Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1106111251490.19567@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Valeska Gert
Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2011 12:59:31 -0400 (EDT)
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