Living Art: Akarova and the Belgian Avant-Garde

Living Art: Akarova and the Belgian Avant-GardeAuthor(s): Nell AndrewSource: Art Journal, Vol. 68, No. 2 (SUMMER 2009), pp. 26-49Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25676481 .

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Akarova in 1923, costume and backdrop

designs by Marcel-Louis Baugniet. Archives

d'Architecture Moderne, Brussels (artwork ? 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ SABAM, Brussels; photograph provided by Archives d Architecture Moderne)

Nell Andrew

Living Art: Akarova and the

Belgian Avant-Garde

I wish to thank Art Journal's excellent anonymous readers for thoughtful and immensely helpful critiques. I am grateful to Anne Lauwers at the Archives of Modern Architecture, Brussels, for her kind and capable assistance with so many of the essay's illustrations. As this research took initial form as part of my dissertation, my deep gratitude extends to my teachers Martha Ward and Tom Gunning in the department of art histo

ry at the University of Chicago. All translations in the text are my own, unless otherwise noted.

I. Anne Van Loo, ed. Akarova: Spectacle et Avant-Garde 1920-1950 (Brussels: Archives d'Architecture Moderne, 1988). A catalogue to the inaugural exhibition of Akarova's donation of her collection of costumes and performance artifacts, this monograph culls from two years of interviews with the dancer and her contempo raries. It is a tremendous visual and textual resource to which I and this essay are hugely indebted.

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 verticality 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 flat ten 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 orga

nization 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 impor tant 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 pro duced 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 noncon

formist 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.

27 art journal



2. Writings by Michael Fried and Jonathan Crary, for instance, have been benchmarks for my inter ests and explorations in both formal analysis and

perception. The scholarship that has stemmed from their important work has led me to insist on

the question, What happens to a discussion of embodiment and embodied vision in abstract art,

particularly when a body is both medium and beholder? 3. The art historian Juliet Koss, writing on empa

thy and abstraction in the context of Germany at

the turn of the last century, argues that empathy and embodied vision "unwittingly helped to set

the terms for the theory and practice of visual abstraction." Koss, "On the Limits of Empathy," Art Bulletin 88, no. I (March 2006): 141.

4. Akarova attended performances of both the Ballets Russes and Suedois in Brussels, and under took a brief apprenticeship with a Ballets Russes

dancer, Sonia Korty. See Van Loo, 94.

5. Lydie Willem,"Early Belgian Modern Dance: Nationalist and Ideological Influences," Proceedings of the Society of Dance History Scholars 22nd Annual Conference, Albuquerque (Stoughton, Wl:

Society of Dance History Scholars, 1999), 15.

This study attempts to re-create the viewing experience of Akarova s perfor mances 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 acti

vated by her works 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 understand

ing 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 gymnas tics 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 innova

tions, 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 aes

thetic influence of Symbolism and German Expressionism, while the avant-garde

28 SUMMER 2009



6. See Van Loo, 429, for a chronology of events in 1919 in Brussels.

7. The figures present at Van Doesburg's 1920 lecture are listed in Serge Goyens de Heusch, "7 Arts" Bruxelles 1922-1929: Un Front de jeunesse pour la revolution artistique (Brussels: Ministere de la culture francaise de Belgique, 1976), 25-26.1 am deeply indebted to de Heusch's exceptional history of the journal and its milieu. The informa tion about 7 Arts that I present here is culled

largely from his study. 8. Other, shorter-lived attempts by avant-garde journals to bridge the ideological divide included

Marie, a "journal bimensuel pour la belle jeunesse," directed by the Belgian Dada-Surrealist writer E.-L.-T Mesens. 9. From its first issues, Pierre Bourgeois critiqued literature and cinema, his brother Victor

Bourgeois wrote on architecture, Pierre-Louis

Flouquet and Karel Maes were painting critics, and

Georges Monier addressed music. Other artists in the 7 Arts group were the Flemish Jozef Peeters,

who wrote the manifesto of Plastique Pure, and is now considered to have initiated the abstract

movement in Belgium; Victor Servranckx, one of the earliest of the group to create completely abstract works; and Jean-Jacques Gailliard, a

French-speaking painter, friend of Akarova, and collaborator with Pierre Bourgeois. The French born Flouquet, perhaps the most critically recog nized painter of the movement, was Baugniet's best friend, shared a studio for some time with

Magritte, exhibited works at the Sturm gallery in Berlin in 1925, and was considered by Henry van de Velde to be more evocative and powerful than Picasso or Leger (see de Heusch, 110). Maes also

published artworks across borders in the pages of Der Sturm and De Sty/. Baugniet, as I will elaborate, found inspiration from Russia and France, corre

sponding with both Malevich and El Lissitzky through the 1920s. 10. See de Heusch, 26-28

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 nonfigu rative works of art.

With the opening of borders at wars end, Belgium, however, experienced an explosion of avant-garde activity, in both journals and exhibitions of interna

tional 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 Construedvist 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 spokes

man 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 the Flemish journal Het Overzicht out of Antwerp, used in reference to an exhibition of 7 Arts artists Karel Maes and Jozef Peeters.10 A glance at a Maes work from this time, Peinture No. 2,

shows the new style to include a purity of form; geometric figures are seen in

planes that abut and cross one another at vertical, horizontal, and orthogonal

joints; its bold color results from the use of only unmixed primary and sec

ondary hues. The following year, Peeters would draft a manifesto for Plastique Pure

published in 7 Arts on October 2c, 1923, and soon after Baugniet would become

7 Arts spokesman for the principles of the Plastique Pure movement.

In Baugniet's work of these early years, we see a rhythmic structuring, a use

of black, white, and primary color, and a dominant use of the circle and square,

providing, as does the Maes work, a view of Constructivist influence, but also of the Suprematist paintings of Malevich. Baugniet's 1923 set design for Akarova s

dance Golliwog's Cakewalk includes a Malevich-like, flat, black circle placed in the

"golden corner" of the backdrop's large, white plane. The decor's cross-diagonals in gray and blue complemented his gestural costuming for the dancer. By 1925,

29 art journal



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11. Fabrice van de Kerckhove, "Les Lettres Dansantes: Akarova and the Belgian Avant

Garde," in Van Loo, 335. Kerckhove describes this exhibition as Baugniet's introduction to the Russian avant-garde, though I would argue we can see familiarity with El Lissitsky's and Malevich's

Suprematist and Constructivist design in his earlier work.

