Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T17:35:46.271Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Green Table–sources of a classic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Marcia B. Siegel
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The Green Table is unique on our stages. In the late 20th century no one is dancing anything quite like it. This is not only because of its age–many ballets are older but look modern. Dancers almost unconsciously speak in the idiom of their time, steadily and imperceptibly polishing the patina off old artifacts to keep them fresh. I think even in well-preserved ballets there is much that is not prescribed, many expressive choices that aren't even acknowledged. When a dancer learns a role, he or she tries to accomodate to the steps, to own them. Most often, the steps end up accomodating to the dancer. They end up looking contemporary, whatever their origin.

The Green Table is an exception. Its production style and its dance idiom are attached to the late-expressionist period, that remote phase of cultural history between the great wars, so earnest in its innocence and anger, its fears and its ironies. Because of his particular method of fitting image to action, Kurt Jooss gave us a document that insists on telling us about its time, even as it reflects into our own.

The goal of expressionistic art, literature, and music was to use emotion and memory as a conduit to more universal feelings. Unlike the Romantics, to whom they were related, the expressionists did not view their art solely as a personal outcry. Expressionism nearly always had a spiritual component. This took the direction not of personal uplift or ecstasy, but of a surge toward the cosmos. Expressionists wanted to know and dramatize their connections with nature, with archeological time, with mystery and magic, and with other human beings living in their own time and place. Early expressionism unleashed a chaotic, anarchic freedom that often looked like madness. After the real trauma of World War I, artists began to draw back from those limitless, destabilized, early visions, into the safety of more rational, formal structures.

Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , Spring 1989 , pp. 15 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 1989

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Benson, Renate, German Expressionist Drama-Ernst Toller and Georg Kaiser. New York: Grove Press, 1984.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bergman, Ingmar, Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman, tr.Malmstrom, Lars and Kushner, David, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960.Google Scholar
Burns, Judy, “The Green Table as a Dance of Death”, unpublished paper given at the CORD conference, Seattle, October 1986.Google Scholar
Coton, A. V., The New Ballet-Kurt Jooss and His Work. London: Dennis Dobson Ltd., 1946.Google Scholar
Gordon, Mel, ed., Expressionist Texts. New York: PAJ Publications, 1986.Google Scholar
Holbein, Hans the Younger, The Dance of Death, 1538. Dover reprint with introduction by Gundersheimer, Werner L., New York, 1971.Google Scholar
Lowry, W. McNeil, “Conversations with Kirstein”, The New Yorker, 15 December 1986, pp. 44–48, 51–52, 56–57, 59–62, 71–74, 76–80.Google Scholar
Manning, Susan, Body Politic: The Dances of Mary Wigman. PhD dissertation Columbia University, 1987. UM1 #88–09388.Google Scholar
Markard, Anna and Hermann, , eds., Jooss. Cologne: Ballett-Bühnen-Verlag, 1985.Google Scholar
Mueller, John, Dance Film Directory. Princeton: Princeton Book Co., 1979.Google Scholar
Patterson, Michael, The Revolution in German Theatre 1900–1933. London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1981.Google Scholar
Ritchie, J.B. and Garten, H.F., eds., Seven Expressionist Plays Kokoschka to Barlach. New York: Riverrun Press, 1983.Google Scholar
Scheyer, Ernst, The Shapes of Space: The Art of Mary Wigman and Oskar Schlemmer. Dance Perspectives #41, Spring 1970.Google Scholar
Siegel, Marcia B., “The Green Table–Movement Masterpiece”, in At the Vanishing Point. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972, pp. 61–65.Google Scholar
Sorell, Walter, ed., The Mary Wigman Book. Middletown Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1975.Google Scholar