Critiques of German Critical Writing
With dance theory continually drifting toward metaphysical idealism, it was not surprising that dance criticism, responses to dances themselves, unfolded informally and abundantly in a highly idiosyncratic, fragmented fashion from a multitude of perspectives. Taken together, this body of criticism implied that, contrary to much of the theorizing, the value of dance, as a performance reality, was quite relative and that dance had little power to unify either perception or the language used to articulate its value. Laban probably assumed that the development of an accurate dance notation system would have the effect of getting people to see dance more acutely and uniformly, but this possibility soon proved an illusion.
At the 1927 Magdeburg Congress, Hans W. Fischer spoke on the theme of dance criticism. He observed that dance criticism was no longer "completely dilettantish," despite the proliferation of "pseudo-critical" dance picture books distracting the public from a deeper level of discourse. He focused less on principles of dance criticism than on the qualifications of the dance critic, who could not shift from opera, theatre, or ballet reviewing as easily as editors seemed to think. "One must be born to dance criticism," he asserted, and the born critic viewed art as an "eternally new beginning." This value remained obscure when dogmatic principles and distinctions prevented, for example, the critic from appreciating Wigman's use of a cabaret device in an otherwise somber dance or from regarding social dance forms as seriously as ballet, which Fischer believed "no longer has a future." Stable critical principles could not accommodate the dynamism of modern dance culture. Already, critical language had become banalized by the misuse of such words as "absolute" and "cultic." The critic must bring to dance an "instinct" for "eruptions" or "blossomings": "One can not push the borders far enough, raise the challenge high enough, or fix the responsibility strictly enough. Because in the field of dance, so much is in flux, so much still unclarified and controversial" (Die Tat, 19/8, November 1927, 591–596). Alfred Bratsch adopted a more cynical tone in a 1931 article on dance criticism for Schrifttanz, stating that most dance criticism served journalistic objectives before it served the
needs of dance, and he accused dancers of perpetuating journalistic standards by their willingness to confuse criticism with publicity. Moreover, he did not think critics who were close to the dance establishment produced superior criticism: "Just those 'non-dancing' artistic people whom we may say really ought to be rejected as critics could be allotted an important task because their judgment is not yet corrupted by close familiarity" (VP 77–79). However, in the increasingly crowded and competitive dance community itself, leading representatives devoted more energy to establishing standards for school accreditation than to raising the level of performance criticism; yet without a theory of performance values, standards for accreditation would continue to rest upon idealistic rhetoric defined by nebulous intentions rather than measurable results.
The most powerful, detailed examination of any dance during the era surely was psychologist Hans Prinzhorn's negative review of Wigman's Totenmal in 1930 for Der Ring, a right-wing journal of cultural-political analysis that otherwise paid no attention to dance. Prinzhorn, who was actually a close friend of Wigman, analyzed numerous performance elements in the piece—movement, costume, music, lighting, text, scenography, choreography—and contemplated their significance in relation to Wigman's artistic-ideological intentions, which he regarded as defective and incapable of provoking the intensity of feeling the creators expected of the spectator ("Grundsätzliches"). But dance and performance analyses of this magnitude or intensity did not often appear, even in the dance journals. For that matter, no published review of a German dance book ever achieved a magnitude comparable to that of Frits Lapidoth's enormously detailed review of J.W.F. Weremeus Buning's De Wereld van den dans (1922) in the Dutch theatre journal Het Tooneel (9/4, September 1923, 51–57). Nor was any German monograph on a dancer as precise in describing its subject's dances and their meanings as Joe Jencik's 1930 book on Anita Berber, published in Czech. Moreover, Jencik's Tanecnik a snobove (Dance and Snobbery, 1931) offered a much more scintillating and persuasive analysis of the psychosocial and historical pressures defining dance as an art than the German theorists ever did; even if he did not analyze many dances, he nevertheless showed how movements of the dancing body in its diverse manifestations exposed class distinctions and estrangements from normative attitudes toward bodily expressivity in different social contexts. But Jencik (1893–1945) lived extensively in the world of theatrical performance, dancing and choreographing ambitious modernist productions for the National Theatre in Prague, appearing in films, leading a jazz revue group (the Jencik Girls), collaborating with the cabaret duo of Voskovic and Werich, and staging plays (Narodni divadlo, 192–193; ES 245–249). Still, he managed to publish several theoretical-historical articles for Divadlo, the leading Czech theatre journal, as well as some autobiographi-
cal novels, including the eerily beautiful Omyl Mea Mara Indry (1944), about the ambiguous sexual identity of a dancer. In other words, Jencik did not accept a concealed class distinction between the bodily world of performance and the intellectual world of criticism and theory. He traveled freely between both worlds, untempted by the redemptive claims of metaphysical idealism.
