Ballet Bites: The Carnivalesque in Frank Wedekind’s Die Flöhe oder der Schmerzenstanz

Abstract

Ballet Bites: The Carnivalesque in Frank Wedekind’s Die Flöhe oder der Schmerzenstanz Kristen Hylenski The word is the medium of the writer, so it is curious to think of the tradition of writers – Goethe, Heine, Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, to name a few – who crafted ballets and pantomimes, works for silent bodies on stage. Frank Wedekind (1864–1918), dramatist and poet, actor and cabaret performer, also wrote dance pieces. This is not surprising when we consider how deeply invested Wedekind was in the human body and its aesthetic potential, for the body in art – as art – brings together the most basic foundation of human existence with our struggle to represent, express, and give meaning through artistic form. Wedekind engages in a wide spectrum of genres, styles, and media, mingling his interests in writing and corporeal performance. With the notable exception of Robert Jones, who considers Wedekind’s silent dramas in the context of their mimic elements, the dance pieces have not received significant scholarly attention. Jones has made a compelling case for the importance of these pieces within Wedekind’s œuvre, emphasizing the influence of nonliterary forms such as the circus and the pantomime as the basis for Wedekind’s turn from a theatre he considered too literary. Further, Jones suggests that the mimic elements become central to Wedekind’s later dramatic practice (“The Pantomime”). While it is important to consider these works in relation to Wedekind’s dramas, it is also important to read them in the context of dance, a medium in which Wedekind expressed great interest. This article will undertake a close reading of the 1897 ballet Die Flöhe oder der Schmerzenstanz. By studying this ballet through the Bakhtinian lense of the carnivalesque, it will demonstrate how Wedekind succeeds in creating an alternative to the classical ballet. Through this piece, he questions binaries of “high” and “low” culture, tradition and modernity, the word and the body, thus creating a hybrid work that renews the ballet by explosively juxtaposing these seeming opposites. Indeed, one of the categories of the carnivalesque delineated by Mikhail Bakhtin is that of the carnivalistic misalliance, in which “things that were once self-enclosed, disunified, distanced from one another by a noncarnivalistic hierarchical world view are drawn into carnivalistic contacts and combinations” (Problems 123). Even the title of the ballet suggests such a contact and combination, merging a vile parasite (die Flöhe) with tragedy (der Schmerzenstanz), hence fusing the mundane, materialistic, and banal with the [End Page 351] esoteric, transcendental, and lofty. Both Bakhtin and Wedekind share an intense concern with the materiality of the body and sexuality, as well as an interest in forms of folk entertainment, suggesting the carnivalesque – a term Peter Jelavich has already employed in conjunction with Wedekind’s drama Frühlings Erwachen – as a productive paradigm in understanding Wedekind’s ballet. An analysis of Die Flöhe oder der Schmerzenstanz traces the inclusion and effect of forms of folk entertainment – “low” culture elements – into and on the ballet and allows us to contextualize it within developments in dance in the later part of the nineteenth century. The pursuit of carnivalistic misalliances also leads us to question the status of the ballet libretto itself, for in fusing binary oppositions, Wedekind transgresses boundaries of both dance and writing. Wedekind’s concern with the body as the locus of the erotic and as aesthetic material and medium extends throughout his career, from the poetry of his youth to his later plays such as Franziska (1912) and Simson oder Scham und Eifersucht (1914). It is especially visible in his treatment of dance. Wedekind’s interest in dance blossomed early in his career during his time in Paris and London (1891–1895). This becomes evident not only in his frequent visits to the stages of Paris, but also in his intellectual pursuits: while in London, he asked for permission to work in the British Museum on a study of the differences between French and English dance (Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe 746). During this time, Wedekind introduced the training of the female body as a major theme in his novel fragment Mine-Haha (begun in 1895), and he also began creating his most famous...