Modern Dance in Germany and the United States

Crosscurrents and Influences

Isa Partsch-Bergsohn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134358212
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

First Published in 1995. In Modern Dance in Germany and the United States: Crosscurrents and Influences Isa Partsch­Bergsohn discusses the phenomenon of the modem dance movement between 1902 and 1986 in an international context, focussing on its beginnings in Europe and its philosophy as formulated by the pioneers Dalcroze, Laban, Wigman and Jooss. The author traces the effects the Third Reich had on these artists, and shows the influence these key choreographers had on the developing American modem dance movement through the postwar years, concentrating in particular on Kurt Jooss and his Tanztheater. When America took the lead in modem dance innovation during the sixties, artists such as Martha Graham, Jose Limon, Paul Taylor, Alvin Ailey and Alwin Nikolais overwhelmed European audiences. Subsequently, the artists of the New German Tanztheater revitalized German theatre traditions by blending new content with some of the American contemporary dance techniques. Although the history of modem dance in these two countries is closely linked, the author describes how each country has kept its own unique and distinctive style.

CHAPTER I: BREAKING THROUGH TO MODERNITY.

THE DECADE OF FERMENTATION

During the first decade of the twentieth century, a rebellion against conventional notions of society spread across Europe. Sparked by a desire for spiritual and physical renewal, the rebellion stimulated a trend toward self-reflection that was heightened by Freud’s discovery of the meaning of dreams. The turn to the unconscious self, documented in the dramas of Strindberg and Chekhov, was also recognizable in Moscow’s Art Theater, where Konstantin Stanislavsky focused on “inner feeling.”

In the visual arts, a group of German painters, the so-called Brücke (bridge) artists were the most radical in voicing their revolt against the restrictive academic formalism that was now identified with nineteenth-century thinking. In the first decade of the twentieth century, this brotherhood of artists created together an aggressive, anti-bourgeois style. The founders of this movement were Ernst Heckel, Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bley, and Karl Schmitt Rotluff; they were inspired by examples of primitive art, at the same time that Picasso rediscovered African tribal art. They aimed for a renewal of life through the arts, freed from “the ballast of tradition.” In 1906, the catalogue to their first exhibition in the “new session” in Dresden affirmed that “everybody belongs to us who directly and genuinely expresses what motivates him to create.”¹ The work of the Brücke artists showed clearly their aim to see the human figure in relation to the cosmos, not as a realistic portrayal, but as a reflection of an inner landscape of men. The nude female figure, in harmony with nature and painted in bright colors, appeared in their paintings to symbolize the purity of nature.

Another group of artists, established under the name of “Der Blaue Reiter” (the Blue Rider), further pioneered the twentieth-century revolt by searching for a “mystic-spiritual construction” of a new perspective on life. The group consisted of two Germans, Franz Marc (1880-1916) and August Macke (1887-1914), and the Russian Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1940). Their rebellion against academic formalism led Franz Marc in particular to create animals, occasionally combined with nude figures, symbolizing the basic unity within the cosmos. It is Kandinsky who is often mentioned as the first purely abstract painter, however. He gave his abstractions the names of musical compositions, indicating the parallelism that he saw between sound and color, and he also reflected on the relations between sound, color and movement characteristics. In his famous book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky articulated the credo of the Blaue Reiter: “Form is the outer expression of inner meaning.... The artist may use any form which his expression demands; for his inner impulse must find suitable outward expression.”²

It is hard to say if Isadora Duncan’s meteoric appearance had exerted any indirect influence on these groups of artists, or whether she was one of the “crosscurrents” that John Martin referred to when he called Duncan “a peculiarly sensitive channel for an idea whose time had come.”³ Nevertheless, the world of dance, the search for spiritual and physical renewal, and the urge for self-expression found a fervent exponent in this American dance pioneer.

Isadora Duncan, born in California and raised by an eccentric but educated mother, reached Europe in 1899, travelling with her family to London on a cattle boat. There she visited the British Museum and for hours at a time sketched the movements on Greek vases and tanagras, making them her own through inner concentration, and integrating these observed movements into her kinesthetic awareness. Most probably Isadora Duncan already had some knowledge of antiquity since, in the 1880s, Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations of Troy had filled the newspapers, but it was in London that she absorbed Greek art work, predominantly of the Hellenistic period.

In 1900, facing some financial difficulties caused by their bohemian life style, the Duncans moved to Paris. There, in Auguste Rodin’s sculpture garden, Isadora danced barefoot in her Greek toga for Rodin and his circle of friends. Walter Sorell comments:

Today we may smile at the notion that bearded men wept when seeing Isadora dance. We can understand it only when we envision the setting in which these artists struggled with themselves and with a world to which they still bore witness, but against which they gave decisive, sometimes violent evidence. It was no longer a question of how to display one’s creative abilities, but of how to disclose the inmost urge to make an artistic statement, how to discover and reveal the mystery of one’s self.⁴

