The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

The movements and the sounds both find their impulse in the center of the
organism and have to be projected at the same time. I invented sound
dances, unity of sound and movement. Again this kind of concentration has
been adapted and misunderstood by other dancers. They accompany their
dances with recitations. That is duality, not unity.... Sounds give birth
to words. If grown out of the same dance impulse, words can skip, jump and
balance, glittering like bright colors. I dance words.

- Valeska Gert

Since I didn't like the bourgeois, I danced those people dismissed by
them, whores, procuresses, cast-offs, those who had slipped.... It
was from the beginning to the state of being "broken." In the beginning,
energy and youth, and then more and more "kaputt."

- Valeska Gert

I don't want to have anything to do with art.... Maybe I'm just nothing
but a chambermaid. Could be. I only want to be loved on stage; in real
life I don't care much.... I'm basically nothing more than just a child
of the masses.

- Valeska Gert

I probably came close.... One night I realized I am a mortal who will
die.... It suddenly dawned on me: Eternity. That I will be gone for all
eternity, and the very thought of eternity almost drove me crazy.

- Valeska Gert

The critics write I'm sparkling as champagne, fresh as a forest, clear
as glass, poisonous as a toadstool and I rush to their head like heavy
wine. I remind them of Rodin, Barlach, George Grosz, Baldung Grien,
Toulouse-Lautrec, Daumier, Pascin, Felicien Rops, Thackeray, Balzac
and Goya. They find me grotesque, bizarre, tragic, comic, vicious,
classic, gothic, expressionistic, surrealistic, dadaistic, baroque. Ivy
Litvinoff, the wife of the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, wrote
that my dances are so primeval that they have the effect of the most
extravagant Modern Art.

- Valeska Gert

My movements are sleek and voluptuous. My white face is almost entirely 
covered by strands of black hair falling over my forehead. I bow my head 
deeply; my chin disappears up to the garish red mouth in a red collar 
which hangs loosely around my neck. Then I bend my knees slowly, spread my 
legs wide and sink down. In a sudden spasm, as if bit by a tarantula, I 
twitch upwards. I sway back and forth. Then my body relaxes, the spasm 
dissipates, the jerking becomes ever feebler, the intervals longer, the 
excitement ebbs away, one last twitch, and I'm down to earth again. What's 
been happening to me? I've been exploited. My body's been abused because I 
need money. Wretched world! I spit one disdainful step to the right and 
one to the left; then I shuffle off.

- Valeska Gert