2008 / 1938 / 1908: A Letter from Vienna
by George Jackson
copyright 2008 by George Jackson
How important is the past for Vienna? For sure, in much of life and work the Viennese look back to take stock of time present. In politics now, they are measuring Joerg Haider – killed when he crashed his car on October 11 and then outed sexually by the NY Times more than by the Austrian press – against populist, far right precedents set by Karl Lueger (1844-1910) and Adolf Hitler (1889-1945). In the economy, the financial market in Vienna tumbled as drastically as elsewhere on Black Friday (October 10), but globally the Viennese were among the most insistent on seeing the crisis in a historical perspective. The cultural event most talked about is an exhibit - the “recollection” of the big 1908 art extravaganza here that officially recognized modernism. Dance, though, doesn’t often look back in this city. Most of the local presenters pander to fads of the moment or a moment ago – the acrobatic “Swan Lake” from China, Blue Man Group, Austrian ballroom finalists, Georgio Madia’s nightclub routines for the otherwise refined Rameau productions of the Vienna Chamber Opera, and Gyula Harangozo II’s middle brow repertory and policy of no permanent stars at the Ballet of the Staatsoper/Volksoper. The exception was Andrea Amort’s “political” dance festival – Touchings (Beruehrungen) - which examined choreography from prior to Austria’s 1938 annexation by Nazi Germany and commented on it with work made today.
The 1908 art exhibit had 176 participants, 65 of them women. A temporary structure was built to house the show. Nicknamed the “Clapboard Palace”, it was made mostly of wood but featured skylights and windows that allowed much natural illumination into its 54 display rooms. The light made those rooms extremely hot, but there were also unroofed courtyards, surrounding gardens with an open air theater and a café which did have electricity. The idea was to celebrate Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef’s 60 years on the throne of Austria-Hungary. The emperor sanctioned the large outlay of state funds required, but did not visit the exhibit – he was quite elderly and perhaps wary of entering this notorious heat trap. Gustav Klimt was the exhibit’s key instigator. Other participating artists and architects who were or would be famous included Oskar Kokoschka, Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser, Carl Moll and Frank Kupka. Two of the Sisters Wiesenthal, Grete and Else, showed their art nouveau dancing in the garden theater after they had quit the Vienna Court Opera Ballet. The exhibit’s current version, although much smaller than the original, is still impressive. Several of the “forgotten” 1908 artists – Broncia Koller-Pinell, Adolf Hoelzel, Bertold Loeffler, Maximilian Kurzweil - are being rediscovered. Moreover, some Viennese now wonder whether this art event from a hundred years ago could be used to make a case for rule by enlightened royalty.
Expression – to press out, to contract the body and force interior feelings into the open as if purging constipated bowels or laboring to give birth – is the stereotypic notion of Ausdruckstanz, the name Central Europeans prefer to use for their modern dance between World Wars 1 and 2. Expressionist dance, as it is called in English, also has other guises and can look impressionist, constructivist or primitive, but still the Ausdruckstanz name sticks. I half understand why: even in semiclassical work of that period and place, a dynamic functions from within the body to its surface and then into space. It is one directional compared to the more balanced vectors in fullblown classicism. Expressionist dance of the explosive sort is necessarily brief. Gertrud Bodenwieser’s 1936 “Terror” lasts mere minutes. It shows a male zombie figure marching in an ever tighter path around a trapped family. This was expressionism as strong, stark and strange as plastic artist Edvard Munch’s “Scream”. Indifferently performed or insensitively set, the Bodenwieser might have been trite. It wasn’t. Harmen Tromp, who staged it, knows the difference between extreme and excess. Rose Breuss, whose new “Whisper Vault (Fluestergewoelbe)” followed immediately after, went to the other extreme – retention of feeling, insinuation. The subtle abstract expressionism of Breuss’s female trio was the perfect foil for "Terror”.
