Mary Wigman’s
Witch
Dance (1914/1926) is perhaps the most famous dance solo no one has seen—at
least not in its entirety. A short clip of the beginning of the artist’s second
version of the piece, made in 1926 and featuring the addition of a Noh mask and
highly percussive music (Wigman first danced the solo in silence), exists
on YouTube. One certainly gets a sense in watching the excerpt of the bewitching
aura and gestural expressiveness that made Wigman, and this signature dance,
such a captivating solo artist and a leading practitioner of Weimer-era
Ausdruckstanz, or “expressive dance.”
However, what the piece looked like in its entirety per force remains
incomplete.
Not that this has prevented generations of dancers, using
contemporary newspaper accounts and the archival research of scores of dance
scholars, from attempting to reconstruct and/or reimagine the work. Belgium’s
Pedro Pauwels is the latest. Working with fellow choreographers Carlotta Ikeda,
Josef Nadj, Robyn Orlin, and Jérôme Thomas, Pauwels asked his collaborators to
use Wigman’s
Witch Dance as a basis
for delving “into the roles of rhythm, energy and movement when dedicated to
bewitching, spells and passion” and, in the process, “to build their
choreographic vision of today’s sorcerer or sorceress.” The result is
Sors, which opened
The Dance Centre’s
2013-14 Global Dance Connections series last night.
As interpreted by Pauwels, the piece is divided into five
parts, beginning with a fairly faithful recreation of the clip of Wigman posted
to YouTube. Masked and seated on the floor, Pauwels claws at the air with his
arms and pushes his bent legs to the ground, just as Wigman does. But, not
least because of the absence of the familiar percussive music, this opening
feels less like an orienting homage than a decidedly disorienting ghosting,
with Pauwels here (and throughout the piece as a whole) conjuring a version of
the uncanny that is as much about emphasizing unlikeness as likeness. This perhaps
helps to explain the next section, in which Pauwels rolls about the floor with
his head partly inside a brass bell, a prop I took as less a mimetic reference
to a witch’s pointy hat than a Labanesque eukinetic allusion to the body’s
internal resonances (more on Laban below). In the third movement Pauwels is
mostly vertical, darting diagonally across the stage with outstretched arms in
a long grey wrap that he wears back to front, and reminding us why, at least in
her first tour of America, Wigman was both hailed as the next and panned as a
derivative Isadora Duncan.
The fourth section of the work is the longest and, from my
point of view, most interesting. It begins with Pauwels, now stripped to his
underwear and outfitted with a body mic, back seated on the floor à la Wigman,
as at the outset of the piece. However, he is also now in possession of an
electric toothbrush, which he proceeds to use, and which we hear amplified via
his mic. Soon he is brushing not just his teeth, but other parts of his body:
the inside of his nose, his legs and feet, his armpits, his crotch. This
purification ritual precedes—and then proceeds along with—a spoken-word bit in
which Pauwels first channels Wigman’s voice by quoting from her letters and
then her very bodily being by calling for assistance from the audience and a stagehand
named Hans to aid him in his cross-gendered transformation, donning lipstick,
pantyhose, and high heels and shimmying briefly to some hip-hop coming from an
audience member’s iPod. Lithe and sexy, the feminine Pauwels is certainly
bewitching. However, the references to Laban, the Nazis, and the 1936 Olympics
in his recitation of Wigman’s correspondence are an important reminder that the
poetics of Wigman’s dance sorcery are necessarily shadowed by politics, with
her pioneering explorations of individual bodily expression always needing to
be historicized in terms of the social movements out of which they emerged, and
towards which they were conscripted.
And, so, because I have been doing some research of my own
into this particular period of dance history, permit me to open a long
contextual parenthesis:
As avant-garde
origin myths go, one cannot get much better than Wigman, in the summer of 1913,
climbing up Monte Verità in Ascona, Switzerland in search of a visionary artist
whom she had heard held similarly radical ideas about movement. What Wigman and
Rudolf von Laban shared was an antipathy toward the traditional dance
vocabulary inherited from ballet, folk dance, and pantomime, and that as an
expressive form was always subservient to music. Rather, they were both
interested in the body as the primary instrument of movement and in developing
dance that emerged directly and organically from the body’s everyday dynamic
and rhythmic relationships with space. However, beyond this common core principle,
Laban’s and Wigman’s theories were quite different, not least in terms of how
each characterized the relationship between motion and emotion. For Laban,
movement was emotion, and in his
theories of space harmony (choreutics) and effort (eukinetics) he would attach
the names of different affects (sadness, joy, anger) to simple bodily movements
and positionings. This informed his idea of movement choirs, mass groupings of
people, most without professional dance training, who could be taught basic
combinations of everyday movement that they would then repeat in unison,
transmitting rhythmically and kinesthetically the set of affects attached to
that movement.
By contrast, Wigman
insisted that movement expressed
emotion, and her early solo practice explored movement patterns and gestures
that evoked individual felt experiences and interior states of being, and on
attuning those “inmost feelings to the mood of our time” (The Mary Wigman Book, 107). This also explains why Wigman, unlike
Laban, remained wary of conscripting movement to other interpretive ends, as in
the theatre. Writing in 1927, she distinguished the pure movement of her
“absolute dance” from the larger “’scenic’ event” and “total” synthesis of
expressive forms that characterized what Laban first called “stage dance [Tanzbühne]” and then Kurt Jooss (who had
replaced Wigman as Laban’s disciple) termed dance-theatre (Tanztheater). “The absolute dance … does not represent, it is,”
Wigman claimed, before positing her own version of kinesthetic empathy: “its
effect on the spectator who is invited to experience the dancer’s experience is
on a mental-motoric level, exciting and moving” (The Mary Wigman Book, 108-109).
Nevertheless,
Laban’s and Wigman’s aesthetic philosophies were sufficiently allied as to
attract mutual notice by the Nazis, whose theories of Aryan racial superiority
were buttressed by the gymnastics and body culture movements then proliferating
in Germany, and who were of course equally adept at employing mass
choreographed movement and stylized gestures to solicit collective emotional
identification with their cause. Even before the Nazis officially came to power
Jooss had made his own political position clear, creating his most famous
piece, The Green Table (1932); this
exemplary early work of dance-theatre is an explicitly anti-war ballet,
anticipating Brecht’s Mother Courage
in using bold costumes, masks, original music, and a libretto by Jooss,
alongside expressionistic choreography developed over seven episodic scenes, to
allegorize the horrors of armed combat. Hounded to fire the Jewish members of
his company, including his composer, Frederik Cohen, Jooss decided to decamp
Germany for Holland soon after returning from The Green Table’s premiere in Paris, eventually setting up a new school
in England.
However, Laban and
Wigman equivocated (whether naively or opportunistically, depends on one’s
perspective). Both accepted the patronage of the Nazi Party, and both bowed to
pressure to dismiss Jewish company members or students, before separately
running afoul of Josef Goebbels over their participation in the 1936 Olympic
opening ceremonies, ironically a stage ideally suited (as it continues to be)
to the transmission of affect through mass movement. Yet what was to have been
Laban’s grandest movement choir, Vom
Tauwind und der neuen Freude (featuring 1000 amateur dancers from across
Germany), was scuttled after Goebbels deemed the dress rehearsal insufficiently
adulatory of Nazi ideology. This made inevitable Laban’s eventual departure
from Germany, first to Paris and then, with Jooss’s aid, to England. As for
Wigman, she displeased party officials by demurring on a commission celebrating
the leadership of Hitler, though she was allowed to contribute another group
piece, Totenklage, instead, and she
continued to teach, first at her school in Dresden, then in Leipzig, until the
end of the war.
Wigman’s career extended
past the war, with her notably creating a version of Le sacre de printemps in 1957 that the dance scholar Susan Manning
sees as having an influence on Pina Bausch’s own take on the Stravinsky
libretto 18 years later (see Susan Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon: Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary
Wigman, 245). However, Ausdruckstanz’s
transformation into Tanztheater in post-war Germany necessarily involved a careful negotiation on the
part of choreographers like Bausch and Reinhild Hoffmann (who both studied with
Jooss) with expressionist forebears like Wigman, emphasizing the universality
of German dance-theatre’s bodily affects at the expense of its local political
history.
This, finally,
brings me back to Pauwels’ Sors, and
its final section. It begins with Pauwels, now once again fully clothed and
entering upstage right with his back to us, magically unfurling a seemingly
endless length of sheer plastic from what at first appears to be his mouth but
was no doubt the top of his shirt. Lifting and twirling and running with and
rising and falling underneath the sheet, Pauwels weaves a gorgeous final visual
spell that is certainly vivid and memorable in its emotional expressivity.
However, I couldn’t help thinking it also worked to contain and bracket off the
politics of the preceding section.
P.
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