaps between its visits to Sadler's Wells or to the Edinburgh Festival. The current Sadler's Wells season has two London premieres, The Rite of Spring and Café Müller, both created in the 1970s. Café Müller is also one of the few works in which Bausch, now 67, still dances.

Bausch's influence stretches far beyond the dance world. Her admirers include the directors Peter Brook, Robert Wilson and Robert Lepage, the singer Bryan Ferry, and the actors Fiona Shaw and Richard Wilson. The film-maker Pedro Almodovar is another fan: his 2002 film Talk to Her begins and ends with scenes from Bausch works. The autograph that appears in the movie is Bausch's own, given to Almodovar six years previously.

Yet Bausch has always had detractors. The American critic Arlene Croce described her work as "pornography of pain". One of the first times I saw a Bausch piece, I went with a friend who stood swearing in rage in the foyer afterwards. Why so much vehemence? Bausch's vision and approach are immediately distinctive, and often angst-ridden. The Rite of Spring was the last of her works to feature a coherent narrative. Since then, she's created collages of movement, fragmented sequences of speech and gesture.

Bausch has said, "I keep making, time and again, desperate efforts to dance." When her performers do dance, it's often ironic or humiliating. She has created several mocking ballet scenes, as when a dancer stuffs bloody meat into her pointe shoes. Bausch's dancers can show masochistic levels of commitment. In The Rite of Spring, they are ready to dance to the point of exhaustion.

More than that, they're part of a very personal rehearsal process. Bausch questions her dancers, who answer in speech or movement. The questions cover memories, relationships, responses to particular situations. She might ask them to imitate one another, to do something they are ashamed of, to act out a mood. Sometimes the prompt is just a word or a sentence. The answers give Bausch her raw material: gestures, dialogue, scenes, which she builds into stage works.

It's a relationship that her dancers cherish. Describing her own training, Bausch recalled working with the ballet choreographer Antony Tudor, who could be cruel or unsettling in rehearsal. He had been kind to her, Bausch told the journalist Valerie Lawson; if he was rude to others, it was because "he believed that if people were too comfortable they couldn't dance". But, she added, "I don't do this kind of thing." Bausch's own chosen dancers are devoted and loyal. Some performers have stayed with her company for decades.

Her main theme is relationships, often with an atmosphere of violence or shame. Bausch's men are often in drag, while her women are regularly dressed with exaggerated, fetishised glamour: impossibly high heels, corset knickers, 1930s evening dress. The performance style can be intensely personal, with a sense that these dancers are acting out their own troubles and fears. They play children's games, scream or babble. In more recent works, Bausch has shown signs of lightening up. The Sadler's Wells season, however, shows two of her earliest and most intense works.

Café Müller, created in 1978, draws on Bausch's own memories. As a child, she played in her parents' restaurant, watching but not understanding the relationships between the adult customers. In the piece, everyone is needy but nobody manages to connect with anybody else. One couple dance together, the man lifting his partner, swinging her across his body before putting her down. They repeat the move, not stopping even when they reach the wall – which means that the woman is repeatedly smashed against it. A playful step becomes a battering.

The sets for Bausch's work are often monumental. The Rite of Spring has the aforementioned peat-covered stage. Palermo, Palermo starts with a wall of breeze blocks, which collapses in clouds of dust. Nelken has hundreds of carnations on stage, an artificial field of flowers. Her dancers romp through the carnation field, watched by guards with Alsatian dogs.

This choreographer can invent astonishing stage pictures. At the same time, the neurosis can seem self-indulgent: so much introspection, so much angst. Must all smiles be mocking, all relationships brutal? In Café Müller, Bausch casts herself as an anguished sleepwalker, unable to negotiate the furniture around her. Trying to get through a glass door, she just bumps into it, again and again. I remember wondering how she would get in: it would break the mood if someone held it open for her. Just as I thought that, a crash of furniture made me look at the other side of the stage. When I looked back, there was Bausch, coming through the door, air of sacrificial mysteriousness intact. That's cheating.

Yet Bausch creates images that stick in your mind: the carnation field, the couples whose games get stuck in a rut. Her performers are committed, daring and raw. Audiences argue about Bausch: exasperated by her fractured collages, or swept along by her creation of pictures, of relationships, of unspoken atmospheres.

Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal is at Sadler's Wells, London EC1 (0844 412 4300) from 13 to 22 February