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There was already a bit of concern when the “Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung” summed up in its balance sheet for the cultural output of 1920: “The flood of dancers in Berlin is still swelling.
There are dance performances every night. ”Every night - and in a wide variety of ways.
Because there was the nude dance, the mask dance, the grotesque dance.
There was the exotic, the ecstatic, the sacred and even the socially critical dance.
Yes, at its peak in 1930, Vera Skoronel, the youngest hope of this hippest art movement of the era, who had just created abstract dance, asked in high spirits and, of course, purely rhetorically: "Not dancing - does that even exist?"
The now almost forgotten Vera Skoronel is a good example of how quickly creative and life-hungry young women were able to establish themselves in the avant-garde art scene of the 1920s.
Vera Skoronel, who died in 1932 at the age of 25 after a short illness, not only became co-director of Berthe Trümpy's famous dance school in Berlin at the age of 20.
Awakening the masses
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A short time later she also received a contract at the Volksbühne.
At that time it was the most advanced theater in the capital.
There Vera Skoronel took over the movement direction for her own pieces, but also for those of the so-called workers' speaking choirs.
At that time they represented a new literary genre and had such promising titles as “The Split Man” or “Awakening the Masses”.
Favorite of Berlin dance photography: Claire Bauroff
Source: Georg Kolbe Museum
Awakening the masses is the keyword. Because this very specific form of musicless dance, which today is usually summarized under the rubrum "expressive dance", as it was invented by Mary Wigman and Gret Palucca before the First World War, was not just a rejection of classical action ballet. It acted here is also a very fundamental farewell to bourgeois culture.
Like the Bauhaus in architecture and design, or like the expressionist November group in the visual arts, dance must be regarded as a specific phenomenon of the Weimar Republic.
Only conceivable in the troubled and experimental interwar period.
But the dance also dragged with it a good measure of young people's movement and typically German worldview.
Because he really wanted to liberate, awaken, if not redeem.
Dance as a substitute for religion
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Awakening for what? Well, of course, first and foremost to the awareness of one's own body in its naturalness and in allowing needs. Barefoot dancer Isadora Duncan broke the corset of the dress code before the First World War. What was added after 1918 was the need to merge with other arts and to transfer the old German treatment of art as a substitute for religion into new forms.
Another German cultural phenomenon quickly emerged: the split into high and subculture.
On the one hand, Anita Berber, who was incredibly popular at the time (she even turned into a Rosenthal porcelain figure!) Gave solos called “Morphium” or “Cocain”.
And she tried so intensively to authenticate herself by generously ingesting these same substances that she collapsed on the open stage in her late twenties and died shortly afterwards.
Tatjana Barbakoff dances the Mongolian torch dance.
Photography by Sasha Stone
Source: Georg Kolbe Museum
On the other hand, Charlotte Bara made herself a “Gothic dancer”.
With deliberately slow movements she aimed at the sacred and priestly.
Unlike the Berbers, she did not try to deal with the catastrophe of the world war in debauchery, but rather to come to terms with the immense suffering that the fateful four years had brought to Europe through a new spirituality.
Gestures of pain
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And that did not only appeal to Heinrich Vogeler in Worpswede, who now left Art Nouveau behind and struggled with new forms after 1918.
We owe him a particularly expressive portrait of Bara, which she presents as downright ecstatically fervent.
But even a moderate nature like Georg Kolbe was attracted to Charlotte Bara's gestures of pain.
Georg Kolbe, wooden sculpture "Nun"
Source: Lempertz
His wooden sculpture “Nun” is another striking example of the turning point in the war.
Because this sculpture suddenly shows itself to be fascinated by the covering.
Instead of letting his female figure expand elegantly and naked into the room as it did before the war, Kolbe lets her contract in mourning.
It almost looks like that of the coarse Ernst Barlach.
It is all the more gratifying that Kolbe found his way back to relaxed swing in his watercolor drawings after the dances of the Bara.
With Georg Kolbe we have arrived at the place where the most famous dancers of the Weimar Republic have now gathered again: in Kolbe's studio museum in Berlin's Westend.
There are eleven pieces - perhaps a small bow to the first avant-garde group in Berlin: the exhibition group “Die elf”, which gathered around Max Liebermann in 1892.
The absolute dance
Each of these dancers is different, each one unmistakable, each one drawn into the vortex of that time and often devoured by it early on.
But they all have one thing in common: They take the viewer on a journey to a time that experienced a rare explosion of creativity.
With a stupendous abundance of testimonies, the show “The Absolute Dance” proves that no other branch of art can be understood as a metaphor for the restless agitation of the 1920s as dance.
With the help of films, photos, drawings, paintings and sculptures, the Georg Kolbe Museum also recalls an attitude towards life that seems to be stretched out in a very unique way between a new beginning here, self-waste, self-consumption there.
Valeska Gert, painted by Jeanne Mammen 1928/29
Source: bpk / Berlinische Galerie
The grotesque dancer Valeska Gert, one of the very few who was granted a comeback after the break in civilization, represents the radical side of this attitude towards life.
At the peak of her career she said: “The old world is rotten, it cracks in every joint.
I want to help break it.
I believe in the new life.
I want to help build it up. "
Solidarity with those in need
Jo Mihaly and Tatjana Barbakoff did the same to briefly introduce at least two other dancers.
The former, whose real name was Elfriede Alice Kuhr, had chosen the name of a Roma family as a pseudonym, who gave her the name Jo Mihaly, which means "one of them", out of gratitude for their support.
The Mihaly was serious about her solidarity with the needy.
She lived for a long time without a permanent residence and succeeded with solos called “Revolution” or “Der Arbeiter”, in which she also played men.
Like many of her colleagues, she continued her work in Switzerland after 1933: on Monte Verità.
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Tatjana Barbakoff switched to exploring non-European cultures and experimented with their dance traditions.
It was a grateful object of dance photography at the time, also a new artistic genre that is well documented in the Georg Kolbe Museum.
Anyone who looks at the recordings and sees the Barbakoff performing her exotic-looking movements in fantastic costumes cannot help but get the impression that our contemporaries are at work here.
Here a feminine aesthetic speaks up, self-confident, curious, ready to try it out, which has only fully developed in recent years.
We should take note of this dawn of modernity - and let ourselves be carried away by its verve.
“The absolute dance. Dancers of the Weimar Republic ”, Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin.