LONDON


DURING this summer’s London Olympics there will be endless displays of speed, grace, strength, masochism, endurance, pain and perseverance. But they won’t all be found inside a stadium. Many such revelations will also be found in theaters, most notably during an unprecedented season of the German choreographer Pina Bausch’s city pieces: 10 works based on residencies all over the world, performed by her company, the Tanztheater Wuppertal.


It’s a cultural decathlon of sorts. And, as Bausch herself once said, a crazy idea.


As revealed in Wim Wenders’s film “Pina,” released to acclaim last year and nominated for an Academy Award, Bausch’s works are neither minimal nor easy to stage. They are exhausting for both the performers and the backstage technicians, often over three hours long, and usually feature sets of challenging complexity and size. The cost of bringing 10 pieces, and the 73-strong Wuppertal company to London, is £1.8 million ($2.8 million), an amount almost unheard-of for a dance season anywhere.


Nonetheless, five years after the idea was first discussed, and after Bausch’s death at 68 in 2009, “World Cities 2012” is poised to open on Wednesday as a centerpiece of the hugely ambitious London 2012 Festival, the culmination of the cultural Olympiad.


The countrywide festival is not lacking for impressive, all-out ventures. There are, among thousands of events, a World Shakespeare Festival (37 of Shakespeare’s plays performed by companies from all over the world), a Gustavo Dudamel Sistema project in rural Scotland and the world premiere of the complete Stockhausen opera “Mittwoch aus Licht,” a part of which will live-stream a string quartet from four flying helicopters.


But “World Cities,” with its 10 productions shown over 20 performances at two theaters, each just two or three days apart, is something else entirely. “It is simply an unprecedented cultural event,” Joseph V. Melillo, the executive director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, said in an e-mail. “This is a historic moment for the company, for London, for the art form of dance and for all those audiences who get to attend multiple works of art created by Pina.”


During her 36 years in Wuppertal, Bausch changed the notion of what a dance piece could be, creating an entirely new form that she called tanztheater, or dance theater. Constructed from apparently unrelated, often surreal vignettes, in which the performers appear as the vehicles of strange rituals and obsessions, their bodies are transformed into repositories of deep irrational fears and hopes, memories and instincts. Although at first audiences were hostile, the work gradually developed a fervent, almost cultlike following extending well beyond the dance world.


“What’s so extraordinary about Pina’s work is that it doesn’t start from the architectonics of movement; it starts from the autobiography of the dancers,” Peter Sellars, the theater director, said in a telephone interview. “She went right into the dark heart of things we are confused, tormented and disunited by, and allowed this pain to be shared and exalted in a collective, experiential, radically shared space.”


Anything in theater, the actress Fiona Shaw said in an e-mail, “that has allowed the world of formal movement to be present with the improvised needs of the spoken text comes from her searing breakthrough.”


Ms. Shaw will be one of many cultural luminaries in the “World Cities” audience, alongside Alan Rickman, Anselm Kiefer and Mr. Wenders, who last year announced that he had already reserved seats for every piece.


“Nobody thought the company could possibly handle it without her,” Mr. Wenders said in an e-mail from Paris. “Now they are doing it, and it is by far the most challenging thing the Tanztheater Wuppertal has taken up since its very beginning.”


Bausch’s death, just days after she received a cancer diagnosis, could have derailed a plan that began with a conversation among a small group of friends one late summer night in Paris in 2007. As suggestions were tossed around for how Tanztheater Wuppertal might be involved in the cultural Olympics, someone — perhaps Bausch’s longtime stage designer Peter Pabst; perhaps Alistair Spalding, the artistic director of Sadler’s Wells; perhaps Michael Morris, director of the production company Cultural Industry; or even Bausch herself — had the wild idea of mounting the 10 pieces based on the company’s residencies in different cities.