The Dance Theatre of Kurt Jooss

Suzanne Walther

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9781135305635
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

First Published in 1997. This is Volume 3, Part 2 in the Choreography and Dance journal and looks at the dance and the theatre of Kurt Jooss, in context of his times of birth, his evolution of as an artist, Jooss as a teacher and his ballets.

The times that gave birth to Kurt Jooss

Walter Sorell

The turn of the century when Kurt Jooss was born was marked by cultural decadence. The artists sought change and the search for new directions gave birth to new creative expressions. Germany was in the forefront of the creative explosion of the 1920’s. In dance of the visionary teacher Rudolf Laban emphasized a new awareness of space and a new movement-consciousness. He was the greatest influence on the artistic development of his pupil Kurt Jooss. Later on Jooss found inspiration in the political writings of Kurt Tucholsky, the major contributor to the magazine Die Weltbuhne. Both Tucholsky and Jooss had a sense of foreboding at the approaching disaster of the next world war.
KEY WORDS Rudolf Laban, Kurt Tucholsky, Die Weltbuhne, Weimar Republic, Mary Wigman, The Green Table

When Kurt Jooss was born, our century made its very first step into history. The year was 1901. When he was still an infant the flowery, playful Jugendstil dominated the scene, but at the same time there was a noticeable tendency to escape reality. The turn of the century was a decadent period in which one drowned one’s emptiness and despair in a happy cancanization of life. Politically there was a feeling of deadly satiation. The world was fully colonized, its riches unevenly distributed. History moved in unbalanced righteousness toward inevitable conflicts.

The artists sought to save the skin of their minds. Gauguin fled the sterility of bourgeois life, calling the world he left behind more barbarian than the imaginary regained paradise on Tahiti. Isadora Duncan freed herself from the fetters of classic ballet, but not without giving the romanticism of the past a new glaze. Ruth St. Denis escaped to the East and wedded the spirit of Tao with the sermon on the mount. With her Indian dances she delighted the Europeans who thirsted for a different life and eagerly accepted any facsimile of their dreams of the East. Such novelists as Pierre Loti fashioned heroes who sought relief from the perplexities of their psyche, and in their rebellion against the past and its norms they fled into the wilderness of the unknown.

The search for man’s identity was the moving force behind most artistic manifestations, particularly in the first two decades of this century. Battle cries accompanied this search, and the “isms” mushroomed to the accompaniment of Schoenberg’s atonal sounds: Fauvism, cubism, vorticism, symbolism, expressionism, futurism, dadaism, constructivism, surrealism. Between Ezra Pound’s “Make it new!” and John Cage’s “Let’s start from scratch!” lie one shock of the new after another. Early in the century Georges Braque had said that “art is made to disturb.” Paul Klee expressed the artists’ need to return to the beginning with the words, “I want to be as new born, knowing no pictures, entirely without impulses, almost in an original state.” André Malraux summed it all up in declaring that “all art is a revolt against man’s fate.” In no previous epoch had the artist so dissociated himself from the society to which he belonged and for which he supposedly created. Aldous Huxley acknowledged this when he said, “art is no longer one of the means whereby man seems to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless and largely evil.”

There was one other “ism,” not well defined in the public consciousness, but of the greatest importance for the development of all the arts in the twentieth century. I call it “surprisism.” In 1912 Jean Cocteau concocted the ballet Le Dieu Bleu, characteristic of past romantic conceits. It was a stunning flop, and thereafter Diaghilev ignored Cocteau. Cocteau, who was far more accustomed to praise, questioned Diaghilev about his reserve, and it was then, on Place de la Concorde, that Diaghilev uttered the historic words: “Etonne-moi!” Surprise me! It has become the slogan of our time.

Diaghilev himself had surprised the world when he opened his first of twenty seasons in Paris in 1909. In describing his success, Cocteau said that “he splashed Paris with colours!” But Diaghilev did more than that. When he arrived on the scene the art of ballet was in a poor state. The words “sterile” and “stereotypic” would best describe its artistic level. Diaghilev’s productions employed the greatest dancers, choreographers, composers and stage designers. He dared to present controversial material in a controversial manner, and thrived on theatrical scandals that later became renowned successes: Afternoon of a Faun, Sacre du Printemps, Parade. He gave twentieth century ballet a new lease on life.

When Isadora undertook to do battle against ballet at the beginning of the century, a spiritual force was set free, fighting for a new freedom of the dancing body, all feeling in motion. There was an endearing, passionate soul afloat, looking for a body. In 1913, on Monte Verità, a fascinating man named Rudolf Laban began to fashion dancing bodies. He taught rhythmic movement, or what he loosely labelled free dancing. He was a man of magnetic power, his eyes afire with a vision. In those early years of his career he was always seen with his notation papers or with a drum in his hand, inventing movement, experimenting, improvising.

One of his most accomplished students, Mary Wigman, saw in him “the magician, the priest of an unknown religion, the worshipped hero, the lord of a dreamlike and yet ever-so-real kingdom.” At that time the dancer envisioned by Laban was not yet born. He had to build up this new bodily instrument. In doing so he caught the spirit of the would-be dancer and set him artistically free. Laban had the extraordinary quality of enabling each one to find his or her own roots, of discovering his own potentialities and the technique that fitted body and mind, an individual style of dancing. In such manner, Laban fulfilled Isadora Duncan’s dream of the new free dancer, finding the right body for its soul.

