Reforming and Uniforming the Body

In ‘Marionettes Unmasked’, King Ubu is analysed as a masquerade and architectural construction. Jarry’s oversized body mask is distinguished from the art of the puppet and from Edward Gordon Craig’s Übermarionette. The masquerading actor in movement is situated and theorised, with consideration of Heinrich von Kleist’s commentary, and analyses from Schumacher, States and Taxidou. The chapter also includes thoughts on the performances of Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman and Sadda Yakko. Head and body masks created by Marcel Janco and Rudolf Laban and presented at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich or at the Monte Verità in Ascona, Switzerland contribute to the discussion on disguise and camouflage in the era of Dada and Cubism. Masquerading and ‘Pirouettes on Eastern Fronts’ extend modernist responses to the Great War to Germany, Romania and Russia while citing the work of sculptors and other visual artists like Ernst Barlach, Constantin Brancuşi, Emmy Hennings and Käthe Kollwitz. Commedia dell’arte treatments in ‘Pierrot and Harlequin Disguised’ feature Picasso images and others created by Heinrick Campendonk, André Derain, Juan Gris and August Macke. Arnold Schönberg’s texts, images and music further complicate the role of Pierrot from Viennese point of view.

Aussteigen um 1900

Die Visionen der Lebensreformer auf dem Monte Verità inspirierten Schriftsteller wie Hermann Broch, der selber ein Aussteiger war. Im verheißungsvollen Jahr 1900 gründeten Ida Hofmann und Henri Oedenkoven eine lebensreformerische Heilanstalt in Ascona, beeinflusst von Ideen Rudolf Steiners sowie Friedrich Nietzsches. Viele Spielarten des Aussteigens - von unpolitischen über sozialistische und anarchistische Positionen - waren in Ascona vertreten. Neben Karl und Gusto Gräser, Otto Gross und Erich Mühsam hospitierten in der Kommune Schriftstellerinnen und Schriftsteller wie Hermann Hesse, Ernst Bloch, Yvan und Claire Goll, Franziska zu Reventlow, Emmy Hennings, Hugo Ball und Oskar Maria Graf. Willkommen waren auch Vertreter der neuen Tanzkunst wie Rudolf von Laban und seine Mitarbeiterin Mary Wigman. Der Band untersucht die Faszination, die Nietzsches Philosophie auf die Kommune ausübte, sowie Spuren der Reformideen, die in der Medizin, der Architektur und der Literatur der Moderne zu entdecken sind. Sieben Aufsätze beleuchten erstmals Hermann Brochs Beziehungen zu diesen Gegenwelten, denn 1927 verkaufte er die Fabrik seiner Familie, schaffte mit vierzig Jahren den Berufswechsel vom Industriellen zum Schriftsteller und schuf in Wien sowie im amerikanischen Exil ein Erzählwerk voller Aussteigerfiguren.

Shamanism in Weimar Dance: The Pathway to Mary Wigman and the Beginning of Dance as Therapy

Mary Wigman's expressive dance (Ausdruckstanz) was a significant strand within Weimar dance that, although new in its inception, featured elements that recalled the ancient tradition of shamanic dance. Drawing on articles from the Weimar period and recent accounts of shamanism, as well as Wigman's own writing, this essay explores how this new but ancient practice acted as the foundational impetus for twentieth century dance and movement therapy.

Aesthetic Strategies of Trance-gression: The Politics of Bodily Scenes of Ecstasy

Choreographic bodies are empowered by modes of expansion and transgression. Focusing on the energetic processes that lead to such empowerment, this article discusses the perceptual politics of trancelike scenes in the work of contemporary European choreographers and performers. As a body-mobilizing choreographic strategy of out-of-body and out-of-mind experiences, trance is closely linked to critical and utopian ideas, bodily transgressions, and crossed boundaries. While Mary Wigman treats trance as an incantation which contains the powers that it unleashes, contemporary choreographers like Doris Uhlich or Meg Stuart, expose the body to powers that nearly disintegrate it. As opposed to Wigman-style modernism, contemporary dance stages movement as a tremendous event that exposes performers and audiences to experiences of transgression.