12. For a listing of new theater groups and key figures involved in the 1920s and 1930s, see

Kerckhove, 336.

Baugniet and other Belgian designers had presented at an exhibition of decora

tive arts that included work by Malevich, Lyubov Popova, and Varvara Stepanova,

introducing the Belgians firsthand to the style of the Russian avant-garde.11 The

weight of the Russian avant-garde is of course felt in Akarova's choice of stage name. It was Baugniet who transposed her last name Acarin into Akarova, the

name to which she would answer from 1923 until the end of her life.

Constructing a Dance

Radical innovations in Belgian theater in the 1920s provided Akarova a stage

environment in which the importance of lighting, design, space, audience

experience, political content, and overall synthesis took precedence over any

authority previously held by the dramatic text or conventions of theater.12 In 1925

30 SUMMER 2009



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Akarova in Allegro Barbaro, 1929, in costume of her own design. Archives d'Architecture Moderne, Brussels (artwork? Archives d'Architecture Moderne; photograph by Robert de Smet)

Marcel-Louis Baugniet, La Danse, 1925, materials and dimensions unknown. Private collection (artwork ? 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York/SABAM, Brussels; photograph provided by Archives d'Architecture Moderne,

Brussels)

13. 7 Arts 8 (December 6, 1925). For more on I'Assaut and its participants, see Kerckhove, 352-53. 14. Akarova interview with Van Loo, June 1987,

trans. Suzanne Day, in Van Loo, 110.

Flouquet, one of the directors of 7 Arts, founded the theatrical Groupe l'Assaut

with his colleague Jean-Jacques Gailliard; that December, l'Assaut published a

theater manifesto in 7 Arts urging avant-garde theater innovation in Belgium by the incorporation of Plastique Pure ideas into stage design.13 Akarova surely wit

nessed these developments: "It was almost always the same public who attended

these avant-garde artistic events .. . [and] the same audience who attended my

productions."14 I am convinced that new efforts to draw an audience's attention

beyond literary content to the entirety of the stage allowed Akarova's avant-garde

peers to recognize the "total art" synthesis and pure plastics of her work.

In the following pages, as I describe her working method and dances, I will

present the way in which her dancing body could offer to her Plastique Pure col

leagues a view of a living architecture. Using the very geometry the artists

applied in their own work, Akarova made that geometry felt in space and time.

Perhaps even more poignant, the medium of her art was a body working and,

therefore, might fulfill the Plastique Pure aim for social and applied art.

Without recourse to the live performance or even to contemporary record

ings of Akarova dancing, my analysis of Akarova's project necessarily comes from

the experience of an imagined spectator. I have attempted to build this spectator

32 SUMMER 2009



^^^^



Akarova, costume for Gymnopedie No. I,

1925/1932, fabric by Marcel-Louis Baugniet. Archives d'Architecture Moderne, Brussels (art work ? Archives d'Architecture Moderne)

15. Yves Robert, "Akarova: Le Geste comme

signe de la matiere sonore," in Transpositions: Hypotheses sur le mouvement, exh. cat. (Noisiel: La Ferme du Buisson/Centre d'art contemporain, 1993), 62. 16. Marcel-Louis Baugniet, Essai sur la psychologie

des formes (Brussels: Editions de la Maison du

Poete, 1963), 61. 17. Ravel's Bolero, for instance, had never been

performed in Brussels before Akarova's first per formance. See her interview in Van Loo, 118.

from the writings and work of her contemporary artists and critics, from her

self-presentation in photographs, and from her own remembrances. Akarova's

biographer Yves Robert, for example, has said that her dancing purified every

thing outside the music. Just as in the new Belgian theater the actors and text

became secondary to atmosphere, Akarova pared down the accessories, positions,

and literal meanings of traditional dance to emphasize the musical structure that

exists in sound waves between the stage and audience. Akarova's movements, says

Robert, were "pure gesture for a pure-plastic art," in which "dance becomes the

architecture of sounds."ls In order, then, to imagine how this was possible, he

also tells us that for the most part, she balanced on the body's central axis?with

the limbs and gestures acting as dynamic counterpoints that never break the

central line. This description of her dancing body as a kind of sturdy yet expres sive column in space is readily corroborated by the photographs. Akarova was

Baugniet's primary model of dance; therefore his agreement in Essai sur la psycholo

gic des formes that "dance should, above all, be music-architecture" can also guide us to imagine her dance in this way.16 In his 1925 painting La Danse, we see a

cubist fracturing of space as the figure strives to support her frame; there is an

echoing of multiple curved lines both concave and convex, and the diagonal run

ning from lower left to upper right in effect dematerializes the body by fusing it

with a light that crosses from an airy taupe to a deep solid brown. The shifting

imagery seems to articulate Baugniet's experience of dance?I would argue Akarova's in particular?as an integration of the object and his experience, of

sight and sound, of form and space. A costume design for Akarova's Gymnopedie, also from 1925, shows a similar visual abstraction of kinesthetic experience that

articulates this idea of a stable core with gestural expression, or "music-architec

ture." In the costume, as in the painting, we see the same placement of stable cir

cles near curved echoing lines, and a center line that is bisected by opposing light and dark elements. The squared shoulder and neckline, moreover, emphasize the

dancer's firm presence in space as if she were an architectural support or column.

As a testament to her understanding of the music-architecture of dance,

Akarova always began with music. This goes against the majority of established, Laban-trained dancers developing der moderne Tanz in Europe, who were keen to

free dance from its dependence on music. In Germany, Mary Wigman's Expres

sionist dances would aim to release an internal meaning from the subject-dancer

through the object-form of her movement; in Zurich, the Dada-inspired dancer

Sophie Taeuber would use humor and a body mask of heavy costuming to remove

her subjecthood and emphasize the objective form of dance. Both choreogra

phers sought an essential and universal art of dance. For Akarova, however, it

was through the specifics of music that she found a unifying spirit between the

object-body and the subject-meaning. She would select the most modern music

for her guide, often seeking out new work abroad. Because her music was often

not yet recorded, it became as much a working part of the dance as the move

ment. Her musicians were required to arrange the new music as she developed

her choreography.17 This method also meant that the relationship between the

dance and its music was never a literal, gestural translation of sounds. Rather, she

created choreography to the spirit of the music, as the majority of rehearsals were

without live orchestra. Though she choreographed ahead of time with the struc

ture of the musical score in mind, at the moment of performance she found

34 SUMMER 2009



18. Akarova quoted in Van Loo, 70. 19. X, "Seance Akarova," I!Independence beige,

April 6, 1930, 2. 20. See Van Loo, 120, for more. 21. Review quoted without citation in Giovanni

Lista, "Akarova ou L'Avant-Garde: Entre

Synchretisme et autarcie," in Van Loo, 220. 22. "Peinture," 7 Arts I (November 9, 1922).

much of her movement through improvisation and intuitive synthesis with the

now-present sound. Despite the emphasis on music, these dances could never

be literal illustrations of the musical notes, as so many modern dancers feared; rather the music added a presentness and living quality to her choreography, which would be generated at each performance through the meeting of the

body with the sound. "I created a material world out of music," she said.18

Reviews tell us that she in fact succeeded in creating that sense of synthesis. One

performance to the music of Fritz Kreisler and Claude Debussy was seen as a

"Seance fort artistique... Mme. Akarova offered the material demonstration of

esthetic ideas. ... In all, the interpretations of Mme. Akarova seduce more by

their intellectual, reflective side than by their musicality, properly speaking. The

art of the dance here takes an absolute value to which the musical element is

more or less subordinate."19 Her work was read not as an expression of the

music, but as a comprehensive artistic experience.

Akarova explained her choreographic process as conceptual. Thanks to her

musical method, her dances were created to be mere structural frameworks with

assigned landmarks, a schema for development, or a consistent movement motif.

Within that framework, however, change was an important creative factor. For

Akarova,"improvisation meant a living dance.20 She was continually performing

the construction of her art and its presence in time and space. We must keep in

mind the two most important forces driving Akarova's dance: first, the music?

as space restructured by sound?and second, the choreographic skeleton or

foundation for her improvisation?rather like an architectural framework for

her performance. In imagining her dances, there should be a vibrating sound

environment in the theater, conceived as a living architecture of music through which Akarova's body negotiated its forms. Through sound, that architecture

would have stretched from the backdrop on stage to the last row of the audience,

including each beholder in the fusion of body and space. References to a sense of fusion among the elements of performance appear

in contemporary reviews. One performance review describes the unification of

body and sound felt by the beholder: "Her whole body interprets the musical

work, becomes confused with it and at certain moments even seems to dominate

it until the spectator no longer hears, but sees and understands."21 It is not there

fore paradoxical that she describes a wish to "express" the music, a process gen

erally considered antimodern and associated with traditional ballet. Akarova's

musical expression was not literal or narrative, but was an abstract link between

her body and the space around her.

The links between Akarova's aims for dance and those of her painter peers are therefore not so hard to find, despite the paintings' abstraction. Plastique Pure

artists strove for just this kind of integration of art with environment.

Abstraction, for example, gave Baugniet the ability to fuse his designs with the

spaces of life?as we can see in a modern bedroom design, in which the "paint

ing" creeps along the floor, bed, and walls and shows the new flexibility of his

dynamic, geometric art. In the inaugural issue of 7 Arts, an unsigned essay titled

simply "Peinture" stated in anthropomorphic terms that painting "should, with

movement and duration, create repose. That is, impassioned repose."22 To build

such dynamic repose, Akarova would also rely on geometry. She accorded much

attention to the sculptural dimension of movement. Robert's evocative descrip

36 SUMMER 2009



Marcel-Louis Baugniet, drawing for bed room design, 1927, India ink, gouache, and

watercolor on cartridge paper, 12% x I63/ in.

(31.5 x 42.5 cm). Archives d'Architecture

Moderne, Brussels (artworks ? 2009 Artists

Rights Society (ARS), New York/SABAM, Brussels; photograph provided by Archives d'Architecture Moderne)

23. Robert, 62. 24. Ibid., 63. 25. Akarova, recorded in Son Image danse, VHS, dir. Michel Jakar, 66 min. (1997; Brussels: Kamalalam Production and Compagnie Tandem).

tion of her dance shows how the lines of her body might translate into geometric solutions: "The trajectory of gestures in the stage space engenders geometrically

perfect volumes."23 While classical ballet hovering on pointe creates movement

in a state of continuous disequilibrium, Akarova's movement, writes Robert,

is made from "an unalterable, immutable, nontemporal equilibrium!"24This

reminds us not only of the stability of a geometric grid, but also of Robert's

earlier description of Akarova's imaginary axis dividing the body in two, from

head to toe. This axis line, he says, is never broken despite the bending and

undulating to music, and means that her center of gravity?the geometric cylin

der of her torso?is at the heart of her movements. In a photo from her 1924

dance Sicilienne, we see what Robert means by a stable center axis at her core; but

I would add that the counterpoints of her limbs, her position on demi-pointe, and

the slight breaks at her elbow, wrists, and knees give the illusion of a solid sky

scraper that nonetheless gracefully sways and bends to the elements. The arms

and legs, she said, speak to one another through the core of the body, which

remains always central. Equilibrium, Akarova admitted, was a crucial natural tal

ent: "I had an ability to balance like no one else."25 When that ability began to

fail at the age of forty-seven, she had to scale back her dancing.

