MOVING MUSIC: DIALOGUES WITH MUSIC IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY BALLET

Transcription

1 BOOK REVIEWS GRET PALUCCA. TANZ UND ZEITERFAHRUNG IN DEUTSCHLAND IM 20. JAHRHUNDERT: WEIMARER REPUBLIK, NATIONALSOZIALISMUS, DEUTSCHE DEMOKRATISCHE REPUBLIK [Gret Palucca. Dance and experience of time in Germany in the 20th century: Weimar Republic, National Socialism, German Democratic Republic] Katja Erdmann-Rajski Hr. vom Deutschen Tanzarchiv Köln, Georg Olms Verlag AG, Hildesheim 2000, Paperback, 420 pages, ISBN This book is really two very different works, uncomfortably and loosely squeezed together. One is a theoretical disquisition on the nature of bodily motion and the other a biography of Gret Palucca ( ), the well-known German modern dancer. The author s opaque style makes the link even more difficult to perceive. English-speakers may get a sample of the murkiness of the author s prose from the following citation in English which appears on the dust jacket: Taking Palucca as an example, the book describes dancing through methods and questions of historical behaviourism as an expression of specifically social and epochal perception, the experience of time. Palucca was one of those people who, in spite of political constraints and generally dominating (artistic) tendencies, courageously plead for a new glimpse ahead and a new way of perception of the surroundings and of themselves Nothing is lost in the translation. The author s German is equally incomprehensible and contorted. As far as I can derive any coherent meaning from the author s reflections, they seem to suggest that she claims to be able to trace movement-patterns through history. She proceeds in three stages in the following order: I. Interactions in dance in the eighteenth/nineteenth century; II. Interactions in dance in the twentieth century; III. Interactions in Palucca s dance. 128

2 book reviews Section I deals with dance around 1750 and The author starts out by declaring that as, in the 1750s stage and social dancing belonged to the same world, it is in order to speak about social dancing only (which, of course, it is not). Folk dance, which had lost its contours (p. 13), was also more or less integrated into social dance. Around 1770 a change in stage dance became evident. It moved from an intellectual to a more emotional activity. The reform of ballet (though no ballets are ever presented or discussed), undertaken by Noverre, Hilverding or Angiolini, consisted in reevaluating technique. Dance had become an exercise significant only in itself, with empty and soulless figures; it needed to be enlivened as an art form. According to the author, this liberation was accomplished by freeing the dancer from the old style of costume. In addition, the waltz transformed things by replacing the erect posture of the dancer; thus began the development of an endless figure in dance, the rotating swinging movement. An even broader analysis deals with the next historical period, the nineteenth century. In the mid-nineteenth century an emphasis on athletics had, she argues, exhausted the artistic content of dance. Bournonville s inclusion of folkloristic elements in his compositions was one effort to lead ballet out of stagnation. But it was the stimulation from somewhere completely different, outside the theatrical realm, which suggested a way out of the crisis and led to the rise of modernity on stage and in social dancing. None of this is explained or supported by evidence. Bournonville, Delsarte, Fuller, St. Denis and Duncan are names simply thrown at the reader. The names act like convenient stepping stones to the evolution of the art of Mary Wigman. And she, after all, was Palucca s teacher. During this historical excursion, the author has developed three ways of movement ( Bewegungsweisen ), though what the term means is never clear. A set of properties that determines the ways of movement : 1. body posture, 2. body movement, 3. time that is experienced by the dancing body, 4. space that is conquered by the dancing body, 5. the acting together of dancers and 6. the carrier of the dynamics in the acting together. With all these elements at hand, the author evaluates the waltz as the first way of movement (p. 56), establishes Wigman s dances as the second way of movement (p. 90) and derives the third way of movement (p. 113) from the Charleston. A summary of the three ways of movement 129

