Emma Lewis Thomas

 
CHOREOGRAPHING BRECHT
 
 
 
 
 
When one mentions Bert Brecht and choreography in the same sentence, most persons think of the one ballet libretto he wrote in 1933, performed the same year in Paris with music by Kurt Weill: Die sieben Todsünden der Kleinbürger. The libretto (Fabel) is brief, presenting a series of scenes chronicling the adventures of two American sisters, poor white women from the South, who tour the U.S. following a strange and geographically illogical itinerary,trying to raise money to send to their poverty-stricken relatives in Louisiana so that they can build a house to live in, literally, put a roof over their heads.
Brecht's description is short and to the point:
 
"Das Ballett soll die Darstellung einer Reise zweier Schwestern aus den Südstaaten sein, die für sich und ihre Familie das Geld zu einem kleinen Haus erwerben wollen. Sie heißen beide Anna. Die eine der beiden Annas ist die Managerin, die andere die Künstlerin; die eine (Anna I) ist die Verkäuferin, die andere (Anna II) die Ware". [Gesammelte Werke 7, Stücke 7, Werkausgabe Edition Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1967, S. 2859]
 
In it, one reads his view of the arts - as entertainment - his view of artists - cogs in the wheels of commerce, in which one is the merchant, the other one the goods - and his view of women - either as madame, selling her sister, or as whore, selling her body. Exploiter and exploited, the spectator is left to decide whether the end ("das kleine Familienhaus") justifies the means - sanctioning espousal of all seven deadly sins. As often, it is Brecht's penchant for questioning accepted bourgeois values, his ironic justapositioning of the family relationship to the issues, and his ability to pose these questions without offering an answer that makes this work intriguing.
 
For the premiere, a young Russian trained dancer, left stranded and jobless in Paris when the untimely death of Sergei Diaghilev necessitated the disbanding of his Ballets Russes, was assigned the choreography. His name: Georges Balanchine.
 
Soon thereafter, Balanchine met the American Lincoln Kirstein, newly graduated from Harvard University, who had come to Paris hoping to suggest an American cure for Nijinsky and seek his talent in establishing a quality ballet company in the United States. Financed by the fortune of William Warburg, Kirstein realized the hopelessness of Nijinsky's mental state, and turned his attention to young Balanchine, whom he recruited for the U.S. dance scene. The rest is history.
 
In this case, Brecht played no choreographic role and in truth, he understood very little about dance in a formal sense. For him dance was either ballet, with its strict rules and highly trained bodies generally associated with opera, or cabaret dance performed in small nightclubs or dance halls. Brecht was comfortable with dancers who used movement as social criticism or with irony, often combined with song. He understood the dance of Anita Berber, with its sexual and drug-induced overtones, as well as the awkward, angular gestures of Lotte Goslar's dance pantomime, one of the truly great cabaret clowns of the Weimar Republic. He was, in fact, a careful observer of human movement, associating gesture and body attitude with feelings, expression, and performance. He enjoyed the movements of boxers, who careful train every step, every punch in a strict training period before a match. He went often to the cinema in the 20s, before sound, where he studied the movements of silent movie stars like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. He was particularly fascinated with comedy, finding its alienating effects useful for his theatrical approach.
 
Along with his keen observations of human nature, Brecht brought these movement studies into his theatrical productions, with particular attention to body posture and scenic rhythm. As director, he used the episodic presentation of disjointed scenes much as one encounters the episodic character of a number of variety acts, thrown together without much thought for continuity, rather organized to attract the spectator's attention, with great rivalry among performers about the spot they occupied on the bill. When one considers his productions of Mutter Courage and Die Mutter, one sees that each scene is a complete drama within itself, easily separated from the rest of the play, designed to illustrate a particular point rather than develop a continuous thread of cause and effect.
 
First, we must acknowledge Brecht's reliance on gesture to create his texts. It is well known that Brecht functioned poorly alone as a writer. He needed an entourage in which to develop his ideas, see them mature, and become texts. With the collaborators listed as co-authors of many of his plays - collaborators who received little, if any compensation for their work - Brecht would have the group act out a scene using no words, only gestures. Only when the movements developed the kernel of the idea, did Brecht begin to set words to the movement text. Later, when working with actors, Brecht continually changed the text in terms of the individual actor who made up the ensemble of that particular production. For this reason, there exist no "definitive" texts of Brecht's work, for it was constantly evolving and changing, according to the production with which he was involved at the time. Leben des Galilei is quite different in the Berliner Ensemble German production, and in the English production developed and re-written by and for Charles Laughton in Los Angeles.
 
In this regard, I agree with my fellow dance historian, Sally Banes, who insits on "...analyzing performances rather than libretti, (to raise) an important metacritical issue. Too much is lost in the gap between performance and plot description. There is an important distinction between critical interpretation of plots (texts) and analyses of performances... (performance is) a live, interpretive art. It is not fixed on the page, nor can all its meanings be accurately conveyed trough verbal means. And bodies can impart different meanings - sometimes diametrically opposed meanings - than words suggest." (S. Banes, Dance Critics Association News, Autumn 1997, p. 14)
 
Much time has been spent in looking at the texts of Brecht; have we really analyzed his performances? In the dialogue of today's criticism, let's look at the relationship of choreographic characteristics to the theater of Bert Brecht.
 
