Floral Pathochoreographies

This chapter juxtaposes Kreutzberg’s Drei irre Gestalten (Three Mad Figures) with Alfred Döblin’s expressionist short story “Die Ermordung einer Butterblume” (“The Murder of a Buttercup”) and Jo Mihaly’s solo Blume im Hinterhof (Flower in the Backyard). It argues that Mihaly’s embodiment of the flower is the culmination of hybrid human/plant blurrings that also occur in Döblin and Kreutzberg. All of this chapter’s examples engage with performances of the symptom in the shape of “floral pathochoreographies”: an attack of insanity brought on by the loss of a flower, in Kreutzberg’s danced triptych; the destruction of a buttercup that provides a narrative around which a paranoid psyche indulges its obsessions, in Döblin; and a wilting and dying urban flower, remarkably incorporated in a dense mimic dance by Mihaly. The chapter also includes a brief excursus on Mihaly’s Vision eines Krieges (Vision of War).

Gestures between Symptom and Symbol in Aby Warburg and Sigmund Freud

This chapter addresses the symptomatic and pathological charge of gesturality in the works of Aby Warburg and Sigmund Freud, but it also engages with aspects of Freud’s and Warburg’s writings that are recuperative. It discusses Warburg’s explorations of gesturality, which are traced across his works, next to Freud’s and Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria, and Freud’s essay “The Moses of Michelangelo.” Warburg’s studies of gesture are concerned with transindividual psycho-physical expressions throughout history. Freud’s engagement with gesture, by contrast, remains attached to the individual psyche and its idiosyncrasies. In both thinkers, gesturality at once protects and protects from passionate and pathological impulses, channeling them away from their violent core and transforming them. In the case of Warburg, gestures transform such impulses in a symbolic, externally focused, rather than a symptomatic, internally driven practice. In the case of Freud, the gestural managing of violence in his reading of the Moses pertains to a queer critique of power.

Gestures between the Auratic and the Profane

This chapter focuses on the ways in which Niddy Impekoven’s Bach dances and Franz Kafka’s “Conversation with the Supplicant” reenact the embodied tradition of liturgy. It singles out postures of inclination as poses of quiet ecstasy and devout submission to the divine, working closely with Dora Kallmus’s photographs of Impekoven. Impekoven’s posture is read alongside Benjamin’s observations on inclination (Neigung) in the Bible illustrations of medieval miniature painting, which he rediscovers in expressionist art, and which he links to historical instances of collective guilt. It is also read alongside an extravagant reenactment of prostration in Kafka, which constitutes an instance of Agambian profanation. Kafka shows how modified reenactments of a given gestural vocabulary undermine this vocabulary’s conditions of meaning; Impekoven in turn demonstrates how such conditions of meaning can be enhanced.

Conducts and Codes of Gesture in Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka

This chapter addresses writings that range across Walter Benjamin’s œuvre to trace his engagements with gesturality beyond a directly Brechtian framework. In his 1934 essay “Franz Kafka. On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” Benjamin argues that Kafka’s protagonists busy themselves with performing a lost or forgotten gestural script, so that their expressive corporeality remains unreadable. Gestural codes are deprived in the writings of Kafka of a commonly shared system of reference. But Kafka’s new, and, with Rilke, proliferating gestures, based as they are on an unexplainable yet unerring necessity, also exude an immanent grace: an inner logic that suggests a forward-looking directedness toward the as yet unknown. The chapter argues that this places them in the vicinity of the grace that Rivière finds in Nijinsky.

Epilogue

The Epilogue rethinks the theoretical, political, and ethical relevance of choreographic gesture through Eric Santner’s work on political theology and economy. Departing from Agamben’s theory of gesture, it derives gesture’s ontological status not from its pure mediality, but from its gag-like function, as physical performance that cannot be detached from its impact of impediment, of Benjaminian intermittency. The Epilogue argues that a dance studies approach is able to trace the singular appearances of gestural performance in more detailed fashion than a philosophical approach. It holds that gestural performance turns into concrete practice what Santner calls “flesh,” the diffuse symbolic substance that survives monarchic structures of power even after their actual disappearance. It suggests that the gestural imaginary participates in the modern managment of the dimension of work, which has taken over the value attached to practices of glory that used to sustain the king.

Gestural Drag

This chapter inquires into the untimeliness of Alexander and Clotilde Sakharoff’s art, focusing on Alexander’s baroquism in Pavane royale and Clotilde’s modernist minstrelsy in Chanson nègre. It argues that Pavane royale constitutes what Mark Franko calls an “auto-critique of power,” and Chanson nègre a release from categories that blurs the lines between man/woman, black/white, human/animal, and balletic/popular. Together, these modes of performance are considered a type of “gestural drag.” Retheorized through current notions of queer temporality, the untimeliness of the Sakharoffs speaks to contemporary interests in a transnational, and potentially cross-genre rethinking of dance history, and to continued explorations of dance modernism in the plural.

Gestural (In)visibility in Béla Balázs and Helmuth Plessner

This chapter juxtaposes the film criticism of Béla Balázs with the philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner in order to carve out their approaches to gesture. It gives particular attention to Plessner’s “Grenzen der Gemeinschaft: Eine Kritik des sozialen Radikalismus” (“The Limits of Community: A Critique of Social Radicalism”) and Balázs’s “Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films” (“Visible Man or the Culture of Film”). Both authors have a pronounced interest in the potential of social gesture to inform public life, yet they articulate it in different ways: where Balázs bemoans too little gestural embodiment, Plessner sees too much of it. Balázs emphatically conjures up the promise of a gestural cure that he detects in the heightened corporeal expressivity of silent film; Plessner considers such expressivity as symptom not only of gestural, but also aesthetic, social and political ills.

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).

Introduction

The Introduction gives an outline of the book’s main concepts and themes: it discusses choreographic gesture within the context of early twentieth-century dance, defines it with reference to Walter Benjamin as a force of intermittency that marks movement so that it becomes available for expression and reflection, and explains the book’s notion of the gestural imaginary with reference to Cornelius Castoriadis. It offers a critique of Giorgio Agamben’s and Jacques Rancière’s theories of gesture, shifting emphasis from Agamben’s preoccupation with gestural mediality to Rancière’s multiplicity of proliferating, singular gestures. The Introduction also discusses the book’s both archive-based and theoretically informed methodology, and provides an overview of its thematic organization.

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.