There were no men who would have presented themselves naked on the stages in the metropolises of the twenties. The only exception, according to the theater scholar Ulrike Traub, was Sebastian Droste, who accompanied dancers as diverse as Anita Berber and Celly de Rheidt. No, it was women, Berbers, de Rheidt, Valeska Gert and others who became famous for taking off their clothes for some or all of their dances and exposing themselves to the gaze of the paying viewer. Describing them as early icons of sexual self-determination and thus to be seen as the predecessors of the dancer and choreographer Florentina Holzinger, whose actresses are currently, a century after the bare-breasted pioneers, lying naked and close to the audience with their legs apart, is the state of the art interpretation.At least that is what the recently published volume “The absolute dance. Dancers of the Weimar Republic ”, edited for the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin by Brygida Ochaim and Julia Wallner, which also includes Traub's essay.
Publicly presented bodies are therefore political bodies: “Bodies that transcend the social and aesthetic boundaries of their time,” as Yvonne Hardt writes in her essay on the expression dancers.
Complete nudity or scarcity, transparency, lightness of the costumes are constitutive for the "absolute dance", an expression coined by Mary Wigman.
Dancing bodies inspired Georg Kolbe
The motif of provocation, the demonstrative liberation from ideas of femininity and beauty, morality and convention, which are perceived as outmoded, is usually in the foreground.
It can have a more erotic and abysmal effect, as in the case of Anita Berber, who perished from her drug addiction, or it can take on aesthetic, almost factual, beauty that objectifies, as in the case of the Amazon-like Claire Bauroff.
The catalog accompanies an exhibition presenting drawings, sculptures, photographs and film excerpts on the traces of the artistic intentions and fates of eleven dancers who inspired the sculptor Georg Kolbe - according to his own statements, he was a "very enthusiastic supporter of the art of dancing, of the dancing body" .
He drew dancers partly from memory after visits to performances or after photographs, as in the case of Vaslav Nijinsky, but he asked Charlotte Bara into his studio to be able to sketch dance poses in peace.
Photographs as documents of the female art of movement
The extremes of the Weimar Republic are also reflected in the positions of the dancers. A time in which Dornier's first seaplane with eight passengers on board takes off and lands safely again, in which Opel drives a rocket-propelled racing car up to 260 kilometers per hour and speeds through a crowd of spectators in which the corset flies into the corner, the hems of clothes and Skirts slide up and women's hair is shortened to chin length, in which people live out their machine-driven speed frenzy and the same greed for speed spreads to all areas of life and arouses the desire for other noises - such a time also brings out the longing for physical self-assurance , Longing for supposed naturalness, enthusiasm for sports, nude body culture, guitar music.Between these extremes of the attitude towards life and the change in life worlds and perspectives, one has to imagine the search for artistic expression.
What exactly it looked like when the dancer Vera Skoronel jumped, recordings with the 35mm camera were able to capture how she landed, you can't see. The documents of modern female movement art are predominantly photographs. All the energy, the flowing or eruptive, the soft, yielding or fast, the brutal of her solo dances or movement choirs can only be guessed at, thought further, imagined.