Dance, Sound, Word: The “Hundred-Jointed Body” in Zurich Dada Performance

Abstract

It is well known that choreographer and dance theorist Rudolf von Laban attended several Zurich Dada evenings with his students, several of whom—including Sophie Taeuber and Suzanne Perrottet—danced on Dada stages, often alongside the recitation of Hugo Ball's Lautgedichte (sound poems). Yet scholarly conceptions of Laban's choreographic work and Zurich Dada performance have remained seemingly irreconcilable. Charting the interanimation of bodily movement and oral declamation, this article shows how the interplay of dance, sound, and word was central to the work of both groups. Connecting them, I argue, was the dissemination of Wilhelm Wundt's theories of nervous transformation, which have been linked to Ball's sound poems and which Perrottet, after studying under Émile Jacques-Dalcroze, shared with Laban and others at his school in Monte Verità. Attention to the wider Lebensreform (life reform) context of specific performance techniques also necessitates, as the article aims to show, a reevaluation of the historical avant-garde project as one aimed at training perceptual faculties. While avant-garde historiography has overwhelmingly centered artistic strategies such as photomontage and the extension of its shock-effects into the revolutionary potential of film, an acute consideration of dance sheds light on the ways that such tactics were aimed not only unidirectionally at the spectator but also back at the artists themselves.