Longer by a little, lasting the duration of Rachmaninoff’s piano “Prelude – Op. 23, No. 5” when played presto, is Andrei Jerschik’s 1929 “Madman (Mensch im Wahn)” solo. An entire catalogue of madness states is traversed. The Jerschik/Rachmaninoff was set within a larger work, “Now Your Turn” and served as point of departure. Immediately after it, we saw soloist Petr Ochvat rehearsing the Jerschik movement, taking breaks from it and returning to it repeatedly. He worked in the presence of two other men – Tromp, who had set “Madman” and Georg Blaschke who was in charge overall. They did not comment but sat and watched like hawks. The solo is exhausting and when Ochvat could no longer continue, the lights dimmed for a film – Tromp working with Blaschke on “Madman” and finally the late Jerschik as an old man teaching it to a young Tromp. Contained in what was basically one dance were result, process, tradition and more - because Jerschik’s look at the madman is quite clearly a denunciation of dictatorship. Preceding the Jerschik-Blaschke construct was “Ionisation”, a male solo by Liz King. It, too, could be seen as balancing expressionism of the explosive sort with something intimate and abstract.
Rosalia Chladek’s 1936 “Lamentation (Totengeleite)” ought to be seen next to Martha Graham’s 1930 “Lamentation”. I doubt that Chladek knew of the Graham. Her female soloist is stoic in her sorrow. She wears a multifold robe and has been compared to a caryatid – one who stands firmly and strides uprightly despite the great weight she bears. Chladek’s expressionism approaches classicism.
Not mourning, but going into the darkness of death with eyes both closed and open is the focus of Grete Wiesenthal’s 1933 “Death and the Maiden”. In the foreground is the Maiden, and Esther Koller’s realization of the role was as finely nuanced as the accompanying Franz Schubert music. Long ago I saw a film of Wiesenthal herself dancing this, but I prefer Koller’s less stylized experience of wonder, denial, fear and submission.
Of the festival’s 7 different programs, 6 were given three times and one just once. The performances were spread out during the month of October 2008 and took place at Vienna’s Odeon – the partly transformed, partly unrestored but still grandiose former Stock Exchange. I saw 4 of the programs and also attended other types of festival sessions - a class, a rehearsal, film showings and lectures* - that were held in other venues. The class, my first festival session, was given by New Zealand’s Shona Dunlop who had danced for Bodenwieser (Vienna, 1890 – Sidney, 1959) and was remembering a typical lesson for us.
At the start of the class, there was ballet of a very standard sort – plies at the barre, battements, developpes, releves and balances but also some slides. The young dancers (pupils at the Conservatory Vienna University) stood straight, were streamlined and probably more classically correct than Bodenwieser’s pupils and company had been. Dunlop had mentioned doing curtseys and bows to the teacher, yet decided that would be too much history. When the movement began to diverge more from the balletic norm it was for jumps up from squatting and arm wriggling over the back also done in a squat. High leg extensions came next – a return to ballet except they were supposed to be very emphatic, daring. Then something waltzy – leg swings while leaning backwards and forwards. The pupils did these much too stiffly and Dunlop (now in her 80s) turned to a dancer she had brought along to demonstrate – Bronwyn Judge, a fiery cannonball compared to the elongate, cool Viennese students. The variety of accentuations with which Judge endowed the body and leg swings was astonishing.
A difficult combination was advancing frontally from the floor’s center to the barre, jumping at it to catch hold with both hands, kneeling and bending back. Then came pairs work – weaving in and out about a shared axis and spinning around a fulcrum. Dunlop inserted individual jumps into these twinnings, expressionist jumps with arms crossed, also spins simple and helical. Stretches started gently and even their collapses were buoyed by strong exhalation and a forward move. Then stretching became sterner. Runs were to be done very stretched and ended with a forward collapse or emphatic throw back of the torso. “Know why you do it” Dunlop demanded.
Sitting on the floor, the pairs tried handholds and sit-ups (“raise your shoulders before your head”) and rapid scissoring of the legs and arms. Standing, there was waltz movement done basically at first but gradually more seductively. Last, the class had to improvise using such notions as rage and conflict while employing not mime but bravura (jumps to the side or tricky folk steps such as the kasatzski). Throughout, the most difficult things for this class of not unrepresentative students were nuance, pause and inflection – or that in the downswing of a waltz phrase one shouldn’t just relax but swoon. It seems to me that contemporary ballet instruction could profit from the doubles and floor work of Dunlop’s Bodenwieser class.
