Cover to Uncover

Abstract

Multiple historical accounts (programme brochures and reviews) describe female Dada artists dancing with alienating, concealing masks and costumes at various Dada Soirées from 1916 to 1919. In her ‘Three Dada dances’ of 1916, writer, singer and performer Emmy Hennings’ face was covered in a Cubist mask, attracting the spectator’s attention by its frightening wide-open mouth and its radically deformed nose. In a similar and equally terrifying costume, interdisciplinary artist Sophie Taeuber performed her ‘Abstract Dances’ of 1917. Their complete disguise, which obscured all references to gender and individuality, suggested that both Hennings and Taeuber fully disappeared behind their unsettling body masks.

However, investigating the physical body masks from a contemporary perspective places these historical Dada performances in a radical new light. In ‘Cover to Uncover: Masked performance and gender in Emmy Hennings’ and Sophie Taeuber’s Dada dance’, Sophie Doutreligne explores the abstract Dada masks through the metaphorical concept of masquerade. She considers Hennings’ and Taeuber’s Dada body mask as a second, gender-neutral skin to their (obviously) gendered bodies. Starting from this premise, Doutreligne investigates if and how these Dada artists applied their abstract body masks to effectively destroy the traditional gender constructions that contributed to the consummation of their bodies on stage. She argues that it was exactly by performing with and certainly not behind their grotesque Dada masks that these female artists successfully escaped from their erased position in a male dominated Dada art scene. Their de-gendered Dada body masks allowed them to explore deviating and desired scripts of womanhood through the medium of dance.

Notes

1 The photograph— presumably depicting Sophie Taeuber—is undated and taken in an unspecified location. Some historians have assumed that Taeuber’s performance took place in Cabaret Voltaire in 1916; others believe that it was performed in Galerie Dada in 1917. If the former were to be true, then the masks would have been created by Marcel Janco; if the latter, both mask and costume would have been attributed to Hans Arp. I assume that the dance took place in 1917 in Galerie Dada and that it can thus be connected to the description ‘Abstrakte Tänze (Verse von Hugo Ball, Masken von Hans Arp)’.

2 All the original Dada masks have either been destroyed or are lost to us. On the difficulty of reconstituting the (masked) performances of female Dada artists through photographs and documents, see Doutreligne and Stalpaert (2019).

3 Ball’s troubling statement is illustrative of Dada’s exotic gaze, installed by the cultural appropriation of so-called ‘primitive’ tribes. This topic surely deserves more academic attention.