It would seem, from all the fog enshrouding the domain of theory, that dance possessed considerable power to challenge the authority of conventional scholarly and critical language. Perhaps Blass was right: to articulate accurately one's responses to dance, one should turn to the language of poetic imagination and value dance by its power to awaken such language. Not surprisingly, the metaphorical image of the dancer appeared frequently in the poetry of the era, most recklessly, perhaps, in Curt Corrinth's ecstatic prose-poem Potsdamer Platz (1919) (cf. W. Roth). But aside from these often stirring metaphorical images and the somewhat vapid odes to dancers such as Niddy Impekoven, Grete Wiesenthal, and Lili Green, the most imaginative use of literary language to reveal dance appeared in the Berber-Drost Tänze des Lasters, des Grauens und der Ekstase (1922) (see Chapter 6 herein).
Another interesting figure, Alfred Richard Meyer (1882–1956), cultivated the life of an aesthete-connoisseur in Berlin, publishing exquisite, rare editions of his own poems, beginning with Vicky in 1902. In 1910 he began to publish many of his writings under the name and persona of Munkepunke, a dandyish, cosmopolitan fellow who constantly indulged in witty word games. Meyer-Munkepunke drifted into the turbulent orbit of expressionism, producing, as was the habit of the expressionists, a great abundance of poems in a multitude of small editions, as well as a little book about charlotte Bara (1921). After 1933 he became an officer of the Nazi Chamber of National Literature; when the war ended, he devoted himself to translations of literary works (Raabe 329–337; Josch). As Meyer-Munkepunke, he published several poems about dancing and dancers, which he collected in Tanzplakette (1913) and Grit Hegesa (1920). Tanzplakette satirically equated individual poems with different social dances or with "posters" for dancing, such as "Tango," "Foxtrot," "Maxie," "Voo-Doo," and so forth: "The new dance, the pouch dance of the kangaroo." A curious feature of the poems was that Meyer kept the right side of the margin even instead of the left. For example, in these lines from "Foxtrott":
I trot, you trot, we trot.
You trot before me, I trot after you.
Two bodies are exactly determined to become one.
But a wall of space always keeps us separate.
We stamp, heavy falling hammer blow, clap-clap the beat of the melody
(Meyer, Grosse Munkepunke , 107).
The effect is of words piling into a "wall of space" from uneven starting points instead of "flowing" from an even starting point. Thus, with these poems, Meyer indicated the power of dance to subvert the conventional order and rhythms of poetic language. In Grit Hegesa , the disturbance of linguistic order was much more radical, as Meyer inscribed his responses to Hegesa's Groteske and Der Samurai:
High over Tohuwabohu of a thousand street organs
Suddenly a green floating boat,
Somehow an even-membered triangle:
Black pompon, pompon, pompon.
Pythagoras, Pythagoras, how do you do it!
a2 +b2 —must have a circle first—to be able to fly
Wild street organing over me and in me with all rainbow colors.
"Meyer, you will never in this life get beyond fourth grade!"
Said my mathematics teacher Frank sourly: "Once more: a2 +b2 "
A momang! I won't prick you, you meadow green girl!
You black point—o holy Archimedes!
I place myself on it and raise this earth off its angles.
Jaap Kool, organ your heavenly festival a little more!
Corn in the chimes. I shoot. Myself.
(113)
Here Hegesa's grotesque dance inspires a vision in which both linguistic and natural order become subverted, as the dancing body urges the poet to imagine principles of grammar, poetic "rhythm," mathematics, physics, geometry, acoustics, time, and perception itself colliding—or perhaps "dancing"—in a wildly delighted manner.