Nearly every photograph of her work shows the dancer on releve, with the

37 art journal



Akarova in Sicilienne, 1932, in her own 1924 costume design. Archives d'Architecture

Moderne, Brussels (artwork ? Archives d'Architecture Moderne; photograph by Robert de Smet)

Akarova in Berceuse, 1934, in her own cos tume design. Archives d'Architecture Moderne, Brussels (artwork ? Archives d'Architecture

Moderne)

26. Ibid. Akarova instructs the dancer Michele Noiret that the gestures must show "env/e."

feet just half-raised to pointe. In a 1997 filmed restaging of Akarova's choreography with the dancer Michele Noiret, one also sees this repeated use of releve. The effect

of raising the body's weight onto the ball of the foot creates an utterly dynamic stasis. Perhaps this is what she meant when she said that even when she is still,

she is not still. Unlike the teetering balance of a point shoe's satin box, Akarova's

raised stance is placed firmly across the breadth of the bare foot. Still, releve means

that the dancer's entire body must respond and be active to keep balance. It

introduces the gestalt of striving against gravity that would not exist in a ground

ed, flat-footed stance; in her words, the movements must show envie, that is,

desire.26 Raised off the ground, the dancer is an active, tensile force negotiating

the forces in space around her. To find equilibrium on releve in fact requires an

agreement between her body and the forces in space. This union of the two

forces bonds figure and ground and strengthens the architecture of the perfor mance space. Tony-Alain Hermant sketched Akarova in her Danse arabe. Though his

drawings do not give a satisfying account of the woman dancing, they do show

strikingly how her costuming created a solid, pillarlike architecture that bound

her trunk to space and allowed a free movement of her limbs. The limbs then

could seem to present "successive touches" that echo in dynamic asymmetry the

lines of the opposite limbs and the geometry of her costume.

38 SUMMER 2009



Marcel-Louis Baugniet, woodcuts from the series Kaloprosopies, 1925, published in

Kaloprosopies: Neuf bois graves de M.-L Baugniet (Brussels: Editions de la vache rose, 1925), ea.

page 13x9^ in. (33 x 24.3 cm), edition of 115, 15 on Japan paper, 100 on Holland paper.

Archives d'Architecture Moderne, Brussels

(artworks ? 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SABAM, Brussels; photograph provid ed by Archives d'Architecture Moderne)

27. Akarova quoted in Albert Guislain, "Musique et danse," Le Soir, February 3^4, 1963, 6.

The best example we may find of the architectural effect of Akarova's ges tures is perhaps in Baugniet's KaJoprosopies, a series of woodcuts the artist made of

his wife in 1925. In these images, it is clear that Akarova's movements stretched

energetically in dynamic counterbalance to one another and gave the impression

of filling up the space in which she performed. By visually expanding to fit her

space in these woodcuts, Baugniet shows the sense a viewer had that in her

dances her movement touched, pushed, even built its surrounding space.

Constructing aVision

In a 1963 interview looking back on her oeuvre, Akarova would say that she

attempted to express in her plastique?her form and movement?the same states

of the soul that her music, costumes, and decors were expressing in their color

and lines.27 Each element of her theatrical art was to augment a single, shared

meaning, with the diverse elements working in mutual support. A 1926 review

of Akarova's Ballet (Petite Suite) described how the costumes merged with the

dance: "Geometric figures on a plain, simple tunic . . . the rigor and the accuracy

with which it is applied are admirable and a fine demonstration of pure plastics. . . . We noticed that the curves and straight lines dominate when the rhythm

39 art journal



^^^^^^^^^^^ 1^'f^^^^K """' ^

Akarova, costume for Ballet (Petite Suite), 1923. Archives d'Architecture Moderne, Brussels

(artwork ? Archives d'Architecture Moderne)

28. Review by Rene de Nobele, trans. Brigid Grauman, cited without reference in Lista, 256. 29. Akarova quoted in Robert, 65. 30. Van Loo, 94.

undulates or cuts, and that the more complex the dancer's attitudes become, the

more the forms fit the costume. As for the colours, their intensity seemed to

depend on the speed of the movement."28 It seems the forms of her costume

appeared fused to her body, even alive with it.

The fusion of elements within her performance space may also have been a

product of the fact that it all issued from one homogeneous vision. Except for the music, Akarova conceived and produced every element of her performance.

Though her costumes and decors were often designed and signed by Baugniet? and later, by other fine-art collaborators?Akarova herself was the seamstress and

constructor of the final forms these designs took. In her words: "My decors are

always the plastic translation of the musical language or rather, the essence of the

music I was dancing. . . . Moreover, my decors have always been built, not as a

whole or as a totality, but on the contrary, as the support and the container of

another expression, that of the choreography and the costumed dancer. With my

body, I trace lines in space, which blend with those of the decor. It must always attune itself to another form."29 Like her improvisation, many of her costumes

were alterable so that she could quickly change them in the midst of perfor

mance?layering, reversing, or converting her clothing to blend with a new

theme in the music or a change in movement motifs.30This adaptability may

have stemmed from Baugniet's beliefs on design. His furniture, for example,

40 SUMMER 2009



31. See interview with Baugniet in Van Loo, 201. 32. Teirlinck lecture of 1931, quoted in

Kerckhove, 324. 33. Ibid. 34. Lista quotes a review of the La Cambre per formance that describes a light that was alternate

ly "a very pale film" and "white plenitude." Lista, 263, trans. Brigid Grauman. 35. See "A I'lnstitut superieur des arts decoratifs," Aurore, June 1929, trans. Brigid Grauman, quoted in Kerckhove, 362.

never existed to him as single pieces, but was made to fit within the architectural

equipement, with other "team players" rendered through sliding doors, multiuse

furniture, and convertibles.31 We know that Baugniet's design for the set of the

1926 play Tam-tam at the Groupe Libre was a Cubist-inspired decor that was com

pletely transformable. In Akarova s one-woman show, however, her shifting and

multilayered costumes and sets went beyond utility and in fact showed an artist

in the act of creating, conceiving, and constructing her art in plain view.

