Tankard’s fate had been sealed, after a more formal audition for the company she was invited to join. There was one issue however, “I had just signed on for 12 months at the Australian Ballet.” Undeterred, Tankard decided she would try and chance her way back to Wuppertal. “I went back to Australia pretending that I was going to choreograph” she says with a smile, “I asked to extend my leave for 12 months just for more experience.” After months of waiting and bureaucratic hassle, she finally left for good. “I never went back!”Turning her back on her classical roots didn't go unnoticed by staff, “some of them were pretty horrible about it, admonishing me for giving up.” In reality, Tankard was entering a whole new world, far more intense than she could imagine. 

Though Tanztheater Wuppertal only did around 50 performances in the year, compared to the whopping 250 with the Australian Ballet, Tankard found her time with Pina to be more exhausting. “Every single rehearsal required 100% commitment, you had to be involved emotionally” she explains. Pina’s work, filled with equal measures of torment and irreverence, required heaps of mental strength from the dancers. Her first major creation was “Kontakthof,” one of Pina’s most celebrated works. “Kontakthof,” which roughly translates to “meeting place,” concerns itself with everything about love and human connection, but it isn’t entirely romantic. One of the work’s most memorable, and perhaps most harrowing, scenes was created on Tankard. “The men come to me, all touching me, people get quite horrified by it. It feels like rape really. But she was only asking them to show me Zärtlichkeit, tenderness. The way she layered it and repeated it, it turned into something completely different.” While creating the work Tankard was especially pushed to the edge when Pina asked her to redo the scene multiple times in rehearsal. “By the seventh time I started to cry, a tear came down. And then we stopped, like she had wanted me to get to that point. I would always remember that seventh time whenever we performed the work” she says, the memory seemingly still fresh. “It was hard, it was intense. That was a lot more exhausting than being on pointe shoes for eight shows a week.”

“Kontakthof,” with all its images of romance and loneliness, has remained one of Pina’s most enduring works, with the piece being remounted and toured on casts of seniors and teenagers. But even before all of this, Pina was thinking of the future. “She did often say when we were creating it how she would love to get us back in thirty years” Tankard says with a foreboding tone. It was when Salomon Bausch, Pina’s son and head of her foundation, called Tankard with the idea of bringing Pina’s wish to fruition that got the ball rolling. However, Tankard wasn’t immediately swayed. “Five or six people have died since then, and I felt it would be wrong to hire replacements because it's supposed to be the original cast. What would be the point?” Charged with spearheading a project that would bring back as much of the cast as possible, she began to comb through the files from Wuppertal, and found filmed recordings of the original production.