Early on in One Day Pina Asked…, one of the performers in experimental German choreographer Pina Bausch’s troupe has a candid moment with the camera in which he demonstrates his knowledge of sign language by translating a George Gershwin ballad in real time, a skill that so moved his instructor, she later integrated it into an act. Akerman’s fiercely unconventional “documentary” on Bausch’s work, which only fleetingly records the maverick herself, illustrates her essence through such instances when her unseen guidance unlocks the potential of her disciples. In long, transfixing episodes uninterrupted by cuts, Akerman documents the rehearsals and performances conducted under Bausch’s tutelage, which suggest expressionistic burlesques of everyday behavior that transform ritual into carnal outbursts or surreal repetitions. If Bausch’s work represents a concerted effort to find roiling undercurrents of human passion beneath numbing quotidian horror (like Akerman’s mother, she was a child of the war years), it’s a mission aligned with that of the filmmaker influenced by her, who at one point appears onscreen to note, with an appreciative ambiguity, the “moments in which I felt I had to defend myself from what was being expressed.”