Constructing Perception

Contributing to her decor, and often surpassing it as a unifying element of her

stage, was Akarova's lighting. Influenced greatly by her long acquaintance with

the innovative Flemish dramaturge Herman Teirlinck, she wanted her luminous,

colorful light projections to breathe life into the spectacle, evolving in dynamic relation with the movement. We cannot sense this attention she paid to lighting from photographs of her work; yet, her self-described debt to Teirlinck can tell

us quite a lot. Teirlinck felt that "the most perfectly limited space is nothing more than an emptiness, or a hole, if it is not animated by that unsettling breath

of atmosphere that is light."32 Teirlinck 's experiments are well documented

through his theater workshops at Henry van de Velde's Institut superieur des

arts decoratifs-La Cambre. In his classes, Teirlinck taught a concept of light as a

vibration that fills the stage, evolves along with the text, and has the ability to

move the drama, perhaps even more than either actors or sets.33 Not surprisingly,

he would link this interest in a rhythmic ambiance of light to the rhythm of

music and dance. In 1929 Teirlinck asked Akarova to assist him in his demonstra

tions of light at La Cambre. Photographs show that the performance took place

using a shallow stage. Akarova moved under a changing series of lights, allowing Teirlinck's students to see light as a physical part of the performance, rebounding off Akarova's varying positions and changing the relations of figure to ground.

Light had the ability to change the perception of the stage space; light created a paradox of a permeating "plenitude" and a unifying "film" that could alter

nately bring out the moving form or fuse it to its ground.34 Antoine Seyl, who

witnessed the experiment with Akarova, commented that her "patterned move

ments were inscribed on this screenlike stage."35 I would argue that, as with her

musical support, Akarova used light to create a layer of webbing in space; it

worked to construct yet another form of architecture on stage through which

her body would negotiate as it moved. Moreover, the lighting, as Seyl attests,

helped to create the sense of a more permanent "inscription" of the fleeting

dance, adding increased physical presence to her movements and suspending them in a perceived image for the audience.

Even the architecture of Akarova s various stages bespeaks her interest to

shape the perceptual experience of her audience. The stage for her performance at La Cambre, for instance, was designed to imitate Van de Velde's famous stage

for the 1914 Werkbund exhibition. The Werkbund stage included a long rectangu lar floor, along either length of which were deep pits for the dancer's entry and the musical accompaniment. This design would be kept when Akarova created her own home-studio stages, the first of which was only two meters deep by six meters long. That both of her personal stages kept these proportions tells us that

41 art journal



Akarova in La Danse a"amour, 1929, in costume of her own design, photograph from performance at Institut superieur des arts

decoratifs, La Cambre, Belgium. Archives d'Architecture Moderne, Brussels (artwork ? Archives d'Architecture Moderne; photog rapher unknown)

36. Until she had a house large enough for a

home stage, Akarova performed in theaters around Brussels and in provincial towns. See

Guislain, I. From 1931 to 1936, she worked from her house on rue d'Ardenne in a narrow, black tiled studio-theater. When it became too small, she envisioned a space in which to house not only her performances, but also a cultural center for

many artists. She hired Jean-Jules Eggericx, a pro fessor of architecture at La Cambre, who had created the theater of the Commissariat General for the World's Fair in Brussels in 1935. Eggericx, too, was influenced by Van de Velde's 1914 Werk bund theater and built her 1937 stage at her home on avenue de I'Hippodrome with a vaulted ceiling and a trapezoidal performance hall that ended in a

circular, horizonlike stage. For further discussion of Akarova's theaters, see Brygida Ochaim, "Des Theatres construits pour des danseuses," in

Transpositions, 29; and Van Loo, 122.

it was an ideal space for her and that her performances were designed with a

very shallow area in mind.36 Created without the depth of a traditional theater,

her movements would have to be more essentialized and would require the audi

ence s perception of a desired extension beyond. The photos from La Cambre, for

example, show a backdrop that mimics stage designs by Adolphe Appia, who

used Dalcroze eurhythmies when conceiving his architectural theater spaces

known as esipaces rhythmiques. In Appia's designs, the stage space is made to resound

outward in arcs, invoking a universal rhythm that connects the audience to the

performer. For Akarova, trained by Dalcroze in eurhythmies, the shallow length

of floor could be made to expand outward by her combination of decor, light

ing, and highly symbolic movement.

Similarly, Baugniet and Akarova's sets?abstract in their reduction of colors

and geometric essentialization of form?in effect animate the space by creating elemental forms that paradoxically teem as if living and breathing with primary,

symbolic meanings.37 Lista and others have described this as a cinematographic,

screenlike display of forms across space. But Akarova's combination of sensory

stimuli could not have allowed a two-dimensional experience of her perfor

mance; rather the space, thickened by sound, color, and light, would seem not

projected, but extended and spread out as a continuation of the audience's living

space. The ideal of a stage that called on an audience's physical being is supported

by Van de Velde's famous plan for the stage at La Cambre. As originally conceived,

42 SUMMER 2009



Marcel-Louis Baugniet, photograph of ^^^Hi^^^l^^. Akarova, 1923,gelatin silver print, 4M x 3[A in. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^

? (11.5 x 8.8 cm). Archives d'Architecture

^^^^^^^^^^^A M * Moderne, Brussels (artwork ? 2009 Artists Rights ^^^^^^^^^^^m ^ Society (ARS). New York/SABAM, Brussels;

^^^^^^^^^^^ Jtttk. photograph provided by Archives d'Architecture

^^^^^^^^^lk M ^Hj

37. Lista writes that "the suppression of sets" was a product of "la danse libre," creating a dance of

"pure animated plastics." Lista, 224. 38. Baugniet wouldn't fully articulate his ideas on a gestalt theory of dance, for example, until he

published Essai sur la psychologie des formes in 1963.

Van de Velde's curtain was to open from all sides like a diaphragm or like the

eye's pupil. Here is arguably the highest authority in Akarova's avant-garde the

ater circle proposing a stage generated from an anthropomorphic movement

that mimics the body's vision.

Akarova's Dance-Architecture

To help explain the choices Akarova made in her dance, I have also relied on

Baugniet's writings, as the prolific spokesperson for the Plastique Pure movement.

