Inside the world of Valeska Gert
CHOREOGRAPHER TAKES ON PIONEERING PERFORMANCE ARTIST
Choreographer Annie Arnoult loves difficult people.
At least as material for her Open Dance Company’s projects.
After immersing Houston audiences last year in the world of American folk singer Woody Guthrie with the compelling “’Bout a Stranger,” she takes on a doozy of a historical character with “Dada Gert,” a larger production that premieres Friday.
Arnoult has devoted a decade, on and off, to exploring the life and work of Valeska Gert, a pioneering and controversial Jewish-German performance artist who filled cabarets during Berlin’s Weimar era, struggled to survive after the Nazis banned her from Germany, made a slight comeback as a film actress in the 1960s (with Frederico Fellini) and very late in life became a muse for the Punk movement.
Haven’t heard of Gert? Not surprising: Although her life is well documented in several memoirs and some of her performances were captured on film, Gert was largely forgotten until recently. Google her now, and thousands of links pop up, including some wildly gestural videos, but that wasn’t the case 10 years ago.
Arnoult fell in love with Gert’s 1920s and ’30s performance art during graduate school and planned to write a dissertation about it but eventually became “a Ph.D dropout,” she said. “Really, I’m a maker. I didn’t want to take six years away from that.”
She instead created a solo work that evolved into a dance for seven performers in Chicago. Expanding “Dada Gert” for her current company of 12 dancers has been on Arnoult’s to-do list ever since she returned to Houston in 2015.
Gert’s bizarre performance art makes Guthrie’s folk-singing narrative sound simple. No single word or phrase seems sufficient to describe it: A fearless social satirist known for “grotesque pantomime,” she was a dancer who sometimes barely moved and at other times went full-on spastic, employing every inch of her face and body to portray disturbing characters who could be people or inanimate objects and states of being.
Arnoult herself takes on Gert’s alter ego of the Witch, Hexa, in her hour-long show, while 11 other dancers represent personas such as the Boxer, the Clown, the Whore, the Procuress, the Wet Nurse — names borrowed from Gert’s solos.
“The kind of art she was doing is the kind we’re interested in now: It was multidisciplinary, and everything was fair game,” Arnoult said. “Plus, it’s crazy fun.”
As with Guthrie, however, Arnoult also finds the themes of Gert’s work relevant to current issues. “We are not in the same kind of crisis, that 1922 moment of rising facism she was responding to,” she said. “But there are similarities on the social front with race, gender and sexual tolerance.”
Open Dance Project’s performers are racially, sexually and economically diverse, Arnoult said. “We’re a bunch of artists who believe in tolerance and acceptance.”
The “Dada” of the title refers to Gert’s friendships with members of Germany’s anti-establishment Dadaist culture, which was related to a wider avant-garde art movement elsewhere in Europe. “She didn’t identify as a Dadaist, but she was influenced by them,” Arnoult explained.
Ryan McGettigan, the whiz who created the immersive environment for the live music and dance of “’Bout a Stranger,” has designed the “Dada Gert” environment. The recorded score combines excerpts from Gert’s performances with guitar and accordion music by Hunter Perrin, inspired by the Weimar era. Lighting and projection designer David Deveau is adapting and adding to Christopher Ash’s projections for the original production to take full advantage of the technology at Moody Center’s Lois Chiles Theater.
Only 20 people could watch “’Bout a Stranger” at once, moving through the environment as they pleased during the performance. The Moody’s more spacious black-box configuration will accommodate at least 40.
“Dada Gert” will be “superdifferent,” said Arnoult, who doesn’t like to repeat herself. “Hopefully, you will feel like you’re in a different country and a whole different world.”