The Dance-Foot had hardly gone, when the devotees of the new Dionysus began to sing: ‘raise higher your dithyrambic legs!’
DMITRY MEREZHKOVSKY1
Nietzsche, sometimes known as the dancing philosopher, gave philosophical direction, and indeed spiritual purpose, to free individual display of creativity as dance. He made ‘light feet’ the metaphor of the spirit: ‘And although there are swamps and thick afflictions on earth, he who has light feet runs even across mud and dances as upon swept ice.’2
Having seen Isadora Duncan dance, the eccentric Russian philosopher Vasily Rozanov contrasted her spirit and directness with the tired, utilitarian expression, as he saw it, of an earlier generation of writers on art. Literary critics, in an intense response to the conditions of life in Russia, had demanded that art be judged as a social and moral act. Rozanov, however, also claimed that there was Russian precedent for the spirit in what Duncan accomplished. ‘How good that this Duncan, with her hips, sends everything, all these Chernyshevskys and Dobrolyubovs to the devil. However, [the poets] Briusov and Bely had already sent them there.’3 One could not find better words to connect the bouleversement Duncan brought about in dance and the Nietzschean ‘transvaluation of values’ pursued by the Symbolists in Russia, as elsewhere in Europe.
The unbinding of the body and the freeing of consciousness partnered each other. Duncan, on the stage and in life, fought with circumstances – moral injunctions and taboos – reforming not only stage costume, even going so far as wanting to perform completely naked, but also the form of life, preaching emancipation and refusing the bonds of marriage. When she came to Russia, first in 1904 and then returning several times, the Symbolist poets and artists, seeing in Duncan an individualist and pioneering dancer par excellence, became her grateful public. For Aleksandr Blok, she was the symbol of ‘the Eternal Feminine’, ‘the Well-Favoured Woman’; on the wall of his room, together with the Mona Lisa and the contemporary painter Nesterov’s Madonna, he hung ‘a large head of Isadora Duncan’.4 A fellow poet, Sergei Gorodetsky, compared Blok’s room with a cell and with a chapel, finding there the same impression of purity and prayerfulness.5
As the psychologist of art, Rudolf Arnheim, stated sixty years ago, dance is ‘the art of the muscle sense’.6 This chapter shows just how true this was for the introduction of modern dance in Russia. It is not necessary to tell once again the story of modern dance, to which Duncan, and the Russians whom she inspired, contributed. But it is important to recognize that the kinaesthetic sense, as we have already begun to show, also played a part in the life and work of artists whose primary medium was not dance. Like ‘the light-footed dancer’, Zarathustra, Andrei Bely, the poet, professed himself to be a tight-rope dancer who balances above the abyss.7 A well-known silhouette by F. A. Golovin pictures him walking firmly in a straight line, as if on a wire, keeping balance with his arms. Mikhail Chekov saw Bely actually going along the parapet of a balcony high above the ground.8 For other intellectuals who, unlike Bely, did not have a motor talent from childhood, the achievement of ‘the opening’ of the body occurred in adulthood. This happened, with notable consequences, to Prince Sergei Mikhailovich Volkonsky, the Director of the Imperial Stage. He had often criticized the theatre of his time for the absence of musicality. One fine day, seeking this very musicality, in Hellerau near Dresden, he looked in on the school of rhythmics of the Swiss composer and pedagogue, Emile Jaques-Dalcroze. It was a decisive event in Volkonsky’s life; personal kinaesthetic experience turned his life around. In Petersburg, at his own expense, he opened the Courses of Rhythmic Gymnastics, and he printed a bulletin, Pages of the Courses of Rhythmic Gymnastics, taking Dalcroze’s words as an epigraph: ‘The comprehension of rhythmical gymnastics is a matter of personal experience.’9 The Prince was not alone. Lyubov Dmitrievna Mendeleeva-Blok, the daughter of the renowned chemist Mendeleev and the wife of the poet Aleksandr Blok, lived through a similar change of life, measuring out for herself the role of a Bacchante. As a teenager, she was ashamed of her appearance, but, moving, she soon began with love ‘to sense her wakened young body’, and as a result, when she saw Duncan, she ‘encountered Duncan with ecstasy, as for a person long anticipated and known in feeling’.10
Movement, gymnastics and plyaska (inspired dance, or dance with spirit, which we express with the Russian word to distance it from just any kind of dance) opened the body from a new direction, a direction ‘that speaks’. The arts met in dance. ‘Music, the art of time, and plastic art, the art of space, find this meeting-place in the moving material of the human body,’ wrote Volkonsky. In movement, ‘a person portrays externally what has woken in him internally’.11 Plyaska heals the person who feels divided by reason and emotion, spirit and body, volition and duty. Even in the highly disciplined form taken by Dalcrozian rhythmics, plyaska brought Volkonsky the highest gift of his life, ‘the quietening of that perpetual dissension which reigns between our “I wish” and “I may”, the meeting of imagination with reason; thought, illuminating the play of the imagination, and with its images helping thought; the ethically-real justification of aesthetic-idealist attractions; and, last, the final blending of all in one “beautiful person”’.12 Finally, plyaska reconciled a person with the world, harmonized her or him with the cosmos. When this happened, the poet Maksimilian Voloshin believed, the cosmic and the physiological, feeling and logic, reason and knowledge flow together. The world, splintered by the cut-glass mirror of our perceptions, receives its eternal subject-object wholeness.13
The Symbolists, who had such a large and impressive presence in Russia, as elsewhere in the early modernist avant-garde, along with those who, like them, sought wholesale change in humanity, believed that the experience of bodily movement, and especially rhythmical musical movement, amounted to finding a new meaning of life. Dance, people grasped, had the capacity to turn over the soul. But how, in practice, with what forms of dance, to realize this turning-over? How, under the influence of affective kinaesthetic experience, would a new vision of the world arise and give form to a new wholeness? How to fulfil the desire for ‘conversion’ (sometimes called, using Greek roots, metanoia), for a mental or spiritual metamorphosis, for transformation of meaning?
Nietzsche’s metaphors of dance, the extensive, if not systematic, reference to the importance of rhythm, movement and dance in the writings of innovative artists like Rimbaud (who recognized that rhythmic poetic forms were spatial, like dance) and Cézanne (who, it has been said, choreographed his thought in painting), along with innovations in dance performance itself, suggest that dance may be a key, perhaps even the key, to a more satisfactory comprehension of modernism as a conceptual category.14 Mallarmé’s conception of the unifying art form of poetry was that it would be performance, like dance, in space and time. Dee Reynolds considered ‘that the art of dance, which takes place in real as well as virtual time and space [in movement and in imagination], in many ways provides a paradigm for the kind of spatio-temporal interactions which these poets and painters wished to exploit’. This in turn prompted the tentative suggestion that ‘dance, even more than the music, is the prototype of the avant-garde art work’.15
Our own argument points in a similar direction. The language of movement, used in connection with all the senses, criss-crosses the achievement of new art forms. All historians of modernism have observed this. They have not, however, always followed through to the conclusion that this makes the artistic medium specifically attentive to movement, dance, of pivotal significance. Speaking of the Russians, we consider artists who clearly and explicitly did see this at the time. Going further, we may say that historians of modernism have paid insufficient attention to the actual sense of movement, kinaesthesia, and to the rich ways in which there was a substantial interest in this topic before and after 1900. All the same, just as we think it conceptually ill-advised to pick out one sense as the sense ‘of an age’, it may be inappropriate to name any one medium (whether music, dance or anything else) as the prototype of modernism. We may expect particular artists, followed by their scholarly devotees, to elevate one medium, the artist’s own, to a dominant position, but this is another matter. Modernism is, when all is said and done, a family name, and there is no necessity for all the different members of the family to have any one particular feature, however widely characteristic it may be, in common.
There is, nevertheless, much to say on dance, and much to be done to identify the place it had in the transformation of culture in general and of the lives of many men and women in particular.
Educated Europeans frequently mythologized the achievements of the Ancient Greeks. Certainly, this was for the grandeur and beauty of their arts, their philosophy and their language. Nevertheless, Nietzsche, and those who followed him, found something beyond this: a wholeness, a genius in knowing how to live. Imagination for the Greek way of life spoke to those who sought to rise above contemporary materialism to ‘the higher sensitivity’.
Oh those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words … Are we not, precisely in this respect, Greeks? Adorers of forms, of tones, of words? And therefore – artists?16
In 1918, barely a year into the Revolution, the poet Osip Mandelstam declared: ‘Above us is a barbarian sky, and all the same we are Hellenes.’17 He did not stand idly by, but went to work in Narkompros (the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment) in order to bring Dalcrozian rhythmics into the curriculum of higher education generally. In the opinion of Volkonsky, Mandelstam and people who thought like them, rhythmics was the best means available to achieve a new Greek orkhēstra, to give birth to a person in movement, rhythmical, expressive, capable of becoming a participant in a theatrical collective. To bring this about, the philologist Viacheslav Ivanov, the theatre reformer Vsevolod Meyerhold and other intellectuals began to co-operate with the new political power. In a short time, the Commissariat of Enlightenment turned into the headquarters for the realization of a grandiose project, a New Birth, a Third Renaissance. (The first was the Italian Renaissance, the second the German age of Goethe, the third was to be the new, Slavic age.) This was, indeed, a vision that the professor of Antiquity in Petersburg, Faddei Frantsevich Zelinsky (Tadeusz Stefan Zieliński), who was of Polish origins, had already proposed at the turn of the century.
In 1910, a group of young people, led by Professor Zelinsky, set out on a journey from Petersburg to Odessa, and from there by steamer to Piraeus in Greece. On the steamer were students of Saint-Petersburg University and students of the Higher Women’s Courses, the Bestuzhevskie Courses, where Zelinsky himself was a professor, and of the Raevskie Courses. These Courses made higher education available to women that was formally denied to them in universities. Meyerhold, who was collecting material for staging Oedipus the King, joined the excursion. He recalled how well the students on the Courses sang folk songs on the boat, how Zelinsky sat in the bow surrounded by his students, how they took off their scarves and decorated ropes with them, and how the wind played with these coloured flags above the head of the teacher. And the teacher talked about how the Athenians returned from Tauris and Colchas to the shores of their homeland and looked into the distance, anticipating the moment when the golden spear of Athena, crowning the Acropolis, would shine in the sun. The professor led his charges not to an alien ruin but to ‘the hearth of home’. Each European, he considered, had at least ‘two homelands: one is the country by the name of which we call ourselves, the other is Antiquity’.18
When Zelinsky proclaimed the coming New Birth, he envisaged it as a return to the spiritual home. The turn to Ancient Greece, he believed, had already twice saved Europe from barbarism and religious fanaticism, and, it was his hope, would save it again from contemporary ‘re-barbarization’. It was necessary to return to the distinctive light of Antiquity, to its joyful world-feeling and presentation of moral law not yet muddied by the Christian understanding of sin. The Petersburg ‘tower’ of Viacheslav Ivanov, the upper-floor apartment where poets met, and the Paris studio of Raymond Duncan, Isadora’s brother, were two of many other attempts to give birth to a living Antiquity. The studio of dance, ‘Heptachor’, on which we shall focus, a group founded by followers of Zelinsky on the Bestuzhevskie Courses, was one more such attempt. Zelinsky and Duncan became two ‘saints’ of the religion of dance to which the students committed themselves.
Contemporaries considered Zelinsky not only saintly through the study of Antiquity, but almost a priest of ancient religion. Students from all the faculties, including the natural sciences, came to listen to his inspirational lectures, ‘as if one breathes with the scent of the boundless sea’.19 The professor judged feeling the main and best thing in religiosity: universal, ecumenical religious feeling is the real kernel of religion, and all the rest is only parables. Zelinsky was a man of deep faith, not in established Christianity, but in his own religion, which he called ‘Ancient Greek’ or ‘Hellene’. Ancient religion, in Zelinsky’s understanding, not only sustained cosmological, moral and eschatological beliefs, beliefs also characteristic of Christianity, but had an indisputable advantage owing to its universalism, or, speaking in Dostoevsky’s words from his famous speech on Pushkin, ‘capacity for universal sympathy’.20 Universalism guaranteed the religious tolerance of the Ancient Greeks, their inclination to recognize their own gods in other divine incarnations, rather than to fight with them. In Orthodox Russia, this was radical and liberating.
Another advantage of ‘the religion of Antiquity’ was that it propagated joy. It is, Zelinsky considered, the only religion of joy, beauty and fullness of life. To practise the religion is thus easy, since a person does it joyfully and not out of guilt, obligation or duty. A contemporary person, he held, someone who is prepared to bow down fully before the three-in-one ideal of beauty, goodness and truth will turn to this religion. Beauty – significantly for the arts – comes first: ‘The physical beauty of the Hellenic gods is the first step to revelation … The second and third is goodness and truth.’ It follows that beauty should be understood in a special way. For Zelinsky, ‘the beauty of unmoving form is only one of the two forms of the revelation of godliness’; the other comes from movement. Zelinsky emphasized that the Hellenic Muses exist as a unity of three – poetry, music and plyaska – with the latter taking the lead. All three are united with godliness, but predominant ‘in this trinity is plyaska’. Plyaska is the bridge which unites ‘Bacchai in deer-skins’, with godlike wisdom, and which serves for the transmission of moral community. Dance, he concluded, ‘may much more deeply furrow our soul than a very attractive word poem could do’.21
Unsurprisingly, Zelinsky responded ecstatically to the appearance in Russia of the first ‘Dionysian’ dancer, Isadora Duncan. At one of her performances, on 22 January 1913 in the Theatre of Musical Drama, he even delivered an introductory word which (taking a Russian custom to an extreme) stretched into a whole lecture. To the accompaniment of the Russian Musical Society Orchestra and the Musical Drama Choir, Duncan was to perform a fragment from Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide. The professor discoursed about Iphigenia and explained Duncan’s dances, which even the most educated viewers received as ‘something unusual, poetic, incomprehensible’. In conclusion, he declared the dancer ‘his inspirational partner in the task of the renaissance of Antiquity’.22 In a newspaper comment, the critic Andrei Levinson, with well-known irony, wrote that Zelinsky’s presentation ‘brought to the last performance of Miss Duncan the character of exceptional creativity’:
Prof. Zelinsky, a master of refined, educated and expressive … speech, expounded Duncan’s art as the authentic renaissance ‘of the idea of the antique orkhēstra’, having pointed out the likeness of her attempt to the creativity of Friedrich Nietzsche, Böcklin and Richard Wagner.… The correspondence of the dances of Miss Duncan to the idea of the antique orkhēstra, which was by no means elucidated by the lecturer, he justified by way of a psychological analysis of Euripides’s ‘Iphigenia’.23
This enthusiasm led Zelinsky to support his followers from the Bestuzhevskie Courses when they, in imitation of Duncan, took up with ‘free dance’. Stefanida Rudneva, Natalia Enman, Natalia Ped’kova, Kamilla and Il’za Trever, Ekaterina Tsinzerling and Julia Tikhomirova got together and moved to the accompaniment of a grand piano, their own singing or ‘internal music’. Sometimes they met in a school, where a relative of one of them was the Head:
In the hall, after lessons, we hung the windows and walls with white curtains. It was dark, and a candle burned only on the piano, lighting the sheet music. We listened to the music and moved in the dark, in order not to see oneself or the others.… The rough, constrained parts of the body sometimes began to liberate themselves, and muscles, absorbing the melody, corrected themselves and began to move evenly.24
The girls spent almost all their free time in musical improvisation. Finally, the day came, Natalia Ped’kova recalled, when it was time to bring into the light the composition which, until then, had been created in the dark:
The spectators were Heptachor themselves, and St[efanida] Dm[itrievna] Rudneva performed. She presented a lullaby but didn’t picture the rocking. The movement of her body found its plastic expression and the melody sang in the movement of her arms. It was a fully completed musical-movement composition. It was ‘Heptachor’.25
In fact, Zelinsky was only later to think up the name of the studio, from the Greek, επτά (seven), to match the number of participants, and χορόσ (circular or group dance).
If Zelinsky’s male students set up an intellectual circle, ‘The Union of the Third Renaissance’ (of which the Bakhtin brothers, Mikhail and Nikolai, were members), his female students responded to his call to renew the ancient chorea or dance-plyaska. The professor encouraged the neophytes of ‘the plyaska religion’, though he saw how far they were from the Hellenic ideal and believed that ‘to the ancient Hellenes these attempts would have produced to a degree the same impression as when people born dumb begin to speak to us with exercises in articulate speech’.26 Yet neither Duncan nor Heptachor occupied themselves with the precise reconstruction of the antique orkhēstra. Their ambition went much further: they dreamed of restoring to humanity an illuminated, joyful, dancing ‘feeling for life’. In the charter of Heptachor, which was never at the time made public, they wrote:
Only the creative feeling for life gives to a man inner strength and freedom, gives to him excellence. And meanwhile, only in rare minutes of illumination does contemporary man grasp such a feeling, creative and harmonious, for life. How to prolong these moments? How to act so that life always declares itself unified, alive, speaking to us? One of the few ways to such feeling for life lies through dance.27
To separate itself from other schools and dance studios, Heptachor called itself a ‘studio of plyaska’.
Faithful to the ideas of their mentor and friendship to Antiquity, as they understood it, the members of the studio lived communally. From their very first meeting, Stenya (diminutive for Stefanida) Rudneva and Natalia Enman had begun ‘to dream about the organization of a group of friends, animated by one idea and by unified dreams – about some kind of commune that constructs a new, unprecedented life’.28 They formed, in the words of one contemporary, ‘a small commune of Amazons of science and art’. ‘If someone in Heptachor got married, her friends lived through a deep wave of anxiety. Was it possible for a husband to be included in the distinctive life? On the birth of Rudneva’s son, Nikon, he became the son of all Heptachor.’29 Their ‘Hellas on the banks of the Neva [Petersburg’s river]’ continued to exist to the middle of the 1930s. It gave a practical beginning to ‘musical movement’ which, through succeeding generations of followers, has come down to the present. During the Stalinist winter, some of the women maintained ideals and technique by teaching children. Then, with the Khrushchev ‘thaw’, elements of studio teaching reappeared.
FIGURE 2 Heptachor Studio in the 1920s.
FIGURE 3 Stefanida Rudneva. ‘The Wings’, mid-1920s.
FIGURE 4 Stefanida Rudneva and Natalia Ped’kova. A study to ‘Dance of the Skomorokhi’ by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, mid-1920s.
In the hungry post-Revolution years, the professor still gave courses in Petersburg University, including one on the ‘Bacchai’ of Euripides. But, according to one of his auditors, ‘Dionysus was deaf to the calls of the Bacchai, their stomachs were empty and they feared police raids’.30 In 1921, Zelinsky left for Warsaw. Later, Heptachor received a letter in which their old teacher informed them that he was going blind, like Homer, and that for him ‘the outer world had gone dark, but he had begun to hear more the voice of the inner world’.31 Three years before Zelinsky left, however, another project, in which Heptachor took a vital part, began in pursuit of the utopia of a new Renaissance.
We recount the story of the first decade of Heptachor in some colour in order to do justice to the richness of what these young women achieved, but also because musical movement exemplifies the place that dance had in linking the arts, and in linking the avant-garde with new hopes for teaching and performance in the immediate post-Revolution years. The life and art of the young women (and, at times, a few men) in Heptachor was a kinaesthetic life and art, integrated with other changes in the arts.
For Zelinsky, the rebirth of Antiquity meant the saving of European civilization from ‘a new barbarism’. His ideal included a restoration of the culture, so valued in Antiquity, of theatrical performance and mastery of oratory. Hoping to correct contemporary over-emphasis on the written word, Zelinsky and his colleagues therefore created the Institute of the Living Word. At its opening, the professor complained that from the time of Antiquity, ‘the word killed gesture, and writing killed the word’. He put forward the means to bring it back life, to return to the syncretic nature the word had possessed in the ancient theatre, the living word, the expressive word realized in drama, the plastic arts and dance. Founded in 1918 and continuing in existence until 1924, the Institute of the Living Word was one of the brightest episodes in the post-Revolution life of the humanities in Petrograd. It became the first scholarly and educational institution to turn upside down the conventional hierarchy of the spoken and written word and to subordinate the bookish word to the word sounded, sung and danced.
A number of like-minded people joined Zelinsky in this project. The most important were Vsevolod Nikolaevich Vsevolodsky-Gerngross, who became the Head of the Institute, and Yury Erastovich Ozarovsky, the teacher of the living word in the Drama Courses at the Petersburg Theatre School (and Gerngross’s teacher). Ozarovsky began and Gerngross continued to revive the art of declamation, restoring words in order to achieve the syncretic unity of poetry, music and gesture which existed in the ancient theatre. A number of theatre directors, including Ozarovsky, Gerngross, Volkonsky and Meyerhold, basing themselves on Antiquity, judged that gesture, movement, historically and naturally precedes the word, though the word gives the gesture definition. The effective word does not predetermine movement, but completes it. Ozarovsky argued that declamation is the more expressive the more it involves mime and gesture, because the expressive timbre of the voice grows out of movement. And conversely: the voice of a familiar person evokes in imagination mimicry of the person’s gesticulation. Declamation, consequently, uses, in full, ‘the living, that is, moving … mimetic sound of the music of human speech’.32
Ozarovsky was called ‘the director-archaeologist’ because of his passion for the archaic roots of the theatre. He wrote:
The theatre grew from the religious dithyrambs of the Dionysian cult. There, in blessed Hellas, amidst the sacred fumes, in the prayerful crowd of orgiasts, frenzied and drunk from passion, groans and wails of the soul were torn out, which opened eyes to the truth of ecstatic revelations. There, in these groans and wails, was created the music of the soul, the first sounds and tones of free (since without purpose and aimless) musical words.
It was necessary, Ozarovsky considered, to return performance and musicality to readings on the stage, so that art would not be ‘torn from its undoubted homeland: thought and emotion – music and mime’.33 Members of his family shared his interests: his sister, the actress Olga Erastovna, collected folklore; his son, Nikolai, contributed to the written book, Music of the Living Word; his wife, Dar’ia Mikhailovna Musina-Pushkina, helped to create a theatre. The married couple founded the theatre called Stil’ (Style), which in its productions devoted significant attention to movement on the stage. Duncan was at their home. Dar’ia Musina-Pushkina had studied expressive movement in Paris, and in the Institute of the Living Word she taught ‘plastic expression according to [François] Delsarte’. (This was a system of teaching declamation and singing, going back to the 1840s, based on systematized movements held to be expressive of inner emotion.) In 1920, when it was already determined that Ozarovsky would have to leave the country, Musina opened ‘The Delsarte Studio of United Art’ in Petrograd. She herself led expressive gesture, and the daughter of her first husband, Tamara Glebova, taught the popular Duncan dance, or ‘natural’ dance. Also in the Institute of the Living Word, Gerngross opened an experimental theatre, in which he adopted the practice of the orkhēstra, the art of the ancient chorus and its movement that ‘respected plastic melody’.34
The Bolshevik People’s Commissar of Enlightenment, A. V. Lunacharsky, supported the creation of the Institute of the Living Word, arguing, in part, that the new republic needed trained orators and that in a democracy everybody should be able to express their opinion. He assigned the Institute the task of teaching expressive movement in order ‘to widen and develop the individual means to express personal feeling, to influence others and to improvise’. Lunacharsky similarly recommended the inclusion ‘of didactics and the psychology of the crowd and of auditors’, along with a course ‘of mime and gesture’.35 It turned to be not a simple matter to organize this last course. In part, this was because there was argument about which system, Delsarte’s or Jaques-Dalcroze’s, to use as a foundation. The choice fell on rhythmics, in which ‘movement of the body respects a law, to seek which one follows not feeling but sound; the taker of the course must therefore study exercises in mime in order to co-ordinate movement of the body with musical rhythm’.36 The choice of a teacher for mime and gesture also turned out to be difficult, but there was finally agreement to appoint the movement artist and budding actress Ada Korvin, who had studied with Dalcroze in Hellerau.
Rhythmics was already being taught in the Institute of the Living Word by January 1919. One student, Irina Odoevtseva, recalled: ‘A hungry, cold, snowy January. But what interest, what happiness! In the Living Word, lectures were mixed with practical activity and rhythmical gymnastics according to Dalcroze’s method.’37 The spring of 1919 saw the introduction of not one but three courses in the theatrical section of the Institute: one obligatory, rhythmical gymnastics according to Dalcroze’s method, and two optional courses, plastic expression according to the method of Delsarte (taught by Musina) and musical movement and dance, led by Heptachor.
When the Institute was relocated to Tsarskoe Selo, the old tsar’s palace outside Petrograd, the teachers came there from the city, stayed overnight and, in the summer, they perhaps danced outside in the park as well as inside in the palace. In the autumn of 1919, the Institute moved back to the city, to the site of the former Pavlovsky Women’s Institute. Here a sequence of exhibition evenings took place, with demonstrations of various systems. There were points of both difference and similarity between Dalcrozian ‘plastic movement’, Heptachor’s ‘musical movement’ and Delsarte’s system.
The members of Heptachor rejected choreography as a preliminary step for staging dances; their presentations grew as improvisation based on music. The group believed that bodily movements should spring up from music spontaneously, in an unmediated way. Plyaska is a direct and simple-hearted response to music, that is, an improvisation. Further, through improvisation, Heptachor served Antiquity. At the beginning, the students made plastic stage-presentations of ancient myths, but later they began to experiment with movement ‘under the sound of singing words’, and in this way they addressed Gerngross’s project ‘to co-ordinate movement with declamation’.38 Heptachor broke connections with Dalcrozian rhythmics, considering that it involved a too-literal, mechanical following of music, but retained connections with Delsarte’s system, successfully taking up the latter’s ideas about the significance of the body’s centre of gravity and the wholeness of movement.
In 1920 or 1921, the Institute of the Living Word moved again, this time to the former building of the Northern Credit Society (next to the Aleksandrinsky Theatre), which had a public hall with fine acoustics. (The building is now a bank again, but is open to view.) The Institute gave concerts for a large public, and in the spring of 1921 there was also a ‘conference of workers in movement’ in which teachers were able to present, explain and compare their systems.39 In the public hall, turned into an amphitheatre, Vsevolodsky-Gerngross’s Experimental Theatre gave its first performances, including The Sunken Bell, Gerhard Hauptmann’s play, conceived as the struggle of Christianity and paganism. A chorus of ‘elves and sylphs’ danced to the scansion, ‘smeytes’, veytes’ [laugh, twist], all ahead – there it is, there it is, the round dance’. The students of Heptachor, who moved better, played the elves and fairies, and they froze terribly at the show: ‘All the audience in the hall sat in fur coats, but we played in light, semi-transparent tunics.’40
Gerngross showed interest in every way in the work of Heptachor, which, he thought, trained students for the orkhēstra and prepared actors for the ancient chorus. Initially, he required all the students of his theatre studio to take part in this activity. This involved material support: he immediately took several students into work and saved them from hunger and cold. The teachers were provided with enhanced rations – true, based on black dried bread and heads of herrings – and the Institute was relatively well heated. In November 1921, he brought from Moscow tickets for Duncan’s performance in the Bol’shoi Theatre, and he sent Rudneva and her partner, Wolf Bulvanker, on a work trip, with free transport, so that they could see their idol. With time, however, the general enthusiasm of his students for movement began to irritate him. One day, the sisters Evelina and Emma Tsil’derman (whose married name was Fisch and who, under this name, much later took part in the revival of teaching musical movement) found a pianist and, in a free moment, occupied themselves with dance. ‘Going along the nearby corridor and having heard the grand piano playing, [Gerngross] half-opened the door, but having seen that we again occupied ourselves [with musical movement], said: “Ach, the devil take it, again they’re dancing here”, and banged the door.’41
A conflict developed in the third year of Heptachor’s teaching. In part, the studio members themselves provoked it, having declared to Gerngross that they would not allow ‘unprepared students’ to take part in public performances, to which the Director often enough sent them. Gerngross had no option: in order to continue to receive precious rations, it was necessary for him to give an account of the Institute which included concerts. So he forced the students working with Heptachor to make a choice: the theatre or musical movement. In the autumn of 1922, the people in Heptachor left the Institute. ‘It was a heavy crash,’ Rudneva recognized; ‘we lost not only a splendid site for performances and a practice room; we lost an already prepared young group, with the large repertoire put together with them … (And besides that, the “scholars’” food, potatoes.)’42 Rudneva did not say anything about the fact that the exit threatened Gerngross’s experiment with the rebirth of the orkhēstra in the theatre. Together with the teachers, the Institute lost thirteen or fourteen students who had become members of Heptachor. Up to April 1923, however, the members of Heptachor still considered themselves co-workers. But then the Institute of the Living Word was cut from the Commissariat budget and moved under the jurisdiction of the Russian Academy of Art Sciences; in the winter of 1924–25, it was finally eliminated.
The experiment, within the walls of one institution, to enliven the word demonstrated that logos and musikē are not opposed to each other but unite in ‘the logic of the thought-feeling’ (Ozarovsky’s term).43 The logic of this arose from the music or melody of speech, from the timbre of the voice and from mime and gesture. Gesture, in Delsarte’s words, is ‘the direct instrument of the heart; the unmediated manifestation of feeling, the expression of that which in words is lost’.44 Gesture receives meaning if it is connected without mediation to music and feeling. Rudneva spoke convincingly about this. At the same time, Andrei Bely wrote about ‘inner music’, from which the word is born or by which it is newly ‘animated’. One of his lectures at Proletkul’t, a post-revolutionary political project of the avant-garde in Moscow, was called ‘The Living Word’, giving voice to a parallel with what his Petrograd colleagues were doing.45 He considered that ‘inner music’, a synonym of feeling, is expressed at first in gestures and only afterwards becomes ‘the inner word’, the meaning of which comes from music and movement.46 Bely, like the founders of the Institute of the Living Word, in reflections and initiatives appealed not to the rational image of the world turning around logos, but to another world, in the centre of which, as Nietzsche had put it, elevating music, there is ‘the primordial contradiction and primordial pain in the heart of the primal unity’.47 The logic of the chorea-dance, ‘the new meaning of the sounds of words, the sunshine of their reasoning’, is distinct from rational logic.48 During the period of Heptachor’s activity in the Institute of the Living Word, when rations of herrings and dried bread were given out, these surprising people found ‘the sunshine of reasoning’: thought-feeling in plyaska, and logos-reason in music.
Looking back to ancient times and looking forward to ‘higher sensitivity’, Heptachor brought together new techniques and expression of movement and dance. Assuredly, there were, later, more famous forms of new dance. At the end of 1923, Gerngross himself undertook a project with a dancer of ‘The Young Ballet’, Georgii Balanchivadze, in which the future choreographer, George Balanchine, made his debut as the stager of plastic movement. Together they prepared a performance, to accompany Aleksandr Blok’s poem, ‘Twelve’, without music and only to the declamation of a chorus, perceived as a vocal part, a musical-rhythmic beginning for a dancing-mime event.49 If later less well known, the work of musical movement did not exist in a world by itself, or on the margins of other kinds of innovations usually seen to belong to modernism. It interacted with and contributed to the rethinking of staging and movement in the theatre, and to the relation of the word to movement in the dramatic and poetic arts. Moreover, in Russia, there was no possibility that it could have been cut off from radical political and social change. The colour of the historical detail reveals the new art of kinaesthesia to have been at one and the same time collective and personal, objective and subjective, embodied and the elevation of the spirit. For all the deference accorded to Ancient Greece, the new art was a transformation of life for the future.