Introduction

  Origins

  Dance as Art

  "Epidemie
  des Tanzes"

  Dance
  and Politics

MODERN DANCE IN BERLIN

"Epidemie des Tanzes"

The third page takes you to the heart of "Epidemie des Tanzes" that swept Berlin during the 1920s. While Mary Wigman and her dance troupe was choreographing and performing modern dance on the theater stages, dance was becoming the most popular entertainment in Berlin. Dancers and the images of a ‘revue-girl’ were extremely popular media icons in the mass media throughout the Weimar years, from magazines to cinema screens. This representative of metropolitan entertainment was not associated as serious art, however, was becoming the subjects in the painting for modern male artists. Not surprisingly, the images of Berlin night life that were menacing yet seductive to the eyes of male artist were naturally associated with women, who are equally seductive, immediately bodily and corrupting: prostitutes, cocottes and dancers. Representation of dance and female body in the works of male artists at the time point to the problematic relationship between the gendered narrative of modernism and experience of modernity.

A quote describing the dance craze at the time in Berlin:

"..defeat in the war and subsequently the arrival of hyperinflation left people frantically eager to enjoy life to the full…Culture flourished as never before, while the country tumbled down into the abyss. It was a time of exuberant erotic pleasure, of intellectual fun and games which gave an added zest to plays songs and cabarets…Heaven was not somewhere way up above us, but here on earth, in the German capital: Berlin." (Wolff 1986).

Click to view the following:

• Paintings by Kirchner, Dix, Grosz, etc.: Berlin’s night clubs and brothels were popular themes for the depiction of the metropolis by many artists, film makers and writers during the Weimar Germany.
  
  
• Berlin night-life: pictures of the cabarets and revues
  
  
• The staff of the Berlin magazine, Berliner Illustrierte, held that dance was primarily an erotic pleasure for the spectator, not art and not something for the masses (Fritzsche) . Quotes on the treatment of the Berlin as woman:

"What on earth gives this city its charm! Movement in the first place. There is no city in the world so restless as Berlin. Everything moves….Second to movement comes frankness….Berlin is a girl in a pullover, not much powder on her face, Hoelderlin in her pocket, thighs like those of Atlanta, an undigested education, a heart which is almost too ready to sympathize, and a breadth of view which charms one’s repressions….The maximum irritant for the nerves corrected by the maximum sedative. Berlin stimulates like arsenic, and then when one’s nerves are all ajingle, she comes with her hot milk of human kindness; and in the end, for an hour and a half, one is able, gratefully, to go to sleep", Harold Nicolson, "The Charm of Berlin," Der Querschnitt (May 1929) (originally in English), reprinted in Der Querschnitt: Das Magazin der aktuellen Ewigkeitswerte, 1924 – 1933.

"People discussed Berlin…as if Berlin were a highly desirable woman, whose coldness and capriciousness were widely known; the less chance anyone had to win her, the more they decried her. We called her proud, snobbish, nouveau riche, uncultured, crude. But secretly everyone looked upon her as the goal of their desires. Some saw her as hefty, full-breasted, in lace underwear, others as a mere wisp of a thing, with boyish legs in black silk stockings. The daring saw both aspects, and her very capacity for cruelty made them the more aggressive. All wanted to have her, she enticed all…", Carl Zuckmeyer, Als waer’s ein Stueck von mir (1966), 311-14, reprinted in translation as A part of Myself, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 217.