This revival has been, justly, highly praised, both as a tour de force of research and as a demonstration of the continuing relevance of the master innovative artists of Modernism. At the same time it is a demonstration of the continued difficulties of accepting at face value the claims made for their works by Modern artists. In Schlemmer’s case the dances do not create “the transcendental on the basis of the rational” he was attempting but rather read as an articulation of what in the ’30s in Germany was called the “J-type personality.” In the postwar period the identification has become the “authoritarian personality,” but previously the traits of this personality were regarded positively: rigidity as strength, intolerance as the unembarrassed result of living according to principle, and inflexibility as the proper alternative to eccentricity. Under the Modernist guise of exploring the tense relationships between organic body and abstract space, between planar primary colors and the three-dimensional effects they can be made to articulate, and between rhythmic movement and controlled placement, a rather regimented, even militaristic view of society is presented. For in the last analysis these works are metaphoric accounts of social relationships and attitudes, leavened now and then with the artist’s own sense of parody.
What we have in Schlemmer’s dances are figures moving like chess pieces in an elaborate but tightly closed system. The closure of the system is constantly brought out more than the possibilities of movement within it, possibilities which themselves are severely limited. To point up Schlemmer’s playfulness, the informative text accompanying the dances carefully distinguishes between his interest in the flexible puppet figure and the general interest at the time in robots (Karel Capek’s play R.U.R. is an uncited good example); but his figures have a mechanical, obedient character, which is brought out by the fact that they are denatured, more specifically desexualized, by the padding and masks which standardize them into universal abstractions. Yet the ominousness of these masks, which convey the same threat of facelessness as the soldiers crucifying Christ in Breugel pictures and shooting the rebels in Goya, restores a historical specificity to the figures. They may have lost their tie to nature, but not that to history, whose orders are no less absolute and deterministic.
There is a certain bleak beauty in these dances. In the untitled first, a kind of demonstration and testing of the grid space, its major boundaries and diagonals are walked by a single figure in white. The three figures in Space Dance, each in a primary color, determinedly synchronize despite their different tempos. In Form Dance I couldn’t help reading two handheld spheres and three poles not as mere props but as orbs and scepters of power. Perhaps my seeing signs of power everywhere is my own pathology, but the sense of watching an honor guard in close, tactically symbolic formation was inescapable. This was the command group of the military parade; there’s nothing more abstract—disciplined—than the military handling of its hardware. Indeed, abstractness here signals both reverential respect for the instruments and signs of power, and submission to them. The tableaux the figures arranged themselves in had a “present arms” dimension; the dances in general seemed to alternate between standing at attention and standing at ease (but still in formation).
Gesture Dance, described as “a nonsensical potpourri of abstract sound and gesture,” is far from that: it is a savage mimicry of bourgeois manners and relations, on the order of Paul Klee’s etching of two men bowing to each other, each thinking the other is of higher rank. (In Schlemmer’s dance, however, the figures are in black tails rather than naked.) The masks, now with the moustaches and eyeglasses that are regulation bourgeois insignia, complete the uniform. But the foolish, helpless humanity of the bourgeois is still revealed by Schlemmer’s little skits, usually demonstrating paranoid, latently hysterical situations. In the Hoop Dance (two of the original four sections were shown) we have what for me was the most socially neutral and elegantly abstract of the dances, yet even here a psychosocial issue was at stake: the figure seemed to be trying to identify itself through its manipulations of the hoops, as though each new positioning hieroglyphically articulated a new possibility of selfhood, soon to be restlessly discarded. Certainly there was an effort to generate viscerality by the interaction of black figure and white hoops, a futile effort that issued only in form, in striking social “postures.” Block Play is more explicitly social again, but also abstractly vivid in the manipulation of blocks whose sides are in the primary colors and their neutralizing antitheses, black, white, and gray. The blocks are finally built into a central tower, which is worshiped by the builders, who, flattened in obeisance before it, back away. Perhaps the visual tour de force is Pole Dance, in which a single figure in black, with 12 poles attached to it, goes through various movements which arrange the poles in a variety of geometrical formats. There is an overall sense of greater harmony and less staccato than in some of the other performances; the rigid figure has learned the abstract rules so well that they give it the advantage of seeming natural.
The generally percussive music adds to the authoritarian aura, which is presented at times ironically, at other times with unwitting straightforwardness. The whole show was academic, yet academic in the very best sense. We are in debt to Debra McCall and everybody else connected with the performance.
—Donald Kuspit
