15 - Performance: Machine Dances and the Avant-garde’s Technological Imaginary

Summary

‘ Not against technology, but with it!’ (Blume 2008: 51): László Moholy-Nagy’s motto for the Bauhaus theatre workshop during the 1920s resonates with the proliferation of ideas about mechanised performance that swept across avant-garde movements in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War. The emergence of a machine art shaped by industrial modes of production and technologies of image, sound and light is illustrated in the architectural plans for total, mechanical or spherical theatres drawn by Walter Gropius and his Bauhaus pupils; in theories of movement, such as Rudolf Laban’s eukinetics and Vsevolod Meyerhold’s biomechanics; in Constructivist acting machines and in contraptions such as Luigi Russolo’s experimental noise intoners and Moholy-Nagy’s Light-Space Modulator; and in Dadaist affirmations such as Kurt Schwitters’s ‘Rrrrummmm!!!!’ and Tristan Tzara’s ‘Boum boum boum’ (Schwitters 1993: 60; Gordon 1987: 38). To artists associated with the Dadaist, Futurist, Constructivist, De Stijl and Bauhaus movements, the machine – always a nebulous notion – offered a convenient shorthand for modernity as a whole, enabling imaginative metaphor and imitation, as well as new explorations of form and content that conveyed varying sensibilities to war and its legacies, to urbanisation and industrialisation, to theories of progress and to art’s changed purpose (see Salter 2010; Vaingurt 2013; Ovadija 2013; Broeckmann 2016). ‘The machine has become more than a mere adjunct to life. It is really part of human life – perhaps the very soul,’ Francis Picabia observed in 1915 (‘French Artists’ 1915: 2). Not everyone shared Picabia’s enthusiasm. Some wondered where the reign of the machine would take humanity. For Hugo Ball, notably, the ‘crass error’ of war was all too easy to understand: ‘We have confused men with machines. We should be decimating machines instead of people’ (qtd in Fijalkowski 1987: 235).

In the wake of the First World War, and throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, performance provided a focus and a channel for modernism’s varied and discordant technological enthusiasms, and avant-garde artists who had little or no experience of the stage came to perceive the theatre, in particular, as the ideal outlet for creative energies that had nowhere else to go, as El Lissitzky observed of his painter colleagues (Drain 1995: 40).