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Article Excerpt
A photograph from 1923 Brussels, now housed in the city's Archives of Modern Architecture, shows a dancer posed in front of a cloth backdrop. The dancer is balanced on her left leg, on releve, with the right foot pulled up to a low passe. Despite her precarious posture, she stands like a living caryatid, her arms stretched wide and bent at right angles at the elbows and again at the wrists, as if to support an invisible weight. The positioning of the dancer shows a partner's understanding of the geometric imagery sewn onto the fabric screen behind her. The upright strength of her trunk and left leg augments the vertically of two white rectangles to either side of her, while her bent elbows and right knee fit her form into the architectonic frame created by an inverted L shape above and to the left of her head. The dancer's costuming--also a play of bold forms sewn on fabric--seems to take its decorative cue from the organic curves of the dancer's body. Yet the soft forms work to visually flatten the dancer's form and connect it to the backdrop behind her, creating an abstract composition of animate geometry. The light suit carries an applied dark swirl across the midriff that visually transfers the organic curve of her waist onto the screen behind. In a Suprematist-inspired composition, the circle placed at her breast both stylizes the woman's form and highlights the abstract symbolic order to which she belongs. The photograph goes beyond documenting a dancer in costume to display a work of visual abstraction in which the dancer's organic body is fused into the objective ground of the stage, between costume and backdrop. The woman in the photo is the francophone Belgian dancer Akarova, who in post-World War I Brussels became her country's most prolific avant-garde choreographer. In developing her unique style of dance, Akarova accorded primary place to the materials, construction, and organization of avant-garde aesthetics. Although she was never filmed on stage in this period, the photograph gives us a glimpse of her radical performance style that was hailed by contemporary artists and critics as "music-architecture," "living geometry," and "pure plastics."
The photograph documents a fragment of Akarova's production during the years of the Belgian art movement Plastique Pure and its champion, the journal 7 Arts, which ran from 1922 to 1929. Akarova, in this period, was married to the Belgian constructivist and Plastique Pure artist Marcel-Louis Baugniet. Through her connection to him and the 7 Arts circle, she created dances and costumes in close collaboration with avant-garde artists of many disciplines and became an important and well-known figure in Belgian theater. Always receiving single billing, she was famous in her own time and remained committed to dance until her death at ninety-five. Nonetheless, aside from an unpublished Belgian thesis, there is only a single in-depth treatment of Akarova's production: a monograph produced just years before her death by the Archives of Modern Architecture in Brussels. (1) This obscurity in scholarship may be linked to her working methods. She performed solely in Belgium, eventually creating her own theater spaces at home to retain autonomy from institutional influence. The result of her nonconformist method and her careful choice of collaborators, however, was a dance fully informed by the avant-garde aesthetics of her time; it is a dance that I believe embodies the aesthetic impulses of Belgium's entry into abstraction in the plastic arts.
This study attempts to re-create the viewing experience of Akarova's performances to suggest how she could synthesize the dancing body with the space of the stage and that of the audience through her use of avant-garde stage designs and an entirely new conception of music as a structural architecture of sound. Not only did Akarova's dance expand the discourse of the Belgian avant-garde by incorporating its Plastique Pure principles into a time- and body-based medium, but, as I will argue, she offered the first abstract artists in Belgium a glimpse of an ideal applied art.
