And then, without fail, there appears among us a man like the rest of us in every way, but who conceals within himself the secret, inborn power of ‘vision’.
VASILY KANDINSKY1
The Russian avant-garde set out on an anthropological, as well as artistic, adventure, a project to change human consciousness, to re-found the feeling of humanity. The art it created proposed a new frame of perception, widening human possibilities. Avant-garde artists – Vasily Kandinsky, Mikhail Matiushin, Andrei Bely, Kazimir Malevich and many others – saw the task of art as being to form a new, ‘higher sensitivity’ or refined feeling. Artists expressed this ‘higher sensitivity’ as material and spiritual, as a unity. This, they believed, required heightened contact with ‘the real’, the kind of contact that the roots of the word ‘contact’ itself connoted, touching and being touched in animated movement. The meanings and metaphors of touching betokened belief that sensory art united the apparently opposed poles of spirit and body, of the ideal and the material, and of imagination and practice. This unity was certainly present in the case of the senses and arts of movement, in kinaesthesia and in kinesis, in sensing oneself move and in sensing others move. The power and resonance of metaphors such as ‘light breath’ or ‘bare feet’ (for the expression of unmediated contact with earth and the world) were as strong in Russian as in other languages. Moreover, there was considerable interest in using kinaesthesia for the creation of new sensations, sensations which were as yet unknown, by synthesizing them with visual feelings or by creating them in their own right. We can even go further and say that kinaesthetic sensations were important for artists in all aspects of their lives, since they danced, developed manual techniques, took part in sport and embraced.
In this chapter, we illuminate this search for a ‘higher sensitivity’ and the place that movement and the sense of movement had in it. As a first step, we discuss the fact of sensed movement, movement present as part of the subjective world, for the person who is herself moving and acting. We introduce the idea of the kinaesthetic intellect. The concern with touch, movement and physical action as the material of art is, for this purpose, secondary. The argument is that the subjective world of movement has its ‘reason’, its ‘intelligence’: the body has knowledge, which is ‘known’ in the sense of balance and movement and in gesture. It is shown to be possible for this ‘intellect’ to serve ‘higher’ aesthetic and human ends. In the second part of the chapter we turn to the story of Kandinsky’s introduction of abstraction into painting in order to illustrate how, in the actual practice of a new form of art, an outstanding Russian artist drew on the sense of movement. The final section discusses the phenomenon of synaesthesia, the fusion of different sensory modalities, which, for the Russian avant-garde, was very much tied up with the search for ‘the higher sensitivity’.
To introduce the notion of the kinaesthetic intellect, we turn to the life and work of the Futurists, of which there were Russian as well as Italian innovators and exponents. In Russia in 1914, in a memorable instance, Vasily Kamensky, a Leftist artist who was to welcome the Revolution, caused a scandal in Saint-Petersburg with his ‘ferro-concrete poems’. His Tango with Cows remains famous for its performance: bringing movement into the reading. Not coincidentally, Kamensky was one of Russia’s first aviators, carrying his own movement into the air.
The avant-garde world fostered artists who considered gesture to be a pre-aesthetic phenomenon; they took elements of bodily kinesis, or movement, as instruments for the artist, available to be turned into art in order to create a new sensibility. There was a precedent for this in Italy, where F. T. Marinetti proposed to create verses utilizing a kind of groping feeling. He then went further, having thought up his own art of touch. As is well known, the Italian Futurists welcomed the First World War, and Marinetti himself took part in the actual fighting. On the front, in the dark of the trenches, he recorded, he studied the recognition of things by groping, and as a result of this experience he thought up a new art, Tactilism. He brought out a manifesto for Tactilismo, the art of touching, in 1921, and, together with the artist Benedetta Cappa, he created a tactile tablet for ‘the travelling hand’. It was necessary to prepare people for the perception of tactile art and to develop their touch feeling, and for this Cappa (who married Marinetti) made tactile ‘scales’ and ‘panels’ from materials of different textures. A person groping over them was to report sensations and even orally improvise:
The Tactilist will announce the different tactile sensations that he experiences during the journey made by his hands. His improvisation will take the form of Words-in-Freedom, which have no fixed rhythms, prosody, or syntax. These improvisations will be succinct and to the point, and as nonhuman [as possible].
Besides his tablet for the hand, Marinetti thought up ‘tactile rooms’, in which the walls and floor were tactile panels, only of gigantic sizes. According to his thinking, in these rooms ‘mirrors, running water, stones, metals, brushes, low-voltage wires, marble, velvet, and carpets will afford different sensations to barefooted dancers of both sexes’.2
In such ways, touch and kinaesthesia appeared in Futurist practices not as a picture of movement seen by viewers, but as their sensation, their feeling experience, connected to their inner, subjective worlds. That movement may at one and the same time be highly public and highly personal, self-evident as it may seem, is of the utmost importance for the theory of knowledge and of art. The automatic proprioceptive system and conscious kinaesthetic life, together, have a central place in understanding the distinction between knowledge how (or ‘know-how’) and knowledge that. It was, we argue, an inestimable contribution of modernist artists to bring into the highbrow cultural world, filled as it was by class-consciousness, snobbery and conservatism, an appreciation of the depth, intelligence and range of knowledge how, knowledge tacit in the body and in what the body has learned. The Russian Formalists called this knowledge priem (technique). The cultivation and popularity of dance in the lives of the artists, as in the lives of other people, knowledge of technique, from ballet to the dance known as ‘turkey trot’, expressed in vital terms an appreciation of bodily knowledge. This has an interesting cultural history in its own right, and we shall return to it in our conclusion. It is also relevant to contemporary science, where there is much attention to understanding cognition as the activity of a person, with a socially embedded body, not cognition as the function of a mind or a brain or a computer. There is contemporary recognition of the thought of the muscles, in addition to recognition of conceptual thought, for which tactile-kinaesthetic sensitivity, or the feeling connected with any human activity, is basic. Indeed, the human embryo, to the extent that the embryo moves, already has this capacity. Kinaesthesia, it would seem, appears first relative to the other senses; cognition involving language is post-kinaesthetic.
A movement, the Russian physiologist Nikolai Bernshtein wrote, ‘reacts like a living being’.3 With these words, he exposed the central weakness of Ivan Pavlov’s ‘theory of higher nervous activity’: human movement cannot be reduced to unconditional or conditional stimulus-response relations; it is holistic, not mechanical. Since the 1960s, this argument, placed ‘in a drawer’ during the Pavlovian era in Soviet physiology, has given a large impetus to motor theories of cognition in neuroscience. Thanks to Bernshtein and others, movement became understood not as a mechanical event, but as action according to ‘the movement task’, indeed a solution of the task similar to an act of intelligence. Bernshtein introduced the notion that a ‘model of the desired future’ is necessary for the completion of an organism’s movement, a presentation of the wished-for result, the biological equivalent of anticipation and foresight.4 Bernshtein assessed such a capability as a bodily capacity, the kinaesthetic intellect. When his works became known in the West, after his death in 1966, they had a deep influence, for example, on the US psychologist Howard Gardner and on the French physiologist Alain Berthoz. Bernshtein and his followers made it possible to say that movement has not only its proper feeling but its proper logos, its reason. Thus our book is about the bodily-kinaesthetic logos of the avant-garde, the ‘sixth’ and, as it may be, the ‘highest’ of the senses.
With the kinaesthetic intellect, with the help of muscular feeling, whether conscious or unconscious, we perceive spatial relations and incorporate knowledge of them into the most elementary acts of thought and movement. Dancers are at the forefront of those who well know that thinking and muscles (in Russian, мышление and мышца, or, transliterated, myshlenie and myshtsa) are close to each other. A creator of postmodern dance in North America, Yvonne Rainer, thus presented a work which she called ‘The Mind Is a Muscle’.5 Its core piece, ‘Trio A’, lasts four and a half minutes and consists of a repeated series of simple, everyday movements; each part of the series has equal significance and each movement follows without interruption. The movements are completed in an unhurried fashion, under control, strongly; they proceed in real time and with real weight. The dancers do not for one moment reduce force or lose energy, displaying the same kind of endurance as long-distance runners. According to the choreographer’s design, the viewer becomes, as it were, a witness to the work of reason, not of a machine but of the human dancer. The operation of thought is in this case fulfilled by means of the body.
Kinaesthesia is not only awareness that accompanies the means to regulate a person’s own movement and connection with the world but, many people would claim, the basis for understanding the movement of others. Already in 1913, the dance critic Hans Brandenburg had asserted that ‘the spectator can only really participate actively when the most complete and most concentrated optical impressions urge him to inner participation, provided that he also possesses a trained corporeal awareness’.6 This built on the then much-discussed, and now revived, theory of empathy. The argument was not so much about the literal, physical imitation of movement (like a reflex shuddering at the sight of one person shaking another) as it was about the existence of a certain kind of kinaesthetic experience with cognitive content. In the 1930s, John Martin called this ‘metakinesis’: if kinesis is physical movement, then its mental parallel is metakinesis, the psychological phenomenon accompanying movement.7 Without metakinesis, Martin stressed, the viewer, at the sight of a ballerina balancing on one point would receive no greater pleasure than from the contemplation of a little feather soaring in the air. (Personally, we rather think the feather might give much pleasure.) The viewers applaud the ballerina, he argued, because they recognize the force of the weight, firmly supported on the ground, as their own. Also in the 1930s, the Russian actress and researcher on dance, Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva-Blok, wrote: ‘The perception of dance penetrates deeper into consciousness than the visual and oral impressions alone; with them are combined much more firmly remembered and incorporated motor impressions.’8
Creative people at the beginning of the twentieth century, as later, were well familiar with the muscular sense, by intuition if not as an elaborated science. ‘Work is possible for me only in the open air,’ pronounced Andrei Bely, ‘and eye and muscles participate in the work. I tap out and cry out my rhythm in the fields; with waving arms; all the sought for dynamics in the contraction of muscles.’9 Bely (the pseudonym of Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev), to whom we shall frequently return, was a significant participant in the Symbolist direction in new art, contributing both poetry and a major novel, Petersburg (first appearing in book form in 1916), well known in translation as well as in Russian. He became a member of Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy movement and joined the emigration after the Revolution, before returning to Russia in the early 1920s.10 Showing a similar sensibility, his fellow poet, Aleksandr Blok, proposed to listen to the music of the Revolution ‘by all the body, by all the heart, by all of consciousness’.11 Blok, whose poetry was and still is revered, was a very distinctive voice, welcoming the Revolution, if in almost apocalyptic terms.
Dance, movement and kinaesthesia became part of the avant-garde project of life-creation, consciousness of new being and the introduction of art into life. In Russia, with its autocratic tsarist system and deeply conservative religious and administrative institutions, any such project was in its nature radical, potentially revolutionary. The social and political context fostered grandiose conceptions of art, conceptions more at home in a philosophical anthropology of ‘the new man’ than in polite society. For this reason, inspired by Isadora Duncan – ‘a contemporary Bacchante’, the first swallow of that ‘artistic humanity’ about which Wagner and Nietzsche had dreamed – intellectuals turned to free dance as to a new religion.12 Abandoning ballet and ball dances, the highly rule-bound disciplines of movement enjoyed by the social establishment, they were inspired by Dionysian dance. In the Russian language, there are two different words for dance: one, tanets, derived from the German Tanz, is for a formalized, controlled way of dancing; the other, plyaska, denotes a free and exuberant dance coming from the individual creative soul. Plyaska, in addition, connotes the dance of a soul of Russian character, as, famously, in the scene where Tolstoy, in War and Peace, portrayed Natasha dancing after the day’s hunting.
The consciousness of intellectuals who, taking up dance and other practices of movement, like eurythmics and gymnastics, opened up to their own embodiment and the embodied nature of art, changed. A number of the most famous, including the revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, were supple and athletic, danced, engaged in sport and appeared on the stage and in films. Bely was famously agile. The stage director Vsevolod Meyerhold himself moved excellently and, teaching his actors to move, developed biomechanics (which we shall discuss in chapter 6). This was at the forefront of establishing kinaesthesia as the basis for training actors. Thus the artists of the avant-garde fully valued the semantic potential of the body to become a source of scientific and everyday metaphor and of new conceptions of movement and rhythm in art and life. They did not just value these things, but began to use them: Boris Eichenbaum wrote about ‘the muscular movements of history’, while Viktor Shklovsky compared art with ‘the touch of a world’ and Sergei Eisenstein brought into film-making the ‘delight of moving bodies’.13 As we shall see, sensibility to movement entered into the arts of writing, painting, the theatre, the circus, sport and – hugely important for the spread of the sensibility through society – the new popular dances of the twentieth century, spectacularly reshaped in street-dance and other dances of contemporary culture.
Before we turn to the new forms of dance in Russia, however, we extend the discussion of the heightening of sensibility, correlated with the widening of the forms of artistic expression, which were such prominent ideals of new art works. As we have noted, autocratic and then revolutionary conditions in Russia fostered utopian, or at least idealistic, writing about a dreamed-of and longed-for future, in which ‘higher’ men and women would redeem the suffering and limited spiritual, moral and aesthetic consciousness of the actual times in which people lived. Mystical traditions within the Orthodox Church, with ancient roots, fed into this, along with the deep respect accorded to the great Russian poets and writers of the nineteenth century. This idealism became part of modernist projects, most clearly perhaps in the work of one of the principal pioneers of abstraction in art, Kandinsky. As Kandinsky’s painting is so well known, discussing it provides a useful entrée to the points to be made about the sense of movement, points much less familiar.
Any discussion of ‘higher sensitivity’ or higher feeling must acknowledge the looming shadow of Nietzsche. The main part of his brilliant, aphoristic writings first appeared in the 1880s, and they became widely known a decade or so later and had enormous impact. His work was then translated into a number of European languages, including Russian (though many Russian intellectuals, having lived or studied abroad, would have read German). For young people taking part in or attracted to artistic innovation, he was the philosopher, because he turned philosophy from an academic pursuit into a living practice, a practice rejecting bourgeois and conservative norms for a purer, ‘higher’ recognition of the forces of ‘life’.14 The medium of Nietzsche’s expression – the poetry, the self-consciously exaggerated language, the intensely individualist idioms, the venomously sharp dissection of hypocrisy, cliché and falseness – set new standards for the intellectual and artistic voice.
Nietzsche’s language seduced. Infatuated with Nietzsche, Russian intellectuals prophesied the transformation of life through art. The Symbolist poet and art historian Viacheslav Ivanov even elaborated a conception of Dionysianism which identified the roots of art in ancient Dionysian mysteries. In the Russian setting, Nietzsche’s message, that there must be a ‘transvaluation of values’, merged with native traditions of idealist and mystical longing for ‘a new man’ (for whom Zarathustra became a model) as the agent of a new age for humanity. Utopian themes were common, unexceptional, in Russia, where political engagement was excluded. They appeared alike on the revolutionary Left, in anarchist circles and among the members of the conservative, finely educated elite. Very significantly, for our purposes, Nietzsche repeatedly and graphically drew on dance as a metaphor of ‘transvalued’ life. Dionysian dance, in his language, recaptured the wholeness of being. Body and soul are one in the dance: ‘Lift up your legs, too, you fine dances: and better still, stand on your heads!’15 Seekers after ‘higher’ things drew the obvious conclusion. Through dance, they would both embrace life and reach a deeper understanding of what life means: to dance is to be alive, to be alive is to dance.
The hope that a special, higher sense, not the intellect, would open the secrets of the world is often to be glimpsed in the writings of poets and philosophers. The younger contemporary of the Symbolist poets, Iakov Golosovker, a translator into Russian of Sappho and of Nietzsche, wrote about ‘a discovery that will shock’. This discovery, which ‘existed of old in the intellectual experience of the ancient philosophers, soon, like lightning, will strike in the very system of our knowledge and in our consciousness’.16 In such contexts, there was talk about inner sensitivity, which we liken to a sixth sense, and about mystical perception. We point to the way that muscular feeling, kinaesthesia, became the empirically verified, scientifically validated and artistically exemplified embodiment of this ‘higher sensitivity’. Reference to kinaesthetic sense thus encompassed both body and spirit, signalling the wholeness of the person and the unification of the temporal and the eternal. Golosovker himself related to this ‘higher sensitivity’ through what he took to be the work of perception, work fulfilling a cognitive function. The work of perception-creative imagination is, he proposed, completed unconsciously, bypassing the conscious intellect. ‘The code of inner senses is not yet declared. It is perceived by us only dimly and at the edge of uncertainty, and it agitates rather than calms us: the spirit disturbs the body, the body the spirit.’ When this code becomes clear, our external senses will have to yield place, and we will give priority not to the external apparatus but to our inner senses which biologists and philosophers have not yet fully understood.17 Then, the poet believed, unmediated knowledge of the spirit, or ‘the absolute of the creative imagination’, will become accessible.
These beliefs stemmed from Theosophy and other kinds of mysticism popular with the early twentieth-century philosophical and artistic intelligentsia. The Polish-born eurythmist, Jeanne Salzmann, for example, argued that ‘experiencing a pure sensation within the physical body can lead to a spiritual experience. We penetrate the world of vibrations, of fine substances.’ She continued: ‘We begin to see the poverty of all our feelings and the need for a feeling that is more pure, more penetrating.’18 She was a student of both Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, the Swiss musician and music educator, and Georgy Gurdjieff, the Russian-Armenian mystic. ‘A world of vibrations’: such phrases, along with words summoning-up the aura of rhythm, were a mainstay of reflective commentary on new art forms. If obviously associated with music and hearing, vibration and rhythm were equally qualities felt in the body, the sensation of which, there was precedent to consider, was ‘deep’ or ‘primitive’. This is hardly in need of exemplification in our age of amplified electronic beat. But it was well understood also in the nineteenth century that the arts of gesture, rhetoric and poetry deployed rhythmic patterns. In the lines of Stéphane Mallarmé, rhythm itself had become the subject, creating a kind of abstract poetry. Mallarmé also radically re-thought typeface and the space of the printed page, thus relating the word to space and to eye movement in innovative use of the senses in art. The language of vibrations was also a feature of the writings of those, like the Theosophists (led by Madame Blavatsky) and Anthroposophists (the followers of Rudolf Steiner), who strained after universal understanding, to be achieved by bringing the vibrations of the human soul into harmony with the vibrations of the cosmos.
In the decades before and after 1900, the language of energy, force, vibration and rhythm had a large place in the overlapping ways of thought of science and esoteric or mystical belief of people looking for something beyond material existence, something speaking to a longing for purpose and guidance in the universe. The vogue for spiritualism, found at all levels in society, spoke to this: members of the Royal Society of London, such as William Crookes and Oliver Lodge, searched for forces beyond those already known to science, while the bereaved used the force of mediums to commune with the dead. Physics before Einstein (who published his paper on special relativity in 1905) was preoccupied with the aether, a supposed medium, filling space, transmitting the wave-like, vibratory form of light and electro-magnetic forces.19 The Nobel Prize-winning physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald build himself a country house near Leipzig which he named ‘Haus Energie’, as a sign that it would be a place where physical and human spiritual forces united in one worldview. (This worldview was called ‘Monism’, which Ostwald took over from the evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel, who had a very wide audience, including Isadora Duncan.) Subjective knowledge, in the form of phenomenal awareness of force (the quality experienced in the effort to move and in the resistance to movement), was implicit in these beliefs and hopes. The whole language of ‘the forces of nature’, as well as belief in the causal activity of spirit, was dependent on the perceptual dimension. In moving, it then seemed, a person had unmediated awareness of participation in the movement of the world. This sensibility, we suggest, was open to a range of interpretations, from those of a physicist formulating thermodynamics, to the esotericist communing naked, dancing, with the trees of the forest – as dancers, including Rudolf Laban, did at Monte Verità in the Swiss Ticino.
The idea that the underlying energy of spiritual and natural forces is, in essence, one and the same has a long history (which included strands of Newtonian science) in European culture. It was also prevalent in a number of cultures from around the world (for example, it informed the Melanesian category of mana). In nineteenth-century Europe, the idea reappeared with a secular and materialist colouration in the natural philosophy of energy and of evolution, and it did so in ways that included a body of commentary about the relation of forces to the senses of effort, movement and resistance. As a result, when modernist artists took up the language of vibrations, they took up a language resonant with imagination for the place, known through sensitivity to movement or rhythm, of the individual soul in the cosmos. Under the hugely disruptive conditions of modernity, the (at times extremely rapid) spread of industrialization and urbanization, and manifest transformation of the landscape by new technology (the railways of the 1840s, the electricity and telephone lines at the end of the century) and by many miles of bourgeois and slum housing, it was a natural and much-taken step to look for hope and healing in the restoration of connection between human movement and the movement of nature. New art forms often participated in this, sometimes by re-imagining the harmony of energies that the Ancient Greeks were supposed to have possessed, sometimes by seeking in the aesthetic qualities of line, colour, form and rhythm themselves the qualities expressive of a deeper truth or harmony. Duncan’s dance exemplified the former, Kandinsky’s abstract art the latter.
It might be thought possible to understand these concerns with the harmonies of nature, spirit and art to have been culturally and politically reactionary, a throwback to earlier ages rather than modern. This, however, imposes an ideal of what modernism should have been, influenced by later anti-humanist formalism in aesthetic theory, rather than attending to what artists actually thought and did. Many Russian modernists were profoundly idealist, and they sought in subjective experience of force, intrinsic to muscular feeling, ordered in vibrations and rhythm, an expressive route to ‘higher sensitivity’ and a deeper life. They looked to art to perform kinaesthetic feeling. This was certainly true among many of the dancers discussed in the next chapter, and it was clearly true for Kandinsky. Artists strained for connections between colour, sound and form, trying not only to open new artistic metaphors and thoughts but also to shape new sensitivity. Their purpose was to transform, even to redeem, their lives and the life of the world.
Kandinsky vividly recalled the sensual delight he had as a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old boy squeezing oil paint from tubes:
One squeeze of the fingers, and out came these strange beings, one after the other, which one calls colors – exultant, solemn, brooding, dreamy, self-absorbed, deeply serious, with roguish exuberance, with a sigh of release, with a deep sound of mourning, with defiant power and resistance, with submissive suppleness and devotion, with obstinate self-control, with sensitive, precarious balance.20
As Dee Reynolds argued, citing this passage, one can see at work the imagination of an artist who would, from ‘inner necessity’, have the colours of the palette dictate the form of painting. Kandinsky also referred to colours showing ‘power and resistance’ and ‘balance’ – ‘precarious’, like a tight-rope walker – metaphors taken from the sensed movement of the body. For Kandinsky, ‘everything “dead” trembled’; everything dead was alive, and the sign of this aliveness was movement. Thus, when he created abstract paintings, line and colour literally animated the picture: a successful picture ‘vibrates’. As he succinctly concluded: ‘movement is life, life is movement’.21 If empathy with ‘dead’ colour paralleled the aesthetic theory of Lipps, sensibility in relation to movement, and balance, implicitly gave voice to accounts of kinaesthesia. Kandinsky also intended colour and line on the plane of his pictures to create movement, to draw the spectator inside the painting and make the spectator’s imagination move backwards and forwards in the dimension of depth and across the surface, from side to side and up and down. The artist himself did not just appreciate movement in painting but took upon himself the task of giving movement to the spectator. This, in Kandinsky’s cosmos, was tantamount to giving ‘life’. He retrospectively attributed inspiration for these beliefs to the carved wooden ornamentation of peasant houses, which ‘moved’ him while travelling in the northern Russian province of Vologda: ‘They taught me to move within the picture, to live in the picture.’22
The mission of the artist, Kandinsky believed, was to open people’s eyes wider, to intensify sound, to free and develop all the senses. In the future, the ruder feelings, such as fear, joy and sorrow, will attract people less and less; the artist will wake up finer senses that now have no name. His colleague in Russia, the composer and artist Mikhail Matiushin, introduced an understanding of ‘widened perception’ as the affective equivalent of ‘widened consciousness’, the term used in Theosophy.23 Matiushin, with his wife, Elena Guro, was a key figure in a Futurist group in Saint-Petersburg just before the First World War, and he was preoccupied by the search for what he called ‘the fourth dimension’. Both Kandinsky and Matiushin were fond of speaking about ‘the inner sound’, ‘the fine subject’, which must change the substance of art, art which in its portrayal of objective subjects had become too ‘material’. They both also described vibrations as the source of contemplative works of art. Kandinsky understood music, which gives birth to vibrations and hence to pure movement in the listener, as the model form of abstract art. If music or painting excludes instrumentality, he argued, then it turns into abstract existence, pure sound, and gives rise not to banal joy or sadness, but to complex spiritual vibrations. Borrowing such language from Theosophy and Anthroposophy, they represented the transfer of ‘vibrations’ from artist to viewer, through music or painting, as a psycho-physiological process, spiritual and material at one and the same time. From music and painting, the understanding extended into the worlds of theatre and dance. Mikhail Chekov, a famous actor (and nephew of the writer), said that
the actor’s body can be an optimum value for him only when motivated by an unceasing flow of artistic impulses; only then can it be more refined, flexible, expressive and, most vital of all, sensitive and responsive to the subtleties which constitute the creative artist’s inner life. For the actor’s body must be molded and re-created from within.24
This, we would add, brought the play of an actor close to dance.
When, in 1914, the young poet Mayakovsky set out finally to free art, that is, to detach art from bourgeois investment in the subject matter of art as common-sense realism, he recommended dance as the means: ‘From the painting of camels, the animals loaded for the transportation “of the common sense of the subject”, we must make a herd of cheerful bare-footed girls turn around in a passionate and clear dance.’25 By that time, he had had the chance to view and picture a number of new dance forms. The new dance positioned itself in opposition to ballet, by underlining the absence of pictorial representation and sentimentality. Dancers changed the old language of feelings, of joys and fears, into terms evocative of natural science. Like scientists, they spoke about vibrations, space, dynamism, force and energy. In Duncan’s words, creating a dance she always awaited a push, coming from the centre or source in the body: ‘when I had learned to concentrate with all my force on this one Centre, I found that thereafter when I listened to music the rays and vibrations of the music streamed to this one fount of light within me.’26
Kandinsky appropriately recognized the reform of artistic movement born in Duncan’s dance when she turned to ‘Greek dance’ and achieved ‘free’ dance, which was dance – very importantly – without a subject. Like Duncan, he considered the language of classical ballet obsolete. The ballet of the nineteenth century, without fail, conveyed feeling and told a tale. Ballet, which served ‘only as the expression of material feelings (love, fear, etc.)’, Kandinsky considered, ‘is today understood by only a few, and still loses its clarity’, and it is clearly unfit for the future. It is, he went on, necessary to change to abstract movement; only then ‘will we soon be able to sense the inner value of every movement and inner beauty will replace outer beauty’.27 He then drew on his vision of the inner movement of the living cosmos: ‘Absolutely simple movement for an unknown purpose, in itself, already produces meaningful, secret and creative impressions. And this exactly, in as much as its mysterious external, practical purpose remains. Then its influence is the influence of a pure sound.’28 According to the artist’s conviction, this principle must, and will, underlie the construction of new dance, dance that stresses the inner value of movement. New dance uses every meaning, all the inner thought of movement in time and space, not in narrative. Kandinsky anticipated that the search for the abstract meaning of movement, either separate from music or in combination with it, would lead to the creation of a new kind of dance – ‘new ballet’.
In the 1920s, Kandinsky made sketches of the Expressionist dancer Gret Palucca. In one of them, he captured her figure in the midst of a jump, with arms and legs spread out to the sides to form a geometrical figure, a five-pointed star, shining in the air. ‘In dance the whole body, in modern dance every finger, draws lines with a very vivid expression … the dancer’s entire body, right down to the fingertips, is at every moment a continuous linear composition.’29 By contrast, his colleague, the architect and participant in the avant-garde, Iakov Chernikhov, in ‘linear compositions’ sought to impose his own character on living dynamism, to give ‘a condition to our graphical solutions, when the impression of motion, striving, displacement, rocking, instability and some form of participating vibrations, is experienced’. His graphical constructions ‘transfer to a stronger and finer form striving, motion, vibration, that is, something “living”, inherent to life’.30
Artists intended the new dance, together with music and abstract painting, to form a staged composition, as Kandinsky called his variant of the total work of art, his vision of das Gesamtkunstwerk. In was in this context that artists questioned the meaning for art of muscular movement, kinaesthesia. The specialist experimental and clinical literature about the biological character of kinaesthesia little, if at all, informed the artists’ knowledge. As a sixth sense, kinaesthesia therefore remained, in Russian creative work, close to intuition and the mental capacities thought sensitive to mysterious and hidden forces of spiritual and cosmic being. Kinaesthetic sensibility was thus a natural candidate, along with intuition and imagination, to become the route to ‘higher sensitivity’. There was also a good deal of contemporary appreciation of the place of kinaesthesia in synaesthesia, the fusion of sensations from different senses, and of the potential of synaesthetic art forms also to foster ‘the higher sensitivity’.
The project to create a new ‘synthesized’ sensitivity by combining several kinds of senses is at least in part attributable to Richard Wagner and his idea of ‘the synthesis of art’. By creating ‘the total work of art’, Wagner wanted to return art to what he supposed was its ancient power, with the strength of myth. Ancient Greek tragedy, with its unity of music, song and drama, served for him as the prototype of das Gesamtkunstwerk, to which he hoped to give birth in his operas. The artists of the avant-garde took over and, in different ways, modernized the Wagnerian idea. With this in the background, in Germany the founders of the Bauhaus created works crossing the borders of different arts within the sphere of buildings and objects in daily life. From this developed much of the modern understanding of design. In Moscow, after the Revolution, the Institute of Art Culture (INKhUK) similarly came into existence, in part for the study of ‘synthesized art’.
The avant-garde interest in uniting the arts, like the interest in synaesthesia, uniting the senses, presupposed that a synthesis of the various arts differs qualitatively from a simple sum.31 Just as a chemical synthesis gives rise to qualitatively new properties, the synthesis of separate arts, or of sensations, it was believed, creates a completely new work and another sensitivity. As the new sensitivity was thought to be higher than any one of the individual sensory feelings from which it had been created, it appeared the means to approach nearer to the world of the extra-sensory, the intangible and the invisible. Such belief connected avant-garde artists to the Wagnerian project: the return of art to its other-worldly, transcendental purpose, engendering the capacity ‘to see’, to be at one with being and with myth. Thus the idea of the synthesis of art, and of synaesthesia, which a modern researcher, Bulat Galeev, has called ‘synaesthetic alchemy’, was part of the striving of Symbolists ‘to grasp in ruptured words the misty entrance of other worlds’, as Aleksandr Blok wrote.32 This project, to open the way to a ‘higher sensitivity’ and to sensory consciousness of symbols, went back at least to Baudelaire’s poem, ‘Correspondances’ (1857). Rimbaud had responded with his poem, ‘Voyelles’, about the coloured perception of vowel sounds, and artistic interest in this continued for a long time.33 The composer Aleksandr Scriabin created an electric circuit with different-coloured light bulbs, which illuminated in response to his own composition. This can still to be seen in the house where he lived in Moscow. The Expressionist poet Ippolit Sokolov, who promoted a radical idea of the human machine in the 1920s, referred specifically to the sixth sense, citing ‘the coloured sound of A. Rimbaud, or the lighted scents of Baudelaire, or the tasting sounds of Huysmans’.34
Synaesthesia certainly interested scientists, especially those engaged in studying visual perception. We need to note only that there was intensive experimental and theoretical discussion of colour and of spatial perception in the second half of the nineteenth century, and this research included a detailed examination of the manner in which the sense of movement of the eyeballs fuses retinal sensations and thus makes possible visual cognition (which the physiologist Hermann Helmholtz considered involves ‘unconscious inference’). Such work implicated a kind of synaesthesia of movement and visual sense in normal vision. By contrast, other research focused on exceptional forms of synaesthesia, treating them as if they were pathological. This made a language of ‘perverted sensibility’ available to critics of the works of the avant-garde. When Velimir (Viktor Vladimirovich) Khlebnikov, an early and (in Russia) influential poet and playwright taking both Futurist and Symbolist directions, talked of ‘the blue colour of the cornflower … ceaselessly changing, passing through a region of rupture, mysterious to us, to people, turning into the sound of the cry of a cuckoo or the cry of a child’, one commentator dismissed this as ‘foggy explanations of the phenomenon of synaesthesia’. This sacrificed Khlebnikov’s intent, since he described not simply a combination of sensations, but a strategy to achieve closeness to ‘another world’ through a ‘region of rupture’ mysterious to people.35 If, following Galeev, we call the correspondences Baudelaire drew between sensations ‘vertically’ or ‘deeply’ connected, in contrast to the ‘horizontal’ connections habitual in perception, then we have to recognize that the Symbolists did not strive to set up ‘horizontal’ connections.36 For them, sensory correspondences were valuable precisely because they opened up the radiance of the symbol, the ‘vertical’ measure, the way into the depths and heights, the sensations of another world. Yet, remembering the gender associations of vertical and horizontal (coming together in the cross), familiar to someone like Kandinsky, the vertical understood as male, the horizontal as female, we may be wary of such language.
Kandinsky carried out experiments with sensory synthesis of different kinds (contemporary psychologists would speak of ‘different modalities’) in 1910 in Munich. In this project, he joined with the Ukrainian-born composer Thomas von Hartmann and a dancer, later well known, but then only starting out, Alexander Sakharoff. ‘I myself had the opportunity of carrying out some small experiments abroad with a young musician and a dancer,’ Kandinsky noted.
From several of my watercolors, the musician would choose one that appeared to him to have the clearest musical form. In the absence of the dancer, he would play this watercolor. Then the dancer would appear, and having been played this musical composition, he would dance it and then find the watercolor he had danced.37
Already in the years 1908–09, Kandinsky had thought of adding the language of movement to the language of music and colour. In his abstract ballet, Yellow Sound, geometrical figures decorated in different colours moved around the stage to the music, also composed by Hartmann. It was proposed to stage a performance in the Munich Artistic Theatre, but the project remained unrealized. Much later however, in 1928, Kandinsky succeeded in presenting in Dessau, in the Bauhaus theatre, another abstract ballet, to the music of Mussorgsky’s Pictures in an Exhibition. It had no subject in the conventional way, and it did not reproduce the themes of ‘Pictures in an Exhibition’. Abstract figures in the ballet, performers dressed in abstract costumes, danced, moved in different directions, came together, then moved away from each other. Earlier than this, in the Belorussian town of Vitebsk, the group UNOVIS had shown a Suprematist ballet. Its author was Malevich’s student, Nina Kogan, and the personages wore the black square, the red square and the circle. The performers, dressed in Suprematist costumes, moved these figures about the stage. The figures pictured a cross, then a star, then an arc.38
In the same year, in 1920, in Moscow, Kandinsky’s initiative resulted in the creation of the Institute of Art Culture. One of its first research projects was to interrogate the synthesis of sensations. Kandinsky himself composed the questionnaire, and he included questions about synaesthesia that took it for granted that synthetic effects include the sense of movement:
How, for example, how does a triangle appear to you – doesn’t it seem to you that it moves, where, doesn’t it seem to you more sharp-minded than the square; isn’t the sensation from a triangle similar to the sensation from a lemon, and even more similar to the song of a canary? And in a triangle or circle, which geometrical form is similar to vulgarity, to talent, to fine weather?
Do you consider it possible to express some of your feelings graphically, that is, with some straight or bent lines or some geometrical figures? … Try to do this and occupy yourself with such exercises.
How does colour act on you: yellow, blue, red? Which of them acts more strongly, and is it pleasant or unpleasant? Is there something unbearable for you in these colours? Especially enchanting? Which of them seems to you strong, dense, active, moving (to which side), flat, deep, unruly, stable?39
As the language of the questionnaire shows, the reduction of art to abstract elements and their combinations was not, for Kandinsky, the reduction of perception. On the contrary, it proposed a new horizon of sensitivity, or, as the Theosophists (with whom Kandinsky was in sympathetic contact) said, ‘widened consciousness’ and ‘widened perception’. The sense of movement was built into the whole project, bridging psycho-physiological and intuitive perception.
The State Institute of Art Culture (GINKhUK) was estab-lished in Petrograd (the Russianized name for Saint-Petersburg once war had been declared with Germany) at the same time as the Moscow INKhUK. It also carried out research in connection with Kandinsky’s many parallel projects. Matiushin, who was the guardian of the idea of ‘the widened look’, headed the section on ‘Organic Culture’ in GINKhUK. He held that every artist, if not in general every person, is obliged to develop a ‘higher sensitivity’. A really observant person sees not only with the eyes but with the organs of the body, doing this directly without adaptation, in the way, for example, that people born blind perceive the world. Matiushin understood the precious quality of the dispersed look of dreamers, poets and artists: only they can grasp the universe as a single and indivisible whole. He himself began to practise such a dispersed, widened perception of the world, which turned out to be over-flowing and all-embracing. His co-workers experimented with vision ‘at the back of the head’ and with ‘widening’ this vision to 360 degrees, for example, by drawing an unknown landscape when blindfolded. Matiushin called his theory zor-ved, which abbreviated zrenie-vedanie (sight-knowledge), and, possibly playing with the words ‘sight-vision’, suggesting that vedat’ (to know) has a larger part than videt’ (to see). In the theory and practice of zor-ved, movement had a large role:
The energy of colour and form immeasurably rises in movement. From a still body, the eye, widely energetic, receives the maximum of colour. In forceful movement of the body, the eye can receive all the intensity of the colour-form. These outcomes, coming from a deeply experienced [witnessed] threefold dimensionality, may set up the beginning and basis of a fourth perpendicular [that is, a new dimension of sense].40
Somewhat later, there were similar experiments in Russian science on the development of unusual sensitivity and the formation of new organs of sense. The Soviet psychologist A. N. Leont’ev, using trial subjects, studied the differentiation of colour with the help of the palm of the hand, not the eye, thereby exploring the ability ‘to see’ with the skin. These experiments took place in the Institute of Psychology in Moscow and in the Khar’kov Pedagogical Institute during the years 1936–39. In a way, this was the most radical practical widening of perception. The key to the possession of such a wonderful skill, in Leont’ev’s opinion, was, indeed, activity: experimental subjects began to differentiate colour only under conditions that produced micro-movements of the hand. Leont’ev, with his students, carried out one further series of such experiments, on the training of high-pitched hearing, and they found that the main condition for the successful differentiation of relatively high sounds was inner song, active participation of the muscles of the larynx.41 Research appeared to show the intimate role of movement sense in wider perceptual possibilities.
In the mid-1920s, Matiushin’s students and co-workers, Boris Ender and his sister Maria Ender, of the Section of Organic Culture in GINKhUK, began to lead the classes in a Petrograd dance studio, Heptachor. We shall discuss this studio in the next chapter, but here we make the point that the Enders taught the students drawing and colouring, and also ‘widened perception’. Their purpose was to intensify the colour and spatial senses of the dancers. In the words of the founder of Heptachor, Stefanida Rudneva, ‘our students studied to find the dynamic axis, the tension and stress, in the form of branches of different species of trees: at first with the appearance of geometrical straight lines, then with the volume of the form of the branches’. The students acquired the skill of perceiving space not only in front of them but also around them, taking a circular view ‘widened’ to 360 degrees. Together with Boris Ender, the students similarly created tension based on ‘the tactile feeling for space’. This tension helped to achieve freer movement and reciprocity with partners, making it possible ‘to wield together separate bodies into one collective, inseparable whole which moves’.42 The experiments on spatial perception were done with the eyes shut. One task was to come up to the wall, stopping at a precise distance (not further than a metre away); another was to gather in the centre of the room without bumping into other people. Alternatively, a person was required to go towards the wall, passing between other people without touching them. Yet another task was to take a position exactly in the middle between two other persons; doing this, Rudneva reported a vivid and unique sensation of an equal attraction from both sides.43
When Boris Ender moved to Moscow, Maria Ender began to lead the activity in Heptachor in Petrograd. Moreover, all the Ender brothers and sisters – Boris, Maria, Georgii and Kseniia – had taken part in performances which Matiushin arranged in his house on Peschanaya Street. Here, in the winter of 1921, Matiushin decided to demonstrate in performance ‘different systems for the understanding of volume in the artistic treatment of the human body’. The first picture exhibited ‘the one-dimensional line of the understanding of volume in Egypt’. Kseniya Ender performed, imitating a fresco depicting a priestess: ‘With slow movements, with severe turns in the flat plane, the woman’s figure of the priestess approached the god and began to dance ceremoniously, all the time severely restraining movement in one plane.’44 In her ‘Sketches of Individual Movement (Dependent on the Straight Body)’, Maria Ender later consolidated the results of research on the axis of movement which Boris had carried out with Heptachor.
Maria Ender’s own experiments in the studio touched on sounds and movements. The results of this were then recreated in watercolour and pencil paintings and drawings by a member of Heptachor, Natalia Enman. She drew different interpretations of the sounds the dancers had differentiated. She annotated her sketches: ‘The sound of trees “made deciduous” from strong wind’, ‘The blow on a frying-pan’, and ‘The sound of groats being poured’.45 After experiments with sound perceptions, the students began, analogously to ‘widening of vision’, to speak about the ‘widening of hearing’, achieving a fuller perception of music through movement. They also tried ‘to transpose into movement’ the colour of sound, the sound timbre of different instruments and the human voice, and they experimented with ‘the sound content of foreign, often not understood speech’.46
In 1926, Maria and Boris Ender, together with Heptachor, carried out a series of experiments on the interaction between the colour of a material (sand, linoleum, fabric and glass) and ‘tactile impressions (with eyes closed)’. In other trials, participants were asked to sense the quality of movement, saying, for example, whether it was quick or slow, straight or curving. Interesting images were created, which Enman recorded for the dancers in her drawings and annotations: ‘Enclosed space. Space broken into pieces by corners, quiet, quick chop.’ They even tried to unite taste sensations with movement. Earlier, in quite another setting, Rainer Maria Rilke (The Sonnets to Orpheus) had exclaimed:
A little music, a stamping, a humming: –
here are the warm, mute maidens, coming
to dance the taste of experienced fruit.
Dance the orange. Who can forget it.47
Unfortunately, Heptachor could not carry out experiments with the taste of the orange, as Rilke had imagined in his sonnet, as the fruit was simply not on sale.
‘Out with prejudices!’ This was Iakov Golosovker’s call in his book about the imaginative Absolute. ‘It is time for science to anatomize “the mystical”, in order to read through its sub-text, using its favoured methods, and not to decide in advance that in front of us is either the ill or the refined display of spirit, reflected with symbolic language.’ But if the radical avant-garde saw in synaesthesia an objective window to another world, it faced conservative scientific critics who continued to see a defect, a pathological perception. Such scientific ‘pre-judgements’, Golosovker considered, ‘are based on belief in an abyss separating two isolated substances, “matter” and “spirit”. But there is no such abyss and also no such substances.’48 The demonstration of the participation in synaesthetic perception of kinaesthetic sensations, ‘widening perception’, we have argued, showed exactly this: the embodied nature of spirit and the spiritual nature of embodiment. That there is ‘no abyss’ between matter and spirit was witnessed also in other experiments undertaken by avant-garde artists, experiments with expressive movement or ‘the speaking body’. This work, as we now show, had great influence and value.