On the History of Normalcy: Oskar Sclemmer & Dance, 1927

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 876 

Jean Bouillard (the famous physician), Joseph de Lalande (astronomer and director of the Paris Observatory), the Paris Academy of Sciences, the French Academy of Sciences, Jacques Babinet, and the University of Bologna are examples of people and entities sharing something fantastically uncomfortable—they all ridiculed the initial presentations of what would become some of the most magnificent achievements of the last 500 years.  Bouillard incredibly and improbably insisted that Edison’s phonograph was impossible and a hoax, Lalande thought it utterly impossible to fly, the Paris Academy found it absurd that steam could be applied to locomotion, the French Academy rejected Lavoisier’s findings that meteorites do indeed come from space, and the great Bologna spat on the idea of Galvani’s researches. So it goes.  There are thousands and thousands of cases like these.  Jenner, Semmelweis, Galileo, Harvey, Copernicus—all produced monumental achievements, and all faced incredible scorn and rebuke. Some had it even worse than this: Dante, Marco Polo, Walter Raleigh, Cervantes, Cellini, Voltaire, Pushkin, Turgenyev, Dostoyevsky, Baudilaire, Verlaine, Machiavelli, and etc.(and Galileo) not only found vast rejection, but were also imprisoned. (Some actually produced works in prison that would also be rejected: Raleigh wrote his history of the world in the White Tower, Pushkin, Eugene Onyegin; Marco Polo, his travels.  Plato of course was also sold as a slave.) This list in general could go on and on--an encyclopedia of mistaken thought and stubbornness could easily be produced from centuries of thought like this, thinking that went outside the boundaries of “normalcy”. 

 

The funny thing about “normalcy” is that all it seems to measure is the time it takes to move from one state of “normalcy” to the next.  People should know better than to expect that there should be no periods of extended non-change.

It is interesting to think about how new ideas like these are perceived.  I came to think about this searching for a picture of the wire costume for the black series in Oskar Schelmmer’s (1888-1943, designer, artist, dancer and by 1923 the Master of Form at the Bauhaus) Triadic Ballet ("Triadisches Ballett”)¹ of 1927. Better than a still, I actually found clips of the dance on youtube, which just floors me.

I imagine that Schlemmer didn’t find a very happy reception to his dance and costumes.  He was outside the sphere of even those re-inventing dance in Germany in the early 1920’s.  His concept of movement, among other things, differed from those of the other pioneers of this period, people like Mary Wigman, Francois Delsarte, Emile Jacques-Dalcroze and Rudolf von Laban—his inspiration came not from the center of the dancer’s experience, but from the costume itself, “which eliminates the torso” and “which the dancers measure out rather than feel out or explore”². 

It is phenomenal to me to see these changes in dance in such a short time, and how much of this movement would have been nearly impossible to conceive as an art form only a decade or so earlier. Except to the minority of people like Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis, who had already rejected the restricting forms of classical ballet—the work of Schlemmer must’ve felt like a lightning strike.

 

1. See this on Musikperformance.

2..From Germany in the Twenties, the artist as Social Critic, a Collection of Essays, 1980, pg. 91.

Comments

[Ray Girvan]

Mind you, ballet always has been astonishingly conservative. With "The Rite of Spring" people were as much horrified by the strange footwork as by the music and pagan/erotic content, and Vaughan Williams went through immense hassle to make sure that "Job: A Masque for Dancing" wasn't danced on points.

As to the main point, it's a pity that the reality of brilliant, and later validated, ideas being rejected so easily leads to the fallacious position - adopted by every paranoid twit with a quack theory - that rejection is a proof of brilliance and future validation.

[Jeff]

Thanks. I shall include this post with my next application to the Patent Office for one of my perpetual motion machines. It just infuriates me that they're so short-sighted and pig-headed. I don't know what that Ray guy is talking about.

[John Ptak]

RAY: Sometimes its just hard to see the future, even when its right there in front of you. SO far as paranoid twit quack theorists go, well, I think they're into it for the (1) the rejection, or (2) the comraderie of the League of the Rejected, or (3) the possibility for landing their own late-night am talk show.

JEFF: please be advised I charge 10 cents for each time this post is used at the Patent/Trademark Office. Just tape the dime > and send it along as necessary.

[Alejandra]

Hi. I find your blog very interesting. I've researching Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet for a while and I totally agree with your post. But I want you to know that the videoclips you found in Youtube are NOT from 1927. They belong to a reconstruction realized in 1970 by Margarete Hastings; Schlemmer was already dead. If you want to see a clip from the original Triadic Ballet, filmed in the 30's, you can see it here: http://triadicos.wordpress.com/la-pelicula-original-2/
They are only a few seconds, taken from a documentary on German dance.