What does choreography mean? It comes from the Greek choros, or group of actor-singer-dancer-performers who participated in Attic theater. In ancient times, the performer did not separate the attributes of speaking from singing and dancing, the participants had to have all these skills in order to perform. The Greek graphos literally means to write, or record. Today, one writes in space, without words. Choreographer, in today's parlance, means one who conceives of the movement of bodies in the stage space, with attention to their use of time, of space, and of force. Rhythm, whether from speech or from process.
 
Brecht's plays abound with scenes where movement subordinates words, or deserts them entirely in order to make a point. In Mutter Courage performance is built on the circle as a never-ending path trod by human beings as they plod through the time given to them on this earth. As the circle contiinues, small vignettes expose the spectators to Brecht's messages. There is the war dance of dem kühnen Eilif, who sings das Lied vom Weib und dem Soldaten, jumping over his sable courageously in a ludicrous situation, watched by the cook, the Feldhauptmann and the Feldprediger, and his mother. There is the ballet of bargaining, when Schweizerkas's life hangs in the balance of meaningless words exchanged, ending in death and wordless rejection of recognition.
 
Three highpoints of the drama of Courage are carried out in wordless gesture: 1) the summoning of help by der stummen Kattrin as she sits on the roof and drums deliberately to warn the village of approaching troops; 2) the wordless cry of Courage as she sinks to her knees, helpless at the death of her child; 3) at the end of the drama, the aimless circling of the bent figure of Courage, strapped alone to her wagon as she continues to complete the circle of life.
 
Brecht's ability to stage elaborate pantomime with his actors is nowhere better illustrated than in Der Kaukasische Kreidekreis. Here, he draws from Asian theater both in the Fabel and in the stylization of the production. Many of the scenes are forerunners to the extremely slow, minimal action seen recently in productions by Robert Wilson. This play is built on the spatial tension created between stage right and stage left, an increasing tension that divides the stage, creating invisible lines extending from the wings that give a careful footprint to the action, very similar to the footprint of a Balanchine choreography. The play concerns the struggle for possession of a child, or even more, the struggle between the nominal aristocratic birth mother and the woman supplying the essential personal needs of the child, the servant girl - today we would call her a "nanny". Three scenes come to mind: the first, an elaborate ritual accompanying the christening of the child. A red carpet is spread between a rather fragile, almost kitschy stage set of a castle, located stage right, extending in a U-shape to the church, and equally flimsy structure located stage left. Helene Weigel appears as the princess, dressed in a stiff brocade gown, wearing a half-mask which, although built on her own face, accentuates the slavic-asiatic highlights of her facial bone structure. On her hands, to each finger is attached a four-inch fingernail that bespeaks her station, and completely precludes any sort of practical work with the hands. Weigel carries the child, accompanied by her consort, and proceeds in a leisurely stroll down the carpet towards the audience, turning to slowly mount the carpet to arrive at in front of the church. One would not be surprised to see this minimal action staged by Wilson today - in the 1950s in Berlin, it was a daring innovation that met with enormous success for Bert Brecht.
 
The further oppositions of the two sides of the stage space are illustrated particularly in the flight of Grusche with the child, over the 'bridge" consisting of two ladders with a rope stretched between them, the formality of Grusche's conversation with her betrothed, bending over a small stream that separates them by more than the pantomimed space. Again, the famous scene at the end, in which the child is literally pulled back and forth between the two women as they oppose each other in a large Kreidekreis drawn by the judge, returns us to the theme of opposition that characterizes this play in performance. Space is all encompassing, space determines the tone, mood, and expression that Brecht achieved in his choreographic direction.
 
Many other scenes come to my mind as I think of the productions that I witnessed as a student in Berlin in the 1950s. Enamoured of his theater, I attended productions many times over, studying the way Brecht the director used space, time, force, and expresion to get across his message. Text was subordinated to his theatrical expertise at that time, and for that reason, I took many friends from West Germany, France, England, and the US to see Brecht's plays. The shock came in 1956. Brecht died, and the theater continued. When I took the first foreign visitors to see the Berliner Ensemble, about 6 months after Brecht's death, I was astonished. It was a production of Mutter Courage, and I was accompanied by a theatre director and a dancer. The evening was listless, long, and barely understandable to my guests. What had happened? I had not had this experience before, even when my visitors did not speak or understand German.
 
With Brecht's death, the choreographic principle had dropped from the repertory. The persons who took over and continued to produce the plays did not have Brecht's sense of timing, space, and how to use energy efficiently. Eilif's dance became ego-centric and precious; Grusche's conversation seemed strained. Even Weigel withdrew, rather than projecting into her roles.
 
I do not wish to denigrate the persons who carried on Brecht's theater after his death; merely to point out his abilities in a choreographic sense to mount productions that had universal appeal. With the new generation of theater practitioners today, there are hopes that Brecht's works may take on new life, if we can agree to look more closely at the meaning of his work in a metacritical sense rather than focussing so closely on the text. Our collective "gaze" will certainly be enriched and we will get beyond Brecht's ideology to find the kernel of his theater.