ABSTRACT
Valeska Gert (1892-1978), German cabaret dancer, made her first stage appearance in 1916 in Berlin. She performed in the mixed media evenings of the Dadaist group, in Kokoschka’s expressionist play Hiob (1918), and Toller’s Transfiguration (1919). In the inter-war years she danced often to an accompaniment of ‘concrete music’, a collage of recorded sounds involving sharp changes of tempo. Izvestia commented: The city is the source of her social fantasy…. The fantastic shapes of procuresses, drug addicts and cast-offs of society distort themselves in terrifying forms before the deeply stricken audience. The entire century of capitalism dances in her dances’ (see Ann Teresa de Keersmaeker, ‘Valeska Gert’, Drama Review, vol. 25, no. 3, Fall 1981, p. 55). She worked in various cabarets, including her own, toured Europe and Soviet Russia, and acted in films, playing Mrs Peachum in Pabst’s The Threepenny Opera. She has been credited with inventing grotesque dance-pantomime, and seen as a precursor of Pina Bausch. For a further statement on her work, see her piece ‘Dancing’ in Schrifttanz: a view of German dance in the Weimar Republic, eds Valerie Preston Dunlop and Susanne Lahusen, London, Dance Books, 1990, pp. 13-16.