Duncan liked to say that she was influenced by “waves and wind”; she danced with the awareness that her body reflected nature. She also liked to think of her body as a temple enclosing the spirit of antiquity. She often appeared childlike to artists who admired her movement abandon, her “free spirit,” which arose from an emotional source. Identifying with Greek philosophy and aesthetics, Isadora Duncan fit perfectly in the turn-of-the-century world of Art Nouveau. Her success in England and France came mostly from her striking personality, for, as much as her audiences were touched by Isadora, they held on to the concept of beauty of the classical ballet aesthetic which prevailed in Europe, and Duncan had no immediate intention of changing these notions. In 1904, the Duncans travelled to Italy and Greece. Inspired by the Parthenon, Isadora tried to find in her own body the feeling of weightiness that the architecture transmitted to her. At the same time, she read Nietzsche’s Birth of the Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. The Dionysian notions espoused in the book broadened her perspective considerably, and she started to experiment with conflicting and dramatic movements which enriched her range. In this process of self-reflection she made the surprising discovery that her dance actually came from American soil. “We are not Greeks,” she wrote, “and therefore cannot dance Greek dances. But the dance of the future will have to become again a highly religious art as it was with the Greeks.”⁵

In 1905, when Duncan performed at the Imperial Theater in St. Petersburg, she met Diaghilev, Bakst, Benois, Anna Pavlova and Stanislavsky. Visiting the Imperial Ballet School in Moscow, she had harsh words for the stifling discipline of the classical training. Nevertheless, Russian audiences received her as a great American artist. Her free-flowing quality particularly impressed Michel Fokine and strengthened him in his efforts to modify the execution of classical ballet, giving it a smoother, more expressive style. Amazingly, in 1902, before they met, both commented in writing on “natural movement.” Duncan referred to movements in nature, such as waves, while Fokine, when he used the word “natural,” meant a less formal approach to choreography, as he vividly demonstrated in the famous solo he choreographed in 1905 for Anna Pavlova. “The Dying Swan,” a classically conceived dance, showed a new expressiveness within the classical form. Duncan inspired Fokine to explore new ways of choreographing for the ballet stage, but, ironically, she exerted her strongest influence indirectly on twentieth-century Russian ballet, which incorporated dancing “ à la Duncan” into its vocabulary.

Duncan’s greatest impact during her lifetime, however, was as a performer in Germany, the country which, since Noverre’s years in Stuttgart, had produced no original dance tradition. It was in Munich, the German center of progressive artists and writers, that Isadora first found recognition. Her greatest professional success was in Germany; there, other artists perceived her as the great dancer of the future. Accustomed to a migratory existence, she enjoyed a relatively stable life in Berlin, where she opened a school in Berlin Grunewald, in 1904. By then, Duncan considered Germany her homeland, and she experienced her most fulfilling and harmonious years there. In Germany she met the stage designer Gordon Craig, and gave birth to their first child. Her personal and her artistic life seemed to have reached a point of balance.

The first Duncan school lasted for four years, from 1904 to 1908, functioning like a state-supported institution, without any tuition fees. A Swedish instructor taught gymnastics and Elizabeth Duncan, Isadora’s sister, taught a dance class consisting of walks, runs, and leaps applied to simple polkas, mazurkas and waltzes. Occasionally Isadora gave an inspirational class, but because of her belief in spontaneity, she did not build up a methodical program. As much as Duncan loved the idea of her school in theory, in reality she was first of all a performer, and she failed to develop a firm foundation for dance.

In 1904, Cosima Wagner, the widow of Richard Wagner, invited Duncan to dance at Wagner’s new Festspielhaus (Festival Hall) in Bayreuth. Duncan danced the famous “Bacchanale” from Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser with Dionysian fervor before a highly eclectic audience of German conservatives. She was honored as the High Priestess of Dance, the “göttliche Isadora” (the godlike Isadora). Duncan appeared to the German audience as the embodiment of dance from the spirit of the music in Wagner’s Bayreuther Festspielhaus, and she definitely embraced the quasi-religious ritual surrounding Wagner’s shrine.

Hans Brandenburg, author of the now classic German book on Modern Dance, Der Moderne Tanz (third edition of 1921), was aware that Duncan’s relation to music was not a genuine one: she basically used to “illustrate with soulful gestures moods created by the music.”⁶ He saw in Duncan a first pioneer of the new dance who had rediscovered the body and its natural expressive gestures and intuitively felt its harmony without being able to explain or teach it. Her art and person were inseparable and, thanks to her strong personality, she gained recognition as an artist. Brandenburg came to the following, most interesting conclusion:

The recognition of the true relation between music and body movement, between sound rhythm and dance rhythm, between time-audible and time-visible order was not yet in her field of vision.⁷

Brandenburg pointed precisely to the problem that succeeding generations of dancers tried to solve: Dalcroze, Nijinsky, Laban and Wigman all strove in their work to clarify the relation between movement and music.

It was true that Isadora Duncan’s field of vision was very subjective; her art arose from intuition. She expressed herself in solo recitals. The next generation of “interpretive” dancers followed her example, using the recital stage as an appropriate forum for women to express their feelings. Accordingly, she speeded up the process of women’s liberation from social strictures and replaced the Victorian idol with her own self, which she celebrated through her dances. To Duncan we owe the fact that the modern dancer appears to the audience on stage basically as a nude figure clad only with a minimum of clothing, the way Isadora looked in 1904, when Gordon Craig captured her youthful charm in the Art Nouveau style.

The dances Duncan composed after the tragic drowning of her two children in 1913 changed to a more sombre color. Isadora had gained weight during a period of withdrawal from performing, and she returned to the stage as a heroic mother figure. During this period, she may have been influenced by Delsarte’s ideas of expressing strong emotions in movement. The Frenchman François Delsarte (1811-1871), a teacher of music and drama, had ruined his voice by faulty instructions, but he had cured himself by learning about human anatomy and recording data based on his own observations of how people react to emotional stimuli. Recovered, he devoted his life to the discovery of general laws and principles of expression. In the years following his death, many had misinterpreted his ideas, since Delsarte himself had published very little. The American dance pioneer Ted Shawn took it upon himself to reassemble what he considered the authentic Delsarte method in his book Every Little Movement.⁸ Shawn recognized as fundamental to Delsarte’s theory the Law of Correspondence: for each spiritual function there is a corresponding body function. Delsarte also taught that gesture is more than speech; it is the direct agent of the heart. These two fundamental notions, that inner movement causes outer movement, and that human gesture directly speaks to the heart, inspired Isadora Duncan, who consciously created dances such as “Marseillaise” (1917) with these principles in mind. When in “Marseillaise” Duncan rose in revolt against World War I, expressing her personal drama and her compassion for mothers in France in gestures of monumental grief, she became a universal voice of European protest. She used popular music, and wore a costume that was not considered to be in good taste, but her gestures grew directly out of her own being, and showed the influence of Delsarte’s principles of dramatic motion. There was no longer any trace of Victorian propriety in her; Duncan, a mature woman, made an abstract statement of dissent.

After World War I, Duncan’s life became increasingly restless. She was obsessed by the idea of establishing a large school for children. Somehow she wanted to give to the world’s children what she had not been able to do for her own. After a failed attempt to establish a school in Greece, Duncan resumed her efforts to build a school in Russia. Actually, this idea had been in her mind since 1908, when Konstantin Stanislavsky had proposed to bring her to his Moscow Art Theatre School. The way that Duncan now pursued her goal showed her romanticism and unshakable sense of mission. In 1920, in London, she met with an outstanding Russian diplomat, Leonid Krasin, and won his approval for her proposal, which he submitted to the Commissar of Education, Anatole Lunacharsky. Duncan proposed: “to found a school in Moscow where she would teach thousands of proletarian children, giving them the joy and beauty through free and uninhibited movement.”⁹

In July of the following year, Duncan arrived in Moscow. In the conversation with Lunacharsky, the Commissar of Education, Duncan stressed “that she wanted to work, not for the theatre, but for everyday life.”¹⁰ Her ultimate goal was clearly educational. Amazingly, in spite of great financial and physical difficulties, Lunacharsky supported her proposal, and the state-supported school opened in fall 1921. The first concert, given in honor of the fourth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, at the Bolshoi Theatre, on November 7,1921, presented 150 children. A year later, in 1922, the Duncan School was removed from the state budget and had to support itself. Simultaneously, some professional ballet critics pointed out the lack of spatial organization and structure in the school’s demonstrations. Thanks to Irma Duncan’s pedagogic help these problems were gradually solved. Irma Duncan also took the children on tour throughout Russia and apparently produced some skillful young performers. In 1924, Isadora Duncan choreographed “Songs of the Revolution” in memory of Lenin. Her last set of concerts in Moscow, titled “Civil Requiem,” were tremendously successful. After this event, Irma Duncan became almost totally responsible for the school and she even travelled to China with a group of teenage Duncan students. Meanwhile, Isadora Duncan’s life, travelling between Berlin and Paris, became increasingly restless. Her death in 1927 was just as eccentric as her life; it ended in a tragic car accident in Nice.

Amazingly, Duncan’s vision of hundreds of children moving to music became reality in a way nobody could have imagined during her lifetime. After a number of very difficult years trying to survive, some of her former pupils who did not go on tour to the United States formed a new group and toured in Russia during the entire pre-war decade. When it was time for them to retire, they started to teach “artistic gymnastics” or “Duncan plastiques” in schools. Beginning in 1947, these forms became the foundation for the developing system of “Artistic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction to the Series
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• CHAPTER I BREAKING THROUGH TO MODERNITY
• CHAPTER II THE FORMATIVE YEARS: THE TWENTIES
• CHAPTER III FIRST ENCOUNTERS ACROSS THE ATLANTIC
• CHAPTER IV DANCE IN THE TIDE OF POLITICS: THE THIRTIES
• CHAPTER V DANCE IN THE SHADOW OF WORLD WAR II
• CHAPTER VI DANCE FOLLOWING WORLD WAR II
• CHAPTER VII FROM THE GREEN TABLE TO JOURNEY IN THE FOG, AND BEYOND
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX