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3. Picturing Palucca at the Bauhaus
- University of Illinois Press
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3. Picturing Palucca at the Bauhaus Susan Funkenstein Gret Palucca quickly ascended to dance stardom in the 1920s. Born in 1902, Palucca received her dance training at Mary Wigman’s pioneering Dresden studio in the early 1920s and was among the first generation of Wigman students , including Vera Skoronel and Hanya Holm, to go on to innovate in the world of dance.1 Prominent dance critics recognized Palucca’s talent while she was still a student, and in 1925 Palucca left Wigman and opened her own Dresden-based dance studio, rivaling her former mentor for students and fame. Known for her careerist drive, Palucca toured extensively and became one of the most recognized dancers of the mid- and late 1920s. With signature movements of airborne springs, dramatic lunges, and high leg extensions, her rhythmic, geometric, and optimistic dancing style was noted by some critics as a balance of contrasts: strength and softness, pushing out and pulling in, light innocence and seriousness. Youthfully pretty, and regularly featured in books, dance reviews, and women’s magazines, the much-celebrated Palucca was portrayed—and portrayed herself—as an avant-garde performer and a mass-media star. During her career ascent, Palucca positioned herself in close proximity to visual artists, and she especially touted her relationship with artists at the Bauhaus, the innovative school for art and design in Weimar Germany.2 During her visits to the Bauhaus, which began with her first performance there on March 18, 1925, Palucca performed in formal and informal venues, posed for photographs, and socialized with the faculty, such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and László Moholy-Nagy. Equally noteworthy, she partied with the students. Between visits, Palucca corresponded with artists about art acquisitions and assigned her dance pupils to write essays about modern art; in turn, Bauhaus artists visited her in Dresden, met with her after her performances, i-xii_1-284_Mann.indd 45 4/5/12 3:29 PM 46 susan funkenstein and wrote statements about her dancing that were published in her promotional materials. And, they created works of art inspired by those experiences. This Palucca-Bauhaus interdisciplinary engagement was due to Palucca’s strong efforts, but she also chose to interact with an institution that strove to bring the arts together. At its founding, the Bauhaus was modeled after the ideal of the Gothic cathedral, in which artists and craftspeople collaborated to build soaring structures of spiritual and civic pride. Pedagogically, all Bauhaus students took the Preliminary Course and introductory courses in form and color, taught by Josef Albers, Johannes Itten, Kandinsky, Klee, and Moholy-Nagy, and these theoretical and aesthetic principles served as shared foundations for later work in media-specific workshops. The Bauhaus ideal of unity, however, frequently did not correspond to its more fractured reality. Concerned that female students would dominate the institution , Bauhaus masters accepted limited numbers of women into the school and curtailed women’s artistic and design training to those media deemed “decorative,” namely the weaving workshop.3 Officially, the Bauhaus assumed a new aesthetic identity in 1923, in which the emotionalism and trembling lines of expressionism gave way to the hard-edged constructivism captured by the slogan “Art and Technology, a New Unity,” but ongoing infighting regarding this aesthetic shift continued for years. Moreover, the Bauhaus’s already turbulent town-gown relationship and financial state reached a crisis during the mid-1920s, as pressures on both fronts in 1925 forced the closure of the Weimar campus and the institution’s relocation to the city of Dessau. Palucca’s March 1925 premiere in Weimar happened to coincide with this particularly stressful moment. In this context, it is understandable why Klee wrote wistfully of Palucca’s 1925 dance concert that her efforts “brought her that otherwise infrequent unanimous praise from our former Weimar community.”4 How did Palucca manage to receive that elusive “unanimous praise”? And if women were envisioned as a threat to the institution, why was Palucca so popular with both masters and students, male and female alike? Palucca succeeded, I would argue, because of her ability to fulfill a wide range of artistic and personal needs and priorities. Savvy regarding her relationships with these celebrated, promising, and well-connected artists, she presented a clear dancing style, yet did so in a manner that served as conduits and triggers for the Bauhaus artists’ own aesthetic issues, gender concerns, and relationships with modernity. The complexity of her performance of gender, which intersected with the Bauhaus’s contradictory attitudes...