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Abstract
It is well known that choreographer and dance theorist Rudolf von Laban attended several Zurich Dada evenings with his students, several of whom—including Sophie Taeuber and Suzanne Perrottet—danced on Dada stages, often alongside the recitation of Hugo Ball's Lautgedichte (sound poems). Yet scholarly conceptions of Laban's choreographic work and Zurich Dada performance have remained seemingly irreconcilable. Charting the interanimation of bodily movement and oral declamation, this article shows how the interplay of dance, sound, and word was central to the work of both groups. Connecting them, I argue, was the dissemination of Wilhelm Wundt's theories of nervous transformation, which have been linked to Ball's sound poems and which Perrottet, after studying under Émile Jacques-Dalcroze, shared with Laban and others at his school in Monte Verità. Attention to the wider Lebensreform (life reform) context of specific performance techniques also necessitates, as the article aims to show, a reevaluation of the historical avant-garde project as one aimed at training perceptual faculties. While avant-garde historiography has overwhelmingly centered artistic strategies such as photomontage and the extension of its shock-effects into the revolutionary potential of film, an acute consideration of dance sheds light on the ways that such tactics were aimed not only unidirectionally at the spectator but also back at the artists themselves.
Acknowledgments
Thanks are due to Tobias Wilke for organizing the symposium “Body, Language, and Performance in the Avant-Garde,” held October 2014 at Columbia University, at which I presented an early version of this text. I am particularly grateful to Wilke, Nicola Behrmann, and Andreas Huyssen for their invaluable comments at that event and afterward, as well as to Leah Pires, Robert Wiesenberger, and Gillian Young for their attentive critical reading.
Notes
1 Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield, trans. Ann Raimes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 102. Originally published as Hugo Ball, Die Flucht aus der Zeit (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1927).
2 The earliest major primary text is Hans Brandenburg, Der moderne Tanz (Munich: Georg Müller, 1913). For an overview of the efflorescence of German-language dance writing and criticism in the period, see Karl Toepfer, “Dance Criticism,” in Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 334–357.
3 For a discussion of dance and abstraction, particularly as it relates to contemporary revisionist art history and exhibitions, see Juliet Bellow and Nell Andrew, “Inventing Abstraction? Modernist Dance in Europe,” in The Modernist World, ed. Allana Lindgren and Stephen Ross (London: Routledge, 2015), 329–338.
4 Taeuber saw Laban's dancers perform in Munich as early as 1911. Later, she took courses with Laban at Monte Verità and at his school in Zurich (during the Cabaret Voltaire period and while she was teaching at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts). See Roswitha Mair, Handwerk und Avantgarde: Das Leben der Künstlerin Sophie Taeuber-Arp (Berlin: Parthas Verlag, 2013).
5 Laban explicitly discusses Wundt in his later treatise, Die Welt des Tänzers, fünf Gedankenreigen (Stuttgart: Seifert, 1920), 253. This reference is noted in Evelyn Dörr and Lori Lantz, “Rudolf von Laban: The ‘Founding Father’ of Expressionist Dance,” Dance Chronicle 26, no. 1 (2003): 2, note 3. See also Evelvn Dörr, Rudolf von Laban: Dancer of the Crystal (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008).
6 See Peter Michael Mowris, Nerve Languages: The Critical Response to the Physiological Psychology of Wilhelm Wundt by Dada and Surrealism, PhD Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2010. Mowris also argues for Wundt's influence on a number of figures, including those that take the focus of the present essay. However, our analyses diverge in that I consider these connections in light of both Dada historiography and theorizations of the avant-garde project to train sensory perception.
7 Ball, Flight Out of Time, 70. See Emmy Hennings Dada, ed. Christa Baumberger and Nicola Behrmann (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2015) for more information on these dancers.
8 Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art [1964], trans. David Britt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 69. See also Ruth Hemus, “Sex and the Cabaret: Dada's Dancer's,” Nordlit 21, Special Issue “The Avant-Garde and the Other” (2007): 91–101. At Monte Verità, Laban cultivated a powerful air of mystique and was erotically entangled with many of his students. See Toepfer, “Rudolf von Laban,” in Empire of Ecstasy, 99–107.
9 The earliest English-language text on this topic is Naima Prevots, “Zurich Dada and Dance: Formative Ferment,” Dance Research Journal 17, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1985): 3–8. The contribution of women artists to Dada has, in more recent years, been subject to reappraisal by feminist scholars. See Renée Riese Hubert, “Zurich Dada and Its Artist Couples,” in Women in Dada, ed. Naomi Sawelson-Gorse (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 516–545; Jill Fell, “Sophie Taeuber: The Masked Dancer,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 35, no. 3 (1999): 270–285; and Ruth Hemus, “Taeuber as Dada Body: The Subversion of Dance,” in Dada's Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 63–70.
10 Dianne S. Howe, Individuality and Expression: The Aesthetics of the New German Dance, 1908–1936 (New York: Peter Lang, 1996). See also Isa Partsch-Bergsohn and Harold Bergsohn, The Makers of Modern Dance in Germany: Rudolph von Laban, Mary Wigman, Kurt Jooss (Hightstown, NJ: Princeton Book Co., 2003), and Mark Franko, “The Politics of Expression,” in Dancing Modernism: Performing Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), ix–xiv.
11 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). See also Stephen Foster, “Disaster and the Habits of Culture,” in Dada and the Coordinates of Cultural Politics, ed. Stephen Foster (New York: G.K. Hall, 1996), 1–6. The important 2005 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art also emphasized Dada's relationship to modernity, collective production, and public speech; see Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris, ed. Leah Dickerman (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art/D.A.P., 2005).
12 Mary Wigman, “My Teacher Laban,” in What Is Dance?, ed. Marshall Cohen and Roger Copeland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 303.
13 Ball, Flight Out of Time, 25. Despite his proclamation of invention, Ball's sound poetry was, in fact, based in other avant-garde precedents, such as Vasily Kandinsky's Klänge (Sounds; 1912) and Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's “Parole in libertà” (Words in Freedom; 1912), both of which were performed or displayed at the Cabaret Voltaire.
14 With regard to Dada and notation, it should be mentioned that Tzara's simultaneous poems were written and scored for performers, most famously his “L'Amiral cherche une maison à louer,” published in Cabaret Voltaire (1916): 6–7 (see, in this context, the essay by Emily Hage in the present issue). Trevor Stark has also uncovered evidence of dance notation by Wulff and Taeuber (although not in Laban's final system of Kinetography Laban). Trevor Stark, “Simultaneity and Totality: Tristan Tzara's Simultaneous Poem Scores” (presentation, College Art Association, Washington, DC, February 4, 2016).
15 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997), 10.
16 Hugo Ball, “Dada Manifesto, Zurich, July 14, 1916,” in Flight Out of Time, 221. I here use a translation by Christopher Middleton, based on the transcription of Ball's original manuscript by his stepdaughter, Annemarie Schütt-Hennings (for a discussion of the manifesto's publication history, see the essay by Tobias Wilke in the present issue). It is Middleton's translation that provides the slightly sexualized English-language connotation of “fool around.”
17 Tobias Wilke, “Da-Da: ‘Articulatory Gestures’ and the Emergence of Sound Poetry,” MLN 128, no. 3 (April 2013): 641 and 644. Notably, scholars have connected Wundt's work and influence to other German intellectual figures, including the empathy theories of Wilhelm Worringer, a figure central to art historical understandings of abstraction. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock (New York: International Universities Press, 1953).
18 Wilke, “Da-da,” 665. Crucially, Wilke argues that Dada sound poetry was not conceived as an “actual” return to “a primary, pre-linguistic stage” but, rather, a later “poetic reflection” on this process. See also Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus, Stimme und Sprechkünste im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001) for another analysis connecting Ball and Wundt.
19 Wilhelm Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythus und Sitte, vol. 1, Die Sprache (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1911). Though contemporary with—and not entirely dissimilar from—Rudolf Steiner's concept of “Eurythmy,” Dalcroze's Eurhythmics are nonetheless distinct from Steiner's techniques. See Émile Jacques-Dalcroze, The Eurhythmics of Émile Jacques-Dalcroze (Boston: Small Maynard & Company, 1915).
20 Irwin Spector, Rhythm and Life: The Work of Émile Jacques-Dalcroze (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1990).
21 Toepfer, “Figure One,” in Empire of Ecstasy, 18.
22 Jo Alice Leeds, “Romanticism, the Avant-Garde, and the Early Modern Innovators in Arts Education,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 19, no. 3 (Autumn 1985): 81. Dalcroze's School for Eurhythmic Instruction was founded in Hellerau, Germany in 1910; in 1914 he moved his school to Geneva, Switzerland.
23 Perrottet was, for a time, Dalcroze's chief assistant. For a discussion of Dalcroze's impact on Wigman, see Selma Odom, “Wigman at Hellerau,” Ballet Review 14, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 46–47.
24 Martin Green, Mountain of Truth: The Counterculture Begins, Ascona: 1900–1920 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986). See also Harald Szeemann, Monte Verità: Berg der Wahrheit (Milan: Electra Editrice, 1978).
25 Suzanne Perrottet, Die Befreiung des Körpers: Erinnerungen, ed. Giorgio J. Wolfensberger and Margarete Berg (Wädenswil: Nimbus, 2014), 83.
26 Ibid., 84. Without a record of these improvised “small poems,” it is impossible to discern how—if at all—they might be compared to Dada poetry.
27 Ibid.
28 Ball, Flight Out of Time, 110.
29 Hugo Ball, “Über Okkultismus, Hieratik und andere seltsam schöne Dinge,” Berner Intelligenzblatt, no. 314 (November 15, 1917): 2. The text was later reprinted in Hugo Ball, Der Künstler und die Zeitkrankheit: Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. Hans Burkhard Schlichting (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 54–57. Debbie Lewer has recently translated the text as “On Occultism, the Hieratic, and Other Strangely Beautiful Things,” Art in Translation 5, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 403–408.
30 Fell, “The Masked Dada Dancer,” 278. Fell's text connects Taeuber's performances to her later work in marionettes.
31 Hal Foster, “Dada Mime,” October 105 (Summer 2003): 169 and 175. The famed performance to which Foster refers took place on June 23, 1916. See Ball, Flight Out of Time, 70–71. For another example of this strain of scholarship, see also Brigid Doherty's concept of traumaphilia in “See: ‘We Are All Neurasthenics!’ or, The Trauma of Dada Montage,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (Autumn 1997): 82–132.
32 Hans Arp, “Sophie tanzte,” Spirale 1 (Bern, 1954), quoted in Erica Kessler, “Sophie danse,” trans. André Gunthert, in Sophie Taeuber (Paris: Musée d'Art Modern de la Ville de Paris, 1989), 45.
33 Marcel Janco, “Creative Dada” (1957), in DADA: Monograph of a Movement, ed. Willy Verkauf, Marcel Janco, and Hans Bolliger (London: Academy Editions/New York: St. Martin's Press, 1961), 23.
34 Emmy Hennings, “Zur Erinnerung an Sophie Taeuber-Arp,” in Emmy Hennings Dada, 116. Translation mine.
35 Nell Andrew, “Dada Dance: Sophie Taeuber's Visceral Abstraction,” Art Journal 73, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 27–29.
36 “Notes,” Dada no. 1 (July 1917): 16. Reprinted in Dada: Zurich, Paris, 1916–1922, ed. Michel Giroud (Paris: Editions Jean Michel Place, 1981), 112. For online access to the journal Dada, see http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/dada/1/pages/016.htm.
37 Rae Beth Gordon, Dances with Darwin, 1875–1910: Vernacular Modernity in France (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 9. The chants nègres and the “negro dances” performed at both the Cabaret Voltaire and the Galerie Dada provide another point of connection between the poems and dances of Zurich Dada, this time through a troubling primitivism. Ball recalls “rehearsing a new dance with five Laban-ladies as Negresses,” in April 1917 for the second soirée at the Galerie Dada. Ball, Flight Out of Time, 104. As Whitney Chadwick and others have argued, the “negro masks” and “African dances” employed on Dada stages conflated the otherness of femininity to the otherness of the African continent, offering a seductive world freed from Western social mores and associated with “authentic” visceral experience. Whitney Chadwick, “Fetishizing Fashion/Fetishizing Culture: Man Ray's Noire et Blanche,” Oxford Art Journal 18 (1995): 3–17.
38 Ball's two recollections were published in 1917 and 1927, respectively; Tzara's in 1917; Hennings's in 1948; Arp's in 1954; and Janco's in 1957.
39 Ball, “On Occultism,” 406. Notably, the conference was the annual congress of the group Ordo Templi Orientis.
40 Ibid.
41 Tobias Wilke, “Tacti(ca)lity Reclaimed: Benjamin's Medium, the Avant-Garde, and the Politics of the Senses,” Grey Room 39 (Spring 2010): 39–55. See also Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Third Version),” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 251–283. See also Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 80, wherein Bürger claims that forms such as the readymade and photomontage offered “a stimulus to change one's life.”
42 As Wilke observes, Benjamin's sense of avant-garde sensorial training relied on militaristic metaphors: for Benjamin, “the dadaists turned the artwork into a projectile,” which “jolted the viewer.” Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility [First Version],” trans. Michael W. Jennings, Grey Room 39 (Spring 2010): 32. Quoted in Wilke, “Tacti(ca)lity Reclaimed,” 46.
43 Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62 (Autumn 1992): 10.
44 Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street,” Critical Inquiry 25 (Winter 1999): 306–343. Part of this material is adapted in her “Mistaking the Moon for a Ball,” in Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 132–162.
45 Gabriele Brandstetter has argued that “processes of segmentation that are characteristic of film, chronophotography, and editing were also translated into the body and movement concepts of avant-garde theater and dance,” chiefly through the work of Valeska Gert, which she contrasts to that of Wigman and Kurt Jooss. See Gabriele Brandstetter, “Interruption, Intermediality, and Disjunction in the Movement Concepts of Avant-Garde Dance,” in Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 362–384.
46 For a discussion of Benjamin and habit, see Michael Taussig, “Tactility and Distraction,” Cultural Anthropology 6, no. 2 (May, 1991): 147–153, adapted in Taussig, The Nervous System (London: Routledge, 1992), 141–148.
47 Toepfer, “Rudolf von Laban,” 103.
48 Lilian Karina and Marion Kant, Hitler's Dancers: German Modern Dance and the Third Reich, trans. Jonathan Steinberg (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003); Terri J. Gordon, “Fascism and the Female Form: Performance Art in the Third Reich,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11, no. 1/2 (January–April 2002): 164–200.
49 This line of thinking is exemplified in Lucia Ruprecht, “Gesture, Interruption, Vibration: Rethinking Early Twentieth-Century Gestural Theory and Practice in Walter Benjamin, Rudolf von Laban, and Mary Wigman,” Dance Research Journal 42, no. 2 (2015): 23–42. Ruprecht contrasts Benjamin's theory of gestural arrest (formulated in response to Brecht's epic theater) in contradistinction to what she calls Laban's “gestural flow” and Wigman's “vibrato,” arguing that Benjamin's theory reveals and deconstructs ideological implications of the body's conditions, while Laban and Wigman do not develop their techniques into the political.
50 Anson Rabinbach, “The Inverted Nationalism of Hugo Ball's Critique of the German Intelligentsia,” in Hugo Ball, The Critique of the German Intelligentsia, trans. Brian Harris (New York: Columbia University, 1999), 227, note 2.
51 Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–25. The question “What can a body do?” is drawn directly from Gilles Deleuze's discussion of Baruch Spinoza in “What Can a Body Do?,” in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1990), although this line of questioning was first introduced in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 257.
52 Pavle Levi, “Cinema by Other Means,” October 131 (Winter 2010): 51–68. Levi draws his discussion of cinema as a “theoretical object,” from Rosalind Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 289–305.