My quasi-formalist study of Akarova's dance necessitates a discussion of kinesthetics and the beholder's self-awareness, both of which I believe were activated by her work's sensory output. Over and against art-historical writing that too often explains perception and embodiment in art in terms of cerebral or optical response--thereby avoiding precisely the body--I would argue, in fact, that a more corporeal analysis is, perhaps paradoxically, in line with the aims and viewing experience of abstract works of plastic art created in Akarova's midst. (2) The kinesthetic viewing I describe in reference to Akarova's work demonstrates that theater, embodied self-projection, and kinesthetic desire are not necessarily in opposition to pictorial abstraction, and in fact might expand our understanding of the urges and experience of formal abstraction. (3)
Belgian Constructivism: La Plastique Pure
The 1920s witnessed a vibrant stage revolution in Europe. While in France the heavy presence of spectacular "big ballets"--the Ballets Russes and Suedois--overshadowed its formerly dominant avant-garde theaters, across France's eastern borders, the first so-called modern dance was being forged by followers of the rhythmically centered Dalcroze and Laban schools of movement studies. In Belgium, Akarova took up the flag of the new dance to become Brussels's best-known choreographer of the interwar years. Born Marguerite Acarin in 1904 in Brussels, Akarova was the daughter of an architect, and grew up immersed in a circle of her parents' literary and artist friends. A classically trained dancer and singer, she had studied Emile-Jacques Dalcroze's rhythmic, free-bodied gymnastics to assist her vocal practice. She had also studied Rudolf Laban's writings and could compare his ideas to the legacies of the Ballets Russes and Suedois. (4) She was also an intimate of with Raymond Duncan, Isadora's brother and originator of his own eponymous dance technique. Akarova's awareness of the most current trends in dance from across Europe and America can be felt in her own innovations, but her enterprise was most profoundly shaped by the plastic-art avant-garde of her home country.
Despite a common language with France and a cultural exchange pre-1914, the First World War had isolated the Belgian avant-garde. Lydie Willem has argued that Belgium's postwar position and identity as "half-blood ... a Flemish country that speaks French" gave Belgium's artists a unique European status that shifted between Latin and Germanic roots. (5) The strong presence of regional ideologies in Belgium meant, says Willem, that pressure to express national self-sufficiency would outweigh interest in wider European trends, thereby stunting the development of modern art. Belgium in the 1910s remained under the aesthetic influence of Symbolism and German Expressionism, while the avant-garde elsewhere in Europe was moving toward abstraction. When Cubism, Futurism, and Constructivism entered the Belgian scene, Vasily Kandinsky, Frantisek Kupka, Kazimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian had already produced completely nonfigurative works of art.
With the opening of borders at war's end, Belgium, however, experienced an explosion of avant-garde activity, in both journals and exhibitions of international scope. (6) The new current of internationalism in postwar Brussels tipped off not only Dada and Surrealist movements there, but also encouraged Soviet and Dutch purist aesthetics and a new Constructivist concept of the artist's role in society. It would be the Belgian artist Victor Servranckx and his group of friends from 7 Arts who would first produce entirely abstract painting in Belgium. In 1920, Servranckx and at least fifteen other key members of the Belgian avant-garde, including the poet Pierre Bourgeois and the painters Pierre-Louis Flouquet and Rene Magritte, attended a lecture at a Brussels gallery by the Dutch spokesman for de Stijl, Theo van Doesburg. Bourgeois would later say that it was because of this lecture, and the resultant gathering of artists, that the ideas behind 7 Arts were born, and along with it a new Belgian style called "la Plastique Pure." (7) During its seven-year run, 7 Arts urged a synthesis among the arts and aimed to unite the Belgian avant-garde with like-minded movements abroad. In its first year, 7 Arts had seven hundred subscribers and an impressive weekly print run of twelve hundred. (8) True to its mission, 7 Arts was a synthesized group of both Flemish-and French-speaking writers, artists, and musicians working in an inherently cross-cultural, interdisciplinary atmosphere. (9) It would be among these artists of the seven arts that Akarova--and her fourth art--would bring so many of their aims to life.
In 1922, at an event organized by Raymond Duncan, Akarova met the 7 Arts aesthetics critic, the painter-architect-designer Marcel-Louis Baugniet; she began a close association with him and his colleagues in art, design, architecture, and theater. During her five-year marriage to Baugniet, 1923-28, the two would work out a kinesthetic idea of Plastique Pure, through collaboration on more than a dozen dance performances--a quantity that likely would have been greater had he not been ill during the majority of their years together.
The term Plastique Pure appeared first in 1922 in...
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