Baugniet fully credits his interest in dance in the 1920s to Akarova, and the

ideas she offered him about living form continued to influence his thinking and writing for years after their split in 1928.38 Akarova and Baugniet remained

close until the end of their lives. Because of this connection, even beyond the

obvious material involvement of Baugniet in nearly all of her 1920s perfor mances, Akarova would have grappled intellectually in dance with the more

abstract conditions and expectations that her husband and colleagues were devis

ing for the plastic arts. Nearly every one of the 7 Arts plastic artists was interested

in, working in, or defining the new Belgian theater, and all were promoting

equality among the arts. Akarova was a synthetic poly-artist, and Baugniet said

that her work was of huge importance to his peers: "[Akarova's dance] was

directly involved with the cultural avant-garde of the period. ... It corresponded

43 art journal



Marcel-Louis Baugniet, Statisme, 1925,011 on

board, 29% x 20 in. (74 x 51 cm). Private collec tion (artwork ? 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SABAM, Brussels)

39. Baugniet interview with Van Loo, November

1987, trans. Suzanne Day, in Van Loo, 201. 40. Ibid., 188. See also the chapter "Cubisme,

Plastique Pure, art abstrait," in Baugniet, Vers une

Synthese esthetique et sociale (Brussels: Editions

Labor, 1986). 41. Baugniet's interview in Van Loo, 165. Images of his graphic work and textiles can be found in Marcel-Louis Baugniet: Liege 1896-Bruxelles 1995: Dans le Tourbillon des avant-gardes, exh. cat.

(Tournai: La Renaissance du livre/Dexia Banque, 2001). 42. Baugniet saw the Belgian Plastique Pure as a

logical development of Cubism with influences from Suprematism and Constructivism. See

Baugniet, Vers une Synthese, 56. 43. Robert Vivier, Marcel Baugniet (Paris: Les Ecrivains reunis, 1927), 5. 44. See ibid., 8-9, for Baugniet's ideas on decora tivism. 45. Pierre Bourgeois, "Les Saisons de la jeune

peinture," 7 Arts 13 (February 25, 1923); cited also in de Heusch, 57. Plastique Pure's mission to

uphold architecture as a model follows along the ideas of synthesis held by Kandinsky's Russian

Academie des sciences artistiques, and later the German Bauhaus. Van de Velde's Ecole des arts decoratifs in Weimar and later his Institut

superieur des arts decoratifs in Brussels also insisted on architecture as the origin of the other

plastic arts. 46. See Bourgeois, preface to de Heusch, 13. 47. For more, see de Heusch, 87.

to our own aspirations in the field of plastic art."39 The writings of Baugniet and

his critics, therefore, help to build an intellectual and formal frame for imagining the experience of Akarova's performances.

Baugniet, who traveled to Paris soon after the war, later said it was the

abstract pioneer Kupka who introduced him to constructivist form and geometric art.40 Exhibited at the Salons d'Automne of 1921 and 1922, Baugniet's paintings were displayed in proximity to avant-garde design, Dada, and Cubist works.

Before returning to Brussels, Baugniet would begin a correspondence with

Malevich. Again, as in his set design for Golliwog that cites Malevich, it is hard not

to read a 1923 costume and photograph of Akarova by Baugniet as showing a

Malevich-like cross in reverse. In thinking about Akarova, who worked in a body based art, it is important to remember that abstraction was always an a priori

goal for Baugniet. In fact, he switched his focus to textiles, sets, and interiors in

large part because abstraction was approved in design long before it would be in

painting.41 His 1921 and 1922 exposure to Kupka and Malevich in Paris led him to even more thoughtful experimentation in cubist abstraction and the develop

ing purism in Europe.42

Akarova married Baugniet in the year following his return to Brussels and

therefore was collaborating with him during his most intense and prolific inter

est in abstraction?a commitment that loosened into more figurative work in the

years after their divorce. The poet Robert Vivier, who published a critical biogra

phy of Baugniet in 1927, wrote that the artist used abstract stylization to "cere

bralize" his visual experiments 43

Perhaps Akarova's commitment to begin always with music as her foundation was her own similar effort to take her art out of

the material and tie it instead to thought. After first experimenting in decoration

for its nonrepresentational imagery, Baugniet would, by the early 1920s, disap prove of what he saw in the decorative as a false use of aesthetics to produce contrived emotion or nostalgia. He instead sought an art of unsentimental, pure aesthetics, and it was this search, Vivier contends, that led him to architecture?

whose every form and relation is worked out by the brain, reason, and mathe

matics.44 Architecture for the new Belgian avant-garde was not an autonomous

medium, but rather a model of construction for all art. Pierre Bourgeois wrote in

the pages of 7 Arts that pure plastics meant "a decorative painting that objectively and physically obeys the process of architectural composition."45 Bourgeois

described a postwar interest in order, which stemmed from a need to combat

the brutality of war with precision, discipline, and a desire to build.46 Plastique Pure would find methods of describing nonarchitectural arts like poetry and

music in architectural terms to show how they might share the same high aims

as the most "constructed" and ordered of arts.47 We have already seen that

Baugniet described dance as "music-architecture" so that an interest in Akarova's

dance among the Plastique Pure artists would be born from her dynamic ability to

set architecture in motion.

As I have tried to describe, Akarova created a reasoned and mathematical

framework of music, which she enlivened by a mix of dynamic and equilibrated

gesture, to result in an image of kinetic geometric abstraction within an architec

tural frame. In his painting Statisme of 1925, Baugniet visually supports this claim

by painting Akarova as the representation of such dynamic equilibrium; though her living body is apparent in the flesh-colored portions of her arm, face, breast,

44 SUMMER 2009



^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^:



48. Baugniet, "La Forme dans la danse," in Essai sur la psychologie, 61. 49. Ibid., 60. 50. De Heusch suggests that Baugniet, when

painting sport or dance, is going not for move ment but for an essence, much like Leger or

Albert Gleizes. De Heusch, quoted in Marcel-Louis

Baugniet: Liege 1896-Bruxelles 1995,1'4. 51. De Heusch discusses the Plastique Pure inter est in the economy of machines, the purposeful and ordered art as opposed to Surrealist excess

and accident which play into the 7 Arts artists' ideas of linking emotion to intellect and logic. See de Heusch, 48-51. 52. Pierre Bourgeois, 7 Arts 18 (March 20, 1927). 53. Victor Servranckx, "Mission de Tart," Savoir et

Beaute 4 (April 1931): 161, quoted in de Heusch, 14.