A Second Gestural Revolution and Gesturing Hands in Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, Mary Wigman, and Tilly Losch

This chapter has two aims: to trace in more detail gestural dance’s ability to realize what Susan Leigh Foster calls “physicality as a discourse”; and to show how modernist dance reflects upon this discursiveness through the pronounced and sometimes self-referential use of hands. Addressing modernist choreography as a second gestural revolution, the chapter argues that it constitutes a recovery, on its own terms, of the meaningful corporeality that was established by the first gestural revolution of the eighteenth-century ballet reform. In order to test Jacques Rancière’s modernist aesthetic of the autonomous subject on a set of examples, the chapter also explores Hilde Doepp’s 1926 book Träume und Masken (Dreams and Masks), Rainer Maria Rilke’s writings on Auguste Rodin, photographs of hands by Albert Renger-Patzsch and Charlotte Rudolph, and the queer aesthetic of Tilly Losch’s Tanz der Hände (Dance of the Hands).

Gestures of Vibrating (Interruption) in Rudolf von Laban, Mary Wigman, and Walter Benjamin

This chapter compares Rudolf von Laban’s and Mary Wigman’s practices and theories of vibrant gestural flow with Walter Benjamin’s theory of gesture as vibrant or intervallic interruption. For Laban and Wigman, gesture mirrors a vitalist understanding of life that is based on the assumption of transhistorical continuities of vibratory exchange between human and cosmic energy. Benjamin’s Brechtian gestures, by contrast, address historical inscriptions and manipulations of bodies, which provide comment on the conditions of society by subjecting to critique aspects of the idea of flow that pertain to unquestioned political figurations of power. This chapter thus explores three gestural manipulations of vibrant energy, and shows what they engender: in Laban, a process of transmission between dancers and spectators; in Wigman, an “action mode” of movement, which she called “vibrato”; and, in Benjamin, a possibility for philosophical insight, but also a disruptive revolutionary charge.

Montreal Modern Dance Company (1952–1955)

The Montreal Modern Dance Company (1952–1955) was an important though shortlived collaborative project between Lithuanian émigrés and dancers Yoné Kvietys (1924–2011) and Birouté Nagys (1920--). Though unacquainted prior to their arrival in Canada, they both studied movement in Lithuania with Danuté Nasvytis, a dancer who trained at the Mary Wigman School in Germany. They met while dancing in Montreal with the Wigman-influenced choreographer Ruth Sorel. The Montreal Modern Dance Company gave its first evening-length performance in early January 1954, and that same year the Company performed at the sixth annual Canadian Ballet Festival. Both performances were well received. The company disbanded in 1955 when Kvietys moved to Toronto. Kvietys and Nagys would collaborate again several years later at the 1963 Canadian Modern Dance Festival when Kvietys invited Nagys to act as guest-choreographer for her Toronto-based group, the Contemporary Dance Company.

Sorel, Ruth Elly Abramovitsch (1907–1974)

Upon immigrating to Montreal in 1944, Ruth Abramovitsch (also known as Abramowitz) Sorel was one of the first dancers to regularly teach and perform modern dance in Canada. Informed by her experience performing with Mary Wigman in Dresden, Sorel introduced Montreal dancers and audiences to Ausdruckstanz, the German expressionist dance style. Her company, variously billed as "Ruth Sorel Montreal Ballet" or "Ruth Sorel Modern Dance Group," performed dramatic psychological narratives set to a classically informed movement vocabulary. She received national recognition when her company performed at the Canadian Ballet Festivals in 1949 and 1950. Sorel’s legacy can be seen in the many dance careers she helped launch, including Yoné Kvietys (1924–2011) and Birouté Nagys (1920--), who jointly founded the Montreal Modern Dance Company in 1952. However, Sorel’s influence on the Montreal dance community gradually began to fade in the 1950s. Sorel left Montreal to return to Poland in 1957 where she remained until her death in 1974.