3 dance research concludes that the first is a movement orientated towards time spaces, the second a movement performing time sequences and the third a movement, which produces time changes. These movements apparently flow into Palucca s work. Perhaps this is a fourth way of movement? The biography starts at this point. Gret Palucca began her career in the Weimar Republic. She danced through the Nazi years and directed her school under the socialist state of the German Democratic Republic. Regimes came and went but Palucca flourished right into unified Germany in the 1990s. She was an adept at survival. The biographical notes are unsatisfactory; they are often vague, unsupported by context. and subscribe to the legend and the selfglorification, which Palucca herself so carefully erected. The really interesting questions are thus missed: How did Palucca manage to survive from one regime to another with such apparent ease? Was it something in her dancing? Did she generate some magical or mysterious property which only art can provide? To tell that story properly the author must accept that Palucca requires a political biography in which the interaction of politics and art is addressed. If Palucca is understood to have danced in spite of political constraints and generally dominating tendencies (back cover), the real story cannot be told. The truth in Palucca s case is exactly the opposite. She danced because she had the ruthlessness, absence of principle and flexible opportunism to change with each regime. No dancer ever dances in spite of political circumstances but within them. To survive the way Palucca survived one needs very particular qualities and it is precisely those characteristics that the author ignores. The author would have had to address the question of personality, psyche, character and the ability to save conflicts. Wigman s portrayal of her former pupil might have been helpful: Palucca, thought the teacher, was caught up in a thick web of lies (p. 252). Palucca knew when and with whom to take sides; she knew whom to approach for help and whom to ignore. (Her correspondence with her Jewish agent Bernstein (pp ) could have served as an example of individual behaviour in an historical situation.) The accounts of both the Nazi years and the years in the socialist state of Germany are consequently very weak and do not illumi- 130

4 book reviews nate the peculiar position Palucca acquired in both systems. The author does not explain how Palucca could achieve popularity in two such different political systems An artistic mission is not a sufficient explanation Two examples, which do not appear in the book, will serve as illustration: Palucca dismissed the Jewish headmistress of her school long before the Nazi laws would have forced her to do so. But Palucca was, according to the Nazi racial laws of 1935, herself half Jewish. She applied directly to Goebbels and Hitler for an exemption from the laws to allow her to dance and received it. Hence the editors of the SS journal Das schwarze Korps promoted her to their highest accolade: the most German dancer. The author merely remarks that Palucca was careful and thoughtful in her actions (p. 266); she was capable of adapting to difficult conditions (p. 268). Many of the observations about the nature of the dance in the late 1920s and 1930s are contradictory. In one place the author claims that German dance had stabilised rather than stagnated in the late 1920s (p. 237), and that Palucca, at the same time, reached her peak and took one step back. Palucca is said to have been averse to the dominating aesthetic principles of the Nazi state (p. 249), yet the Nazis established their ideal dance aesthetics by integrating the existing dance styles, including Palucca s dance. On the other hand, the aesthetic criteria that suited the Nazis and which they incorporated into their state aesthetics were identical with those Palucca represented (p. 254). Later, Palucca became part of the pact between the communist government and the intellectuals. She profited from the deal just as much as the government. She managed to escape punishment for her Nazi past and dominated cultural politics even more than during the Nazi years. As a member of the highly prestigious Academy of Arts, she was involved in making and taking decisions. She was responsible, for instance, for the exclusion of many modern dancers from socialist politics. She personally saw that Wigman was removed from the list of prospective Academy members; she insisted that Kurt Jooss was only a minor artist, not to be invited to East Berlin. Whatever these artists thought of socialism, Palucca made sure that they would not become her rivals. A centralised socialist system suited her ambitions very well. The author either does not know these facts or suppresses them. 131

5 dance research Palucca deserves a real biography, an honest one, which tries to say how much her success rested on her political manipulation and how much grew out of her artistic audacity. Then there is the broader effort to look at German dance and its relation to modernity. Katja Erdmann-Rajski fails on both counts but she deserves credit for a certain daring ambition and for an intuition that there is a problem to be faced. Marion Kant MOVING MUSIC: DIALOGUES WITH MUSIC IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY BALLET Stephanie Jordan London: Dance Books 2000 There is a wood-preserving product advertised as doing exactly what it says on the tin. Moving Music is the first book on the analysis of choreo-musical relationships to be written by a dance scholar and it provides an excellent and much-needed contribution to the discipline but it does not do exactly what it says on the back cover. In one instance this is a fairly trivial failure to match up to a piece of promotional writing in which we are told that the different musical concepts of a number of choreographers, including Merce Cunningham, are included. Admittedly it does say in a broad overview but, in fact, Cunningham is given only one paragraph and a sentence pointing out that his extreme method of independence has had no obvious impact on the ballet world (p. 60). The other misleading claim, however, is of fundamental importance since it reflects a misconception about choreo-musical relationships that has pervaded thinking in the subject throughout its development. The cover says that using ideas drawn from recent dance theory and musicology, Jordan proposes a new way of understanding musical-choreographic meanings and of analysing the style and structure from which they arise. My contention is that, on the contrary, a large part of the value of the book is that Jordan is engaging in the same sort of detailed structural analysis of dance as was undertaken in music through the last century. In so doing, she has gone a long way towards redressing a previous imbalance in choreo-musical analysis and it is important for the discipline that this is recognised. 132