54. De Laval, trans. Brigid Grauman and quoted in

Lista, 254-55. 55. Bourgeois, preface to de Heusch, 11. 56. Vivier, 13. 57. In his interview in Van Loo, 163, he states that he based all his work in furniture especially on

these three concepts.

and abdomen, the figure as a whole is fused to and supporting her ground. The

dancer is shown holding up the blue block at top, and at the same time she

physically shares the diagonal plane that cuts across her waist. Baugniet expresses a dance that, through order and geometry, can be equilibrated into architecture.

A chapter of Baugniet s Essai sur la psychologie des formes is titled "La Forme dans la

danse." For him, dance is an ideal medium through which to analyze gestalt

theory relations of figure to ground and form to form, important in any art

form. He writes that "dance was born of a mathematical spirit. It will be a

grouping of gestures superposed onto the musical line and supported by light and color." He continues to say that the dancer is not a female body, but rather an intermediary for the measure of space and time.48 Not only does dance create

form, but "it is also the union of the three arts in time and in space: music,

sculpture, architecture, made perceptible by the mediation of a beautiful living

body."49 We can see how Baugniet s paintings and the Kaloprosopie woodcuts

depicting Akarova do not attempt to represent actual movement, as for example

a Futurist repeated contour, but rather they show movement's solid inextricabil

ity from the entirety of its environs. 50

Because it uses the body, dance comes closer to the avant-garde hopes for an interpenetration of sensation and thought in art. Although the Plastique Pure artists denounced Surrealism's lack of structure as overly sensory and anti

aesthetic, they were not opposed to feeling and sensation. In fact, they frequently used terms linked to lyricism and emotion in their writings.51 In 7 Arts, Bourgeois would publish on the balance between emotion and intellect;52 Servranckx wrote

that while Plastique Pure contained the static base of Constructivism, it had also

reached a stage of "ecstatic dynamism."53 Built as it was through a musical

framework and a moving body fused to geometric form, Akarova's dance seems

to have demonstrated both the unsentimental emotion and dynamism of her

artistic peers. The critic Roger de Laval saw that "Akarova provokes the spirit. Her dance is free of fabrication, free of myth, and self-sufficient, and attempts to

create a cerebral and psychological emotion of the intellect, with no false senti

mentality. Akarova dances and her movements, transformed into pure will, intel

ligence, psychology, and technique, have the special beauty of pure plastics."54 The element of temporality inherent in the medium of dance can do even

more to activate feeling in the spectator. An image once placed in time creates

expectation and desire that can be either achieved or thwarted by harmonious

visual combinations or dissonant contrasts. In practical terms, when watching a

moving form in dance, we follow a sequence in time and begin to expect, even

want something from it, so that the viewing cannot be passive, but must be felt.

The ideal creation of art, as set forth in the Plastique Pure manifesto in 7 Arts, should consist of three parts, the "lyrical aspect or inspiration, the technical

aspect or execution, [and] the social aspect or expression."55 This last quality, the

lived aspect of art, forges a most palpable connection between Akarova's pure

plastic dance and the interest of the Belgian avant-garde at 7 Arts. In order to

imbue aesthetics with social content, Baugniet and the others would rely on the

Constructivist requirement of utility in art. Baugniet's aesthetics, says his friend

Vivier, "is linked to emotive expression or, in absence of that, to practical use."56

Baugniet based his designs on three priorities: rationality, strength or resistance, and practicality.57 In 1929 he wrote his manifesto "Quelques Mises au point de

46 SUMMER 2009



58. Baugniet's manifesto, "Quelques Mises au

point de I'art contemporain," rep. in Van Loo, 215. 59. Vivier, 13. Human content might come from an object's perceived use, say an armchair, but also in the living rhythm present in that chair's

dynamic parallel and perpendicular forms. 60. Baugniet discusses his aesthetics in his inter view in Van Loo, 182. The bibliography to his 1963 Essai sur la psychologie des formes also gives

us a clue to his interest in gestalt and phenome nology theories; he includes references to Hegel, Henri Bergson, Albert Gleizes, Elie Faure, Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space, and Henri Focillon's La Vie des formes. 61. Paul Valery, "Philosophy of the Dance," 1936 lecture, rep. in What Is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism, ed. Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen (New York and Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1983), 62. 62. 7 Arts manifesto, 1922, quoted in de Heusch, 41. 63. Fernand Leger, "Notes sur la vie plastique," 7 Arts 20 (May 15, 1923).

Tart contemporairi," which involved the oft-cited "le beau, c'est l'utile" ("beauty is usefulness") and "la fonction cree la forme" (function creates form).58

Baugniet's early work as a decorator, designer, printer, and advertiser shows

that he had always linked aesthetics with utility and practical application, and his

furniture and interior and set designs solved the dilemma of an aesthetics that

was abstract, free of sentiment, but paradoxically filled with human content.59

Again, this is a particularly 7 Arts form of constructivism. Despite his use of

Russian Constructivist geometry and logic, Baugniet was never convinced of a

purely visual and formal artwork free of lived experience.60 It is because of this

desire for a lived and experienced art form that Akarova's dance becomes the most

precise representative of Baugniet's abstract ideal. In 1936 PaulValery gave his

"Philosophy of the Dance" lecture, in which he described the special "inner life"

of dance, a life force that "resonates" in order to communicate to spectators who

will feel "possessed by the rhythms so that we ourselves are virtually dancing."61 No matter how abstracted Akarova's sets or gestures became, the dancing body

will always create a kinesthetic connection between the audience and the art.

From the start, Akarova's home theaters were used to house meetings for

artists, which embedded her in the avant-garde of her time, but she was seen

as an artist outside restrictive labels. In the world of der moderne Tanz, Laban and

Wigman were proposing an autonomous art that expressed avant-garde ideals

through the dance medium's own unique qualities. Akarova, on the other hand,

took full advantage of collaboration. Beyond merely functioning as parallel arts, the other avant-garde arts were to her formal and structural models, so that her

dance may be seen as more than participating in avant-garde efforts, but as phys

ically representing them. Oskar Schlemmer of the Bauhaus might be compared in this way to Akarova?that is, as seeming to integrate the visual and structural

language of avant-garde art practice into his dance performances. Yet even

Schlemmer did not fully integrate the human body into his art, but instead relied on doll and machinelike costuming to activate the art-body connection. His is a more literal illustration of dance through art. Akarova, I argue, transposed the

visual and perceptual tools articulated by Baugniet and the 7 Arts group onto her

unmasked, breathing, and living body, and thereby translated their hope for art

into a lived experience.