Two of my festival programs – the evening for Grete Wiesenthal (1885-1970) and “Wallfrau” dedicated to Margarete Wallmann (1901-1992) – were monodramas (despite supporting casts). The Wiesenthal, directed by Fanny Brunner, tried to revive both the woman and her work whereas Renato Zanella’s “Wallfrau” (it should not be translated as “Wallwoman” or even as “Woman on the Ramparts” because “Wall” has too many other connotations in German) is about Wallmann as a being.
A triple bill of Wallmann works I saw danced by the Vienna Staatsoper Ballett at the 1954 Salzburg Festival gave me the impression that she was a director shaping the contours of movement and not a choreographer who relished the process of making steps dance. Ballerina emerita Irina Borowska, attending several of this festival’s sessions, confirmed that. Wallmann had come to ballet from Ausdruckstanz (she was a Mary Wigman pupil) and the classical vocabulary never became second nature to her. Borowska had worked for Wallmann at Teatro Colon during World War 2 and said that she would ask the ballet dancers for steps that fit her ideas but that she did have her own “ideas” and also was a handsome, impressive woman. The direction, choreography and stage design by Zanella for “Wallfrau” plus Andrea Amort’s text (from Wallmann’s autobiography) and their star – Jolantha Seyfried – gave us a strong, three dimensional character. Seyfried was perhaps too strong on opening night, relaxing not one instant. Subsequently she reveled more in Wallmann’s skin. What Zanella asks of her is not so much mime or full dance as behavior. Seyfried (a former ballerina of the Vienna ballet and current director of its school) moves in this role as only a finely trained dancer can. The constant tensions between daring and nerves, between dignity and passion, keep us on edge for an hour and conjure an unforgettable individual.
Wiesenthal emerges feistier than Wallmann, less concerned with her public image than with her own feelings and thoughts. Julia Grumeth, an actress who moves vividly but isn’t a dancer down to her bones, was Grete Wiesenthal and delivered the almost hour long monologue drawn from the subject’s writings and the “Strange Girl (Das fremde Maedchen)” pantomime scenario that poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote for Wiesenthal in 1911. The monologue tells of the dancer’s path from 19th Century ballet and womanhood to 20th Century modern dance and artistry, as well as of her reaction to a totalitarian state. Grumeth gave a virtuoso performance but there was interference from an amplification echo on the first night. Even subsequently I missed not having a printed text available. Inserted into the action were 4 of Wiesenthal’s short dances – the 1922 waltz “Wine, Women and Song”, the 1939 waltz “Roses from the South”, the percussive 1930 “Winetreader Dance” and the aforementioned lyric-dramatic “Death and the Maiden”. The program opened with Rose Breuss’s trio “Spheroid”, which I think showed three of the Sisters Wiesenthal – Grete, Else and Berta - at work.
The program given just once was a benefit-gala for Wera Goldman, past her mid-80s but still dancing and a teller of epic tales. She started in ballet and Ausdruckstanz in Vienna in the 1920s, now lives in Tel Aviv but has also resided in India, Southeast Asia and Australia. Goldman defines her own dancing as a direct translation of emotional impulses into personal, experienced movement. This program’s highlights were the already mentioned Chladek “Lamentation” which Eva Selzer danced with fine control and Goldman’s “Sarah in her Tent” with Martina Haager as a rejuvenated Sarah whose musings flow like a smooth, deep, richly shaded stream. Bernd Bienert, choreographer, was the evening’s moderator and Goldman was awarded a City of Vienna medal of honor.
Among the film and lecture events, Gaby Aldor presented gems from her own experience (she directs the Arab-Hebrew Theater of Jaffa) and that of the dancing women of her family – Magalit, Judith and Susan Ohrenstein - who studied Ausdruckstanz with Gertrud Kraus (1901-1977) both during Kraus’ early days in Vienna and then in Tel Aviv. Kraus appears just moments in one of the films but is eye-catching. Pressing out feelings and launching them into space can be imitated but to be convincing the act must be lived.
To be continued soon: a bit more about “Touchings” but mostly about October ballet in Vienna.
*Disclosure: I gave one of the festival’s lectures.
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