ABSTRACT
Heinrich von Kleist’s credibility as a dance writer stems from an undoubtedly singular text: Über das Marionettentheater (On the Marionette Theatre), published in the writer’s journal Berliner Abendblätter (Berlin Evening Gazette) in 1810. The short dialogue is as alluring as it is perplexing. A dancer, Herr C., persuades an acquaintance of the superior grace of a marionette. This grace is explained by simple physical principles: ‘Each movement, he said, had its center of gravity; it sufficed to control this point within the interior of the figures; the limbs, which were nothing but pendula, followed by themselves in a mechanical way without further assistance.’1 An elaborate mathematical analysis of the puppet’s movement follows. At the centre of the scientific discussion is the fact that the marionette is not human, that its body is weightless and lacks a person’s consciousness and affects. Both stand in the way of perfectly calibrated dance, as evidenced in the clumsy performance of real ballet dancers. In Kleist’s text, these dancers do not meet the aesthetic target. The balletic embodiment of neoclassicist beauty is thwarted by incompetence; yet the ideal itself, here the marionette, is haunted by its uncanny, dysfunctional double, dancing with prosthetic limbs: ‘have you heard of those mechanical legs that English artists fabricate for unfortunates who have lost their limbs?’ (MT, 417). The neoclassicist core of pain, so evident in the Laocoon group, is equally present in the text’s second example of grace. Yet again we are confronted with the idealisation of injury, now in the sculpture of the youth drawing a splinter from his foot. And the allusion to wounding returns in the third anecdote that praises the sovereign grace of the bear who defends himself in a potentially lethal fencing match. Kleist thus names the consequences of the neoclassicist era: flawless beauty of movement or body is not only a mortifying ideal, it is also deeply compromised. The latter, however, brings the ideal closer to a more human range of comportment in the shape of the text’s
counterexamples to perfection: jerky performers, a young man who compulsively fails to imitate the desired sculptural pose, and a fencer who is helplessly overchallenged by his task.