From Embodied Art to Lived Vision

My aim in this essay has been to show how Akarova could paradoxically use an art associated with the body to show the 7 Arts artists a performance of their own

Plastique Pure mission of abstraction. The journal's manifesto states that "the artistic revolution and artistic order are indissolubly linked; civilization consists of dar

ing and ordering. . . . Art is active expression of civilization. It involves creating

an art in the present."62 Fernand Leger, an artist closely tied with the temporal arts of film and dance, would also express in 7 Arts, during its first year, that the artist must "live in the material."63 Dance is an expression of living in a body, ordered by movement; unlike painting or architecture, which endure, dance is also an art in the present tense.

Describing the ideal of purity in abstract art, Baugniet wrote that dance is the most pared-down of the arts?the dancer uses no tools or instruments to

47 art journal



64. Baugniet, Essai sur la psychologie, 61. 65. Fernand Divoire, Pour la Danse (Paris: Le Saxe,

1935), 18. 66. Robert, III. 67.1 agree with Robert, however, when he

declares that Akarova was able to convey the

"aesthetic intention" of the composer, since she is

producing something impacted by the structure

and material of the music. See Robert, 113. 68. While Sonia Delaunay, for instance, also

experimented in performance with similarly pat terned costumes and decor, her constructions

instead describe surfaces, flattening the dancer to

the backdrop. Akarova's connection to the cos tumes and decors, however, was elastic, as we've seen from responses to her performances: they reasserted her form and at the same time helped to animate it through the space. 69. Baugniet, Essai sur la psychologie, 62. 70. See ibid., 17, for more of Baugniet's notion of

grace. 71. Ibid., 62.

work her material.641 would argue that the beauty of dance for Baugniet is a

synthesis of the arts paradoxically constructed from the most simplified of medi ums. The prominent French dance critic of this period, Fernand Divoire, also

expressed this sense of the simplicity and living authenticity of dance in the

1920s, writing that "poets lie too much.. . .The painter too can lie.. . .With

dance, only one irreplaceable instrument, the human body; only one possibility for expression, the truth of the human body; only one possibility of rhythm, the truth of human rhythm, the rhythm of human blood pulsating, of human

breath, of the human race, of human love."65

What I have proposed is that Akarova's dance presented for the Plastique Pure

movement a human, living architecture. While other innovators in modern

dance were unseating music from its dominance over dance, Akarova instead

re-formed music in the service of dance. I have tried to show how her idea of

dance is movement fused with sound?and what is sound but webbing or waves

in space, an invisible network of communication extending between stage and

audience. She attempts not to represent or express the sound, but to make dance

that is one with it. In uniting her body with the sound, she is uniting her body to the space in which it exists. Yves Robert evocatively subtided his essay on

Akarova "The Gesture as a Sign of Sound Matter" (matiere sonore). In her dance

then, he found not an affective relation to music, but rather the material reality of sound in space.66 Akarova used her music as an invisible spatial architecture in

which to move. In doing so she enacts Robert and Baugniet's theory that dance

is "musique-architecture." Both the daughter and wife of architects, Akarova seems to

have felt herself directly involved in that vocation and a part of Belgium's archi

tectural history, for at the end of her life she chose to donate all her remaining costumes and sets to the Archives of Modern Architecture Museum in Brussels.

While Robert and others have described Akarova as searching for the

"essence" of music, her dance is truly avant-garde because her relationship to

music was physical; she was guided through space as if by the music's touch. The

body and sound danced together.67 Baugniet's costumes also joined the dance,

mimicking Akarova's movements and the backdrop, to unite her movements

with plastic form. The moving forms on her costumes and their echoes in the

decor, I believe, worked to stretch her movements from the body into the space between dancer and backdrop.68

Following Bergson, Baugniet also believed in the communication of an au

deld (or sublime) that dance can provide. Citing Bergson's notion of grace as a suc

cession of movements, one undulating into the next like a wave, Baugniet found

that the rhythmic performance of dance augments the sublime sense of grace by

allowing "the spectator to better anticipate these movements as if he himself had

become master of them."69 The rhythmic presentation of forms in succession is

what allows the spectator to take in the content as her own, to embody it as her

own vision and space. Grace?as Bergson describes it?contains within each

moment the direction of the succeeding moment, so that we have a sense of the

future in the present. For Baugniet, this ability to anticipate allows a dance audi

ence to feel as if time has been suspended and as if the future exists in the pre sent.70 The dancer's body moreover could assert the Belgian avant-garde's aim for

dynamic equilibrium, as it is always pulled by gravity, struggling to stay balanced

and upright against pressures from all sides?the body's equilibrium exists in a

48 SUMMER 2009



dynamic, living, and continually renewing state. So while dance offers the feeling that one has grasped the ephemeral, Akarova's performance went beyond this

perception to concretely express equilibrium and grace. In that relationship between dancer and spectator, Baugniet wrote, "Rhythm takes hold of our spirit and adjusts it... it dominates it so well that our individuality dissolves."71

Through the reconstruction here, we can imagine how the classically trained

dancer s Plastique Pure ideals led her to transform the sensuous, sensible body into

synthetic, aesthetic form in symbiosis with its environment, thereby allowing the viewer a palpable display of objectivity lived and felt. Akarova, I propose, offers new terrain through which to understand the experience of abstraction in

art?an experience beyond medium-specificity, toward sensation. In this case,

dance was a means for bringing the absorptive and aesthetic vision of the

Belgian avant-garde to life, through direct communication and bodily engage ment of its viewers.

Nell Andrew is an assistant professor of modern art history at the University of Georgia. Her current research highlights the intersection of avant-garde dance and the development of abstract painting in late nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Europe, including studies of the dancemakers LoVe Fuller, Valentine de Saint-Point, Mary Wigman, Sophie Taeuber, Oskar Schlemmer, and Akarova.

49 art journal



Living Art: Akarova and the Belgian Avant-Garde

Documents

Transcript of Living Art: Akarova and the Belgian Avant-Garde