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What do you think of my protector?
A picture book with documents of the Derra de Moroda Dance Archives
Around 1726, a certain T. de Mare engraved this coversheet of a series of etchings visualizing in the medium of the image the principal subjects of Molière’s comedies. The parquet of the theater, the boxes are completely packed, the curtain isn’t drawn yet. Two monumental candleholders are still standing on the stage floor. And suddenly: a head and two legs appear from behind the curtains. Soon, the performance can begin! Or, better yet: our (in a multiple literal sense) contemporary conception of displaced bodies of dance…
Apropos Curtains
It is only later in time that curtains frame the high culture dance theater-stage. The dance theater-stage begins its existence only in the second half of the 17th Century. Before, aristocrats themselves danced in courtly staging. In the course of theatralization, of institutionalization and professionalization of dance, around 1700, the rule in dance is also: curtains up! Programmatic concepts and divertissements are developed for the audience, perceptions of body and of dance start to change. Also in folk culture, especially on the fair, the curtains constitute a theatrical instrument.
Apropos Molière
From the 1660ies on until 1670, a regularly recurring cooperation between the choreographer Pierre Beauchamp, the composer Jean Baptiste Lully, and the dramatist Molière is documented. While composition (Lully) and text (Molière) are still rather perceived together in the historiographic re-construction of the Comèdie-Ballets genre – as for example Les Facheux, Le Marriage Forcé or Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme – in research, choreographic and staging practices as well as the performative dynamic of ballet escape re-view. The experimental genre of the Comèdie-Ballets with its structure of interludes allows of the formats of comedy and of ballet to partially oscillate, to partially stand next to each other.[1]
This picture book desires to experimentally and playfully show three dance-historiographical concepts of the ‘displaced/dissembled body’. It is about a display of historical material and diversifies three perspectives on the ‘displaced/dissembled body’. Firstly, the displacement of the body in space; secondly, the arrangement of bodies via movements, gestures, objects, and thirdly, the utopia of the undisplaced body. These are associatively selected and commented snap-shots from the history of dance based on material of the Derra de Moroda Dance Archives.
The images are neither reproductions and illustrations of a dance performed at a certain time, nor unqualified appearance, chimera, vision.[2] They try to re/construct, with different instruments (pen, graver, printing plate, paper), a theatrical presence, which was assumed or experienced ‘elsewhere’. According to our thesis, these documents do not only produce iconic but also kinetic perceptions of body and performances, and they archive diverse historic concepts of ‘displaced/dissembled bodies’.
Symmetry and Body Mechanics
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| Quarta Scena di Mare from: Le Nozze degli Dei [Favola in musica by Marco da Gagliano], etching by Stefano della Bella based on Alfonso Parigi, Florence 1637. |
The fourth stage setting from Le Nozze degli Dei (debut performance 8 July 1637, Florence) draws the observer into a bizarre waterside landscape, whose composition follows strict regimentations. The staggered stage constructions produce, as well as the picture composition, an illusion of a centered-perspective view. Arranged according to geometrical principles, all lines aim towards a vanishing point and regulate the view of the observer. All stage elements – dancers’ bodies, sets, flying machines, props – are positioned and staged within the stage architecture in order to produce this perspective. Even the jumps, steps, and positions in the front of the stage border, which are catered to the frontal and to the horizontal, follow the mathematical principle of the symmetrical composition. These (dis-)placements favor the concept of the mechanized body.
Arabesque
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| Scene aus dem Kobold, Feenballet in zwei Abtheilungen und fünf Tableaux von Hrn. J. Perrot, costume=image fort he theatre magazine no. 57, colored copper engraving by Andreas Geiger based on Johann Christian Schoeller, Vienna 1838. |
Scene aus dem Kobold, Feenballet in zwei Abtheilungen und fünf Tableaux von Hrn. J. Perrot from 1838. An idyllic setting: an old woman at the spinning-wheel, a young girl is sitting by her side. In the background: mountains, a rural house, a well. Extraordinary about this costume image is the male-role figure, which hits the eye right away. A goblin, a male dancer with a short red dress, blue butterfly-wings and a golden hairband, balances on his tip on a turning wheel. It is self-evident that this image serves the condensing of the role figure of the goblin, the over increase of his vocabulary of movement. However, this costume image archives 19th Century perceptions of body, space, and dynamics. In romantic ballet, highly specialized and trained bodies arrange spaces through the application of virtuosic dance technique and acrobatic inserts. The arabesque performed here stands for the striving and expansion of the body into space. The corporal space becomes more important than the architecture of the theatre stage, where the bodies were placed and staged during Baroque.
En Travestie
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| What do you think of my Protector, Captain Maria?, from: Alfred Crowquill’s Sketches from Jullien’s Bal Masque, colored lithography by Alfred Crowquill, London [184?]. |
What do you think of my Protector, Captain Maria? The caption of the colored lithography by Alfred Cromquill comments the scenery of a masked ball in London. ‘En travestie’ is very a la mode during the 1830ies and the 1840ies. Heterogeneous images and imaginations of the feminine are very frequent and an integrative component of dance-theater practice. The metamorphosis from virtuous ballerina to an epee-swinging officer-in-training is a spectacular aspect of the staging of romantic ballet (as for example in Le Diable Boiteux). The non-gendered dance technique and the playful breakup of the radical gender difference refer to hybrid, mobile conceptions of femininity on the stages during the first half of the 19th Century.[3]
Group, Mask, Back
Three aspects of choreography from around 1910/14, hence from the times of the Ballets Russes, are archived in Ernst Opplers sketches. [4]
Group
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| Corps de Ballet, etching by Ernst Oppler, [Berlin, around 1910/14]. |
The arrangement of the dance group is a choreographic handcraft, which is still often applied at the beginning of the 20th Century. The sculptural dance figurations are arranged in a less monumental manner – they are placed, displaced as the Corps de Ballets in the second half of the 19th Century. Oppler’s sketch corresponds with the choreographic procedure of 1910. The bodies form two swinging lines; the movements are contoured and dissolve into the background. The rhythmization of the Corps is transferred in the image.