Mary Wigman created dances that were no longer trying to shape a very personal feeling, an emotional experience only, as was Isadora’s language. She wanted to reach her audiences with a message that had universal meaning. She aimed at the dramatic interpretation of the conflicts within the individual and in relation to the influence of the outside world. She asked for substance, for some significance in her body’s speech. She felt that the dance she wanted to create had to be born out of necessity.

What happened in Germany during and after the First World War in the dance field was either balletic, gymnastic, or a kind of pretty-pretty dance, like the Danube waltzes in which the Wiesenthal sisters waltzed themselves into fame. It was entirely characteristic of the era that a great deal of the dancing was done in the nude in nightclubs. The star of those dancers was Anita Berber, who also loved to be seen at receptions and in theatres covered only by a fur coat.

The German audiences were used to this variety of dancing, not to anything so serious as Mary Wigman’s masked Witch Dance or her ecstatic dances of prayer and sacrifice, presented in an almost defiant manner by a dancer who was neither young nor pretty. Between 1914 and 1920 she had little success, was misunderstood and often booed. It was only in the early 1920’s that her dance works were recognized as a vital contribution to the expressionism then current, an art form never seen before, bewildering and sometimes frightening in its subject matter. Whatever she danced was the mirror image of her time, and became known as the German Ausdruckstanz.

When we look back at the 1920’s from our vantage point, we see that they were unique on both sides of the ocean. Nonetheless, the most decisive artistic changes and the strongest cultural impulses came from Germany. The phenomenon of a defeated nation rising to singular artistic greatness is reflected in the epithets we use to label those years: Americans speak of their “roaring twenties,” while Germans know them as their “golden years.”

This explosion of creativity happened at a time of the greatest difficulty in every sector of human existence. But in spite of the daily fight for survival, the madness of political divisions, and a haunting insecurity, Germany experienced those golden years as if there were no barriers, no limitations to finding new ways of self-expression. It was like a grand resurrection of the human spirit from the debris of a frightening past and a terrifying present. Out of a hard and hungry reality arose a need to find oneself, a daring to deny the past. Everyone seemed to be simultaneously at work on something new, in all fields of artistic and humanistic expression.

The whole world is indebted to this rare creative euphoria in Germany and Austria during the 1920’s, for the scope of its intellectual growth has had tremendous influence on our lives. The revolutionary ideas of Einstein, Planck and Heisenberg advanced fundamental science with accelerating speed. Psychoanalysis became a household word. Schools of philosophy, ranging from Wittgenstein’s positivism to Heidegger’s phenomenology and the work of Frankfurt’s Institute for Sociological Studies, established mystifying but fascinating relations between society and esthetics.

There was the powerful impact of the enigmatic voice of Franz Kafka. New concepts from the Bauhaus, wedding arts and crafts with technology and the slogan of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), changed the architectural face of the cities and much of our thinking. Oskar Schlemmer’s experimental dance figures stunned people, and later had some tangential influence on Alwin Nikolais’s nonobjective dance approach. Expressionism and militant dadaism, flowing into Freudian-inspired surrealism, vied with futurism and constructivism, and all these “isms” flourished in creative competitiveness.

We can draw a wide arc from Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse to Bertold Brecht and Franz Werfel, from Rilke to Hofmannsthal. A rich and varied palette embraces Arnold Schoenberg and his pupil Alban Berg, Ernst Krenek and Kurt Weill. The German movie industry reached new heights with Erich von Stroheim and Marlene Dietrich, and with such sophisticated directors as Fritz Lang and Ernst Lubitsch. But the rise of inflation crippled the industry, and it was bought up in its entirety by Paramount and M-G-M.

A new awareness of space led to experimental stage concepts for which the Berlin theatres became famous: ramps, platforms and stairs were used by Max Reinhardt and Leopold Jessner, a treadmill and films by Erwin Piscator’s epic theatre. Reinhardt began to stage plays in circus arenas, cathedrals and castles— already at that time creating environmental art. It gave him huge spaces to fill with actors who could no longer stand still and declaim their lines, but who had to move around and let space inotivate their acting.

Mary Wigman said of her dancing that space became her dancing partner. Movement consciousness led to a defined and definable space awareness. It began with Rudolf Laban, where it was basic to his visionary concepts. This mystic philosopher had a scientific mind, teaching and preaching the gospel of the magic of movement through which the individual could gain a heightened perception of himself. Laban endeavored to see man grow beyond his averageness—a Nietzschean thought—and reach for a lofty state of festive existence. This thought inspired the huge pageants he loved to stage.

Kurt Jooss, a young man in the early 1920’s, was trying to find his personal road to self-fulfillment in the world of dance. It was self-evident that he should seek the tutoring hand of some brilliant man such as Rudolf Laban. It was as if Jooss was born again when he entered the magic circle of this master over movement. Yet there was another man who also exerted great influence on Kurt Jooss, a literary man who gave him the intellectual stimulation he was seeking.

In 1976 I met Kurt Jooss in his New York hotel on 57th Street. We talked, among other things, about his reading habits. He told me that he had always read much poetry aloud, together with his wife. She brought the poetic world of Stefan George closer to him, while he tried to convince her of Rilke’s greatness. Jooss had always had a weakness for first editions and very old books which he collected. But what is most important in the context of this essay is the literary source that he cited as having had the greatest...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• THE WEST GERMAN DANCE THEATRE PATHS FROM THE TWENTIES TO THE PRESENT
• JOOSS THE TEACHER HIS PEDAGOGICAL AIMS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHOREOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLES OF HARMONY
• THE DANCE OF DEATH DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS OF THE GREEN TABLE
• DANCING FOR JOOSS RECREATING THE ROLE OF DEATH IN THE GREEN TABLE
• JOOSS BALLETS
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS