Dance is the strongest means of expression of the human soul. (Thomas Niederreuter)
Even since ancient times, dance, often accompanied by music or sound compositions, has been a fundamental part of human life. In fact, this discipline was very likely present in all cultures, such as ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, the Etruscans and Romans, usually performed at rituals, ceremonies, popular festivals, in any case, always in a collective gathering. Even today, wall paintings, vase decorations, mosaics and frescoes testify to the early sequences of movements, which were often performed in the context of a religion but also as a cult. Thus, the representation of music was also handed down at an early stage.
Since music itself cannot be depicted, it has been a top priority from antiquity until the present to bring the viewer closer to the melodies and their diverse mood content through images. In the visual arts, this was initially limited to the depiction of musicians and the instruments. Consequently, not only the development of music was documented, but new forms ofrepresentation of music in the visual arts arose again and again.
In fact, dance, just like the visual arts, had sought a renewal and a new understanding of physicality and movement with the modernism that began in 1900. For both genres, the "new human being" was the freely moving human being.1 Modernism represented a break with traditions that had previously existed in life, society and culture: Urbanization, mass industry, technical progress and scientific insights such as Sigmund Freud's (1856-1939) „psychoanalysis" increasingly brought the subjectivity and individuality of the individual to the fore in the early 21st century. These impulses of the time are also taken up and made visible in music and dance.
Thus, after the First World War, an expressive dance style developed. At the center of this were individuality, improvisation and solo dancing. In Germany, the development of so-called "expressionist dance" (from German "Ausdruckstanz") was particularly shaped by individualism and the creation of "qualitatively new dance movements".2 In addition to the ballet stage, which was preferred by expressive dance, and in addition to the experimental stage workshop, the vaudeville theater was an important venue for dance practice.
Dance, but also music, emerged in this period from the inner drive of people in motion, as a physical expression of the inner world of sensation and experience, the changing and shifting of mental states. The rhythm should be made physically visible and the body should be freed in this way from constraints and limitations.
Expressive dance was indeed danced naked in the 1920s. Therefore, representations of it are often found outdoors in nature, on the water, on the beach, in forests and meadows, depicting the naked human body in a new naturalistic sense of body and beauty.3 Dance was now regarded as a metaphor for sexuality, the relationship between the sexes, and art in general.
Just as the "Brücke" artists around Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), Erich Heckel (1883-1970), Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884-1976) and Emil Nolde (1867-1956) turned away from academic art, modern dance did the same from classical ballet, in which the body squeezed itself into corset, tutu and pointe shoes and performed unnatural movements: "Where knowledge of things ends, where only experience is law, that is where dance begins. [...] It is not 'feelings' that we dance! They are already much too firmly outlined, too clearly. We dance the changing and shifting of mental states, as they take place in each individual in their own unique way, and in the language of dance become the mirror of the human being, the most immediate symbol of all living beings." 4 This quotation from one of the most important dancers, choreographers and dance educators of her time, Mary Wigman (1886-1973), indicates what will inevitably be associated with modernity from then on: inner expression and the affirmation of one's own existence will become essential and a source of inspiration.
Wigman incorporated the immediacy and free expression of emotions in her expressive dance experiments, which she held with Rudolf von Laban at Monte Verità in Ascona and later developed further in her own dance studios, for example, in Dresden. The expressivity of the body, given shape in dance, was always in the foreground.
Wigman called the twisted, contorted and abrupt movements that seemed diametrically opposed not only to classical ballet but also to the bourgeois ideal of order and unity, an "enchantment through distortion".5 In this and in its overarching goal of depicting individual emotions, the expressionist dance coined by Wigman, also called "free dance", intersected with the then avant-garde art movement of German Expressionism and its representatives around the "Brücke".
Thus, a deeply excited Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) noted in his diary after his visit to Wigman's dance studio in Dresden on January 16, 1926: "The new art is here. M.W. uses many things from the modernist paintings unconsciously, and the creation of a modern concept of beauty is as much at work in her dances as in my paintings. [...] The connection of W.'s endeavor with mine of the representation of modern beauty is undoubted."6 In countless sketches and drawings, Kirchner captured on paper what presented itself to him as a silent observer during the dance rehearsals in the Dresden Residential Palace: the human body in free movement, as "immediate and unadulterated" 7 as the "Brücke" formulated it in its 1906 program for art and as it was danced by Wigman. One of the main works in the exhibition, which Kirchner created on the basis of drawings made on site and which he later painted in Davos, is the brightly colored painting "Totentanz der Mary Wigman" (Dance of Death of Mary Wigman) (1926-28). In alternating colors and forms, Kirchner captures how Wigman reinterprets the folk tale of the dancing dead in the weave-like structure (the so-called "Davos carpet style"; in German: "Davoser Teppichstil") typical of him during this creative period. In the same rhythmizing principle as in the repeating elements of expressionist dance, the synergy between Expressionism and dance becomes impressively visible.
Similar to how the themes of "death" and the "dance of death" reached a peak in the iconography, especially in the 1920s, when the destructive brutality of World War I and the world economic crisis of those years exposed consequences that threatened their very existence, modernist artists also incorporated dance cafés, vaudeville shows, circuses, and cabarets in their works that began to characterize metropolitan nightlife as Europe's metropolises emerged. Similar to Kirchner and his "Brücke" friends, Georg Tappert (1880-1957) worked in Berlin, which became the center of all Expressionist arts before and after World War I and offered an exuberant sense of freedom. In the exhibition work "Mädchen am Tisch (Betty mit Fächer)" (Girl at the Table (Betty with Fan) (1913), Tappert captures his preferred model around 1913, Betty, in the moment of dressing up for her performance on one of the countless dance stages of the pulsating big city. In doing so, he achieves such an intense colorfulness that can only be compared to Kirchner's series of street scenes.
The large-format painting "Älplerkirchweihtanz (Bauerntanz)" (Alp Parish Fair Dance (Peasant Dance)) (1922) by the painter Philipp Bauknecht (1884-1933) offers a completely different testimony to its time and to the representation of dance and music in modernity. In impressive complementary contrasts and in a luminous, seemingly untamed colorfulness, the traditional dance becomes an expressionist celebration, in which the faces of the dancing peasants are distorted and deformed in an almost disturbing manner. The artist is not seeking a genre-like depiction of peasant dance here, but rather portrays the typicality of the figures and the archaic nature of their reality - they are elevated to a „parable of life".
The artistic explorations of dance and music in Expressionism will be juxtaposed in the exhibition with the abstract works of Fritz Winter (1905-1976) and Bernard Schultze (1915-2005). As a student at the Bauhaus under Paul Klee, Winter made his German contribution to the "abstraction creation" of the 1930s in a balancing act between the latter, Naum Gabo, and the large abstracting formats of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner during long stays in Davos. In works such as "Rhythmen I" (Rhythms I) and "Die dunkle Orgel" (The Dark Organ), his investigations regarding musical themes become apparent, which Winter varied in different series of experiments - similar to music. Winter's strict lines, circles and reduced forms against a monochrome background, which resemble notes and sounds translated into art, are contrasted by Bernard Schultze's (1915-2005) organic and colorfully varied paintings. In these, the viewers are drawn into a non-representational world that nevertheless exhibits figurative tendencies - similar to the abstract nature of music, which, however, can also have a fleeting moment of the "tangible" inherent in it, when a particular sequence of notes or sounds can evoke an individual memory, thought, or feeling.
We would like to cordially invite you to trace these special moments in our new exhibition in Riehen "EXPRESSIVE! Music & Dance in Modern Art" and to let your very personal references to the themes of "Music & Dance" come to life. Let yourself be inspired by the various depictions of dancers and musicians captured by the artists of German Expressionism and Abstraction.
Susanne Kirchner and Katharina Sagel (Translated by Uli Nickel)
Press release courtesy Galerie Henze & Ketterer.
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