Mask
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| Karneval IV, Karsawina und Nijinsky, etching by Ernst Oppler, [Berlin, around 1910/14]. |
Since 1907, the Russian choreographer, Michel Fokine, defined the aesthetics of the performances of the Ballets Russes, among others, through his archaizing style. The mask is the essential element in the staging of the Ballets Russes – it types the body and displaces its individual features. In Oppler’s sketch Nijinsky dances with Karsawina in Karneval IV. The emphasis of the physical and energetic dimensions in theatrical dance around 1910 is archived, in the image, especially in Nijinsky’s posture. The activation of the leg and arm gestures through the dominant emphasis of action of the lower legs and forearms is explicitly articulated.
The alignments of the upper body, the lower body, and the head vary 90 degrees caused by the rotation of the waist and head demonstratively producing body fronts. The additional contraction of the upper demands a higher degree of technical capability.
Back
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| Karsavina in Polka III, etching by Ernst Oppler [around 1910/14]. |
The en-face-principle (with exceptions) applies to theatrical dance from the 17th until late into the 19th Century. The body front of the dancer directs itself towards the audience. At the beginning of the 20th Century, not only radical space stage concepts are being developed but also the repertoire of movement and the spatial alignments of the dancing body expand themselves. At the same time, the back view of the dancer Karsawina tiptoeing documents dance technological lore, new body images and displacements.
The Energetic Pose
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| Isadora Duncan [sheet 22] from: XXX Dessins. Nus, Isadora Duncan, Ida Rubinstein, Boxeurs by André Dunoyer de Segonzac, Paris 1913. |
The tender, flowing lines, with which the French painter André Dunoyer de Segonzac (1884-1974) tries to transfer Isadora Duncan’s dance into the picture imparts an idea of the sensual, erotic aspects of her personal expression in dance. Especially the gestures of the upper body, the head and arms behold a sensualized kinetic quality, which releases itself pictorially and energetically from its role models. The sensual-energetic ‘pose’ refers to Duncan’s concept of the isolation of single sections of the body. However, while still consciously constituting the entire body and experimenting with gravity. A sensual atmosphere is supposed to be created by presentation of a sculpturally formed and, according to their understanding, ‘undisplaced’ body.[5]
Silhouettes
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| Fritzi von Derra as a ‘silhouette dancer’ in Vienna, 1912. |
The dancer, choreographer, pedagogue, dance critic, and researcher Friderica Derra de Moroda archived the manifold cultures of knowledge of dance from the Renaissance until far into the 20th Century. Popular, entertaining arts, and dance-theatrical high culture represent neighboring equal partners within her collection. Her silhouette contours the corpus of the archives, which is not composed solely of books. The image archives of the Derra de Moroda Dance Archives until now have been neglected as a reservoir for dance research.[6] Images are like writings on dance archives for movements. Through our contemporary view we re/construct choreographic, dance technical and imaginary displacements of the body. We hope that sparks of the auratic and energetic presence of the visualized and commented displaced dance bodies will ignite on the rubbing surface between documentation and fiction, between the historical and the present.
Imprint
Concept: Nicole Haitzinger
Realization and content: Nicole Haitzinger and Christiane Karl
Digitalization: Barbara Romankiewicz
Thanks to: Derra de Moroda Dance Archives / Gunhild Oberzaucher-Schüller
All images and usage rights: Derra de Moroda Dance Archives
1 Compare with Nicole Haitzinger, Vergessene Traktate, Archive der Erinnerung, dissertation, Vienna, 2004.
2 Concerning the following theses compare with: Nicole Haitzinger, Von der Aufführung zur medialen Re/Konstruktion, Bild, Schrift und Körperlichkeit als Konstituenten des Medien-Tanz-Archivs am Beispiel des Rosafarbenen Pas de Deux (1973), in: Gunhild Oberzaucher-Schüller (publ.), Taglioni-Materialien. (in print).
3 Compare with Nicole Haitzinger, Frauen als andere Fremde auf der Bühne, in: Gunhild Oberzaucher-Schüller, Souvenirs de Taglioni. (in print).
4 Around 1910/14, Ernst Oppler etched mainly Ballets Russes. By using the invention of a specially lighted drawingpen he outlined impressions of movements directly inside the darkened theater room.
5 Compare also with Claudia Jeschke, Neuerungen der performativen Technik um 1900, Eleonora Duse and Isadora Duncan, in: Tanzdrama 48, 4/1999, 6-10.
6 Compare with Gunhild Oberzaucher-Schüller, Eine Kunst, für den Augenblick allein? Das Bildarchiv der Derra de Moroda Dance Archives, in: Der Tanz – ein Leben, In Memoria Friderica Derra de Moroda, Sibylle Dahms and Stephanie Schroedter (publ.), Salzburg, 1997, 180-197 and Claudia Jeschke, Von der Körperlichkeit der Bücher und Bilder, ibid., 156-160.
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