Max Terpis

Perhaps the most troubled of the theatre choreographers in Germany during the 1920s was actually a Swiss, Max Terpis (aka Max Pfister, 1889–1958). Originally a student of architecture, he encountered Laban in Stuttgart (1920) and took classes from Laban's protégé in Zurich, Suzanne Perrottet, who urged him to study under Wigman in Dresden. He spent only a single year (1922) with Wigman. Though Terpis came to dance relatively late in his life, no one soared to such national prominence with greater speed. His talent for group movement immediately attracted the attention of Hannover theatre director Hanns Niedecken-Gebhard, who hired him to choreograph Der Tänzer unser lieben Frau (1923, music: Stürmer), Die Nächtlichen (1923, music: Wellesz), and Der fliegende Prinz (1923, music: Paumgarten). Terpis danced the lead role in his own version of Richard Strauss's Josephs Legende (1923). His only solo concert, given in Hannover in 1924, featured no musical accompaniment and was a collaborative affair involving solo dances by Kreutzberg, Frida Holst, and Else Rudiger.

The Hannover choreographies brought him to the attention of Max von Schillings, director of the Berlin State Opera, who sought to reform the ballet corps, which numbered nearly a hundred dancers yet failed to achieve anything resembling the seriousness of purpose that Kröller had attempted to provide it in 1919–1922. Terpis held the State Opera position for six years, but his life there was a nightmare of political intrigue and reactionary efforts to undermine his reforms and authority. He produced nineteen ballets at the State Opera, nearly all of which used music by living modernist composers, including Kool, Stravinsky, Kömme, Wilckens, de Falla, Schreker, Prokofiev, Klenau, Benatzky, and Milhaud; Terpis wrote most of the scenarios himself. Scenic designers such as Emil Pirchan and Panos Aravantinos assisted him in creating expressionist-constructivist settings for ballets that largely inhabited the realm of symbolic fantasy; Die fünf Wünsche (1929) contained a film sequence shot by Gina Fagg. Because of persistent resistance to his expressionist methods from doyens and classically trained dancers, he could not construct group dances as powerfully or radically as he wished, so he increasingly relied on the talents of a few extraordinarily gifted soloists—Rolf Arco, Rudolf Kölling, Daisy Spies, Walter Junk,

Dorothea Albu. This strategy only aggravated tensions between himself and the majority of the corps, although Schillings and his successor, Heinz Tietjens, continued to support him. But in 1929 Terpis faced a full-scale insurrection, from new music director Otto Klemperer, who accused him of lacking "musicality" and of failing to grasp the nature of theatrical art. Terpis therefore handed in his resignation, and Laban soon replaced him. The next year he retreated into almost monastic seclusion, opening a school in Berlin-Grunewald, which he directed until 1939. He then returned to Switzerland, where he directed numerous operas and stage plays in Bern, Basel, and Zurich throughout the war years. In the last decade of his life, he devoted himself primarily to the study of psychological theory, particularly to problems of color perception and semiotics, on which he even published scholarly articles, although relations between color and movement had preoccupied him in the 1920s (Schede).

Terpis appealed to male theatre administrators because his thinking seemed rigorously disciplined and austerely rational. He seemed capable of creating an atmosphere of sober freedom derived from a synthesis of ballet and modern dance techniques. Thus, a major irony of his career was that his own corps regarded his thinking as too radical (expressionist), when in reality his ideas lacked sufficient respect for excess, flamboyance, and wildness. None of his ballets resonated much with either the public, the critics, or the dance world, in spite of his impressive seriousness and ambition, and useful descriptions of them remain difficult to excavate. Even his almost completely uncritical biographer, Wolfgang Schede, gave only the vaguest descriptions of them, offering only a couple of photographs, and Terpis himself did not discuss any of his ballets, publishing scenarios of ballets that never got produced rather than analyzing those that did. He offered an aesthetic of grandiose restraint and heightened sobriety, as he indicated in a lecture to students around 1932: "Our time has an outspoken inclination toward exaggeration, consumption; it loves the loud, the screaming, the extreme. . . . The dance programs consist largely of grotesques, parodies, problematic spiritual distortions, insofar as they do not exhibit artistic or virtuoso formalisms. . . . It is rarely that one can identify a dance as 'beautiful' or 'elegant,' rarely that a dance displays internally or externally an aristocratic bearing. Today we are immediately ready to identify everything that is 'beautiful' and poetic—that is, harmonic—as kitsch. The ugly, unharmonic, unlogical strike us as interesting" (Schede 101–102).

Terpis pursued what one might call an architectural sense of movement fusing concepts of classical ballet with theoretical categories of modern dance; indeed, "architecture and choreography share the narrowest of affinities" (Terpis, Farbenspiel , 102). He tended to build individual movements out of classical concepts supplemented by a distinctly modern enthusiasm for swinging motions, although he showed little interest in pointe

technique. For group movements he favored modern theoretical categories, which nevertheless seemed more rooted in architecture and space than in the body. Group movement achieved maximum expressivity through Terpis's notion of "symmetricality": "The ordering of masses in space is symmetrical," he believed, for symmetricality provided the most effective "representation of the idea of power, wealth, strength, and domination" (107). Asymmetrical constructions opened up the world of "fantasy" (which he actually preferred on the narrative level), but these must never transgress "laws and order" established through symmetry (112). Group symmetry occurred through the application of abstract geometrical categories: the circle, the triangle, the square, and the row. Each category contained numerous variations—the circle, for example, included cylinders, half-circles, tunnels, balls, arches, and so forth. Asymmetry intervened when group movement no longer disclosed recognizable geometric categories. Choreography entailed the fusion of abstract geometrical categories with classical ballet positions and with modern notions of swing and pulse.

Terpis's belief in synthesis operated at a further level: he sought to fuse abstract categories of movement with a very literary sense of narrative. He wrote most of the scenarios for his ballets, which primarily projected a fantastic or Gothic atmosphere, and he seemed unable to imagine dance without an elaborate libretto (Terpis, "Wie ensteht," 4). Yet knowledge of his scenarios is so scant that it is difficult to ascertain what he wished to say. Don Morte (1926, music: Wilckens), perhaps his most successful work, was a grandiose adaptation of Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death." This piece, which revealed such powerful anxiety toward fleshly pleasures and the body, conveyed the logic of his asceticism: he feared the body and the turbulent emotions it provoked; carefully scripted narrative dance, constructed symmetrically within an elaborate theatre bureaucracy, was the most effective way to regulate the body and the threats to spatial order from impulse and fantasy, which the body "covered up." He loved the extravagant productions of the Ballets Russes when they visited Berlin—these sent him walking alone through the city for hours—but he was incapable of anything so unapologetically lavish and hedonistic. Yet the State Opera (including the corps) probably expected him to come up with some serious competition for the Parisians, a task he could hardly achieve through his own productions of Stravinsky's Pulcinella (1925) and Petrouchka (1928). In the scenarios for his unproduced dances—Saul und David (1930), Orpheus Lysios (1936), Circe (1936), and Niobe (1937)—he revealed perhaps most overtly his greatest desire: to show how dance bestowed upon the body a redemptively priestly identity (Farbenspiel , 169–177). But the theatre was never a happy home for such an ascetic attitude.