Envisaging Dada: Facial Legibility and Illegibility in Sophie Taeuber’s Dada Head

Abstract

Throughout the text, I use the artist’s maiden name Taeuber rather than her married name Taeuber-Arp to reflect the way in which she signed her works during the period under discussion, which preceded her marriage to Hans/Jean Arp in 1922. It was a dance full of flashes and fishbones, of dazzling lights, a dance of penetrating intensity. The lines of her body break, every gesture decomposes into a hundred precise, angular, incisive movements. The buffoonery of perspective, lighting, and atmosphere is for her hypersensitive nervous system the pretext for drollery full of irony and wit. The figures of her dance are at once mysterious, grotesque, and ecstatic.1 This is how poet Hugo Ball described Sophie Taeuber’s dance performance to one of his sound poems at the opening of the Galerie Dada in Zurich on 29 March 1917.2 Because no indisputable images of Taeuber’s dance practice survive, Ball’s account is central to reconstruct her approach to this discipline. According to Ball, when Taeuber set her body in motion she appeared to fragment it in a plurality of gestures. These gestures did not blur the body into an undifferentiated kinetic mass; on the contrary, their ‘precise, angular, incisive’ character conferred a geometric quality on Taeuber’s moving figure. At the same time, Ball’s lyric language contrives a movement comparable to a source of ‘dazzling light’, as energetic as it is uncontrolled. For Ball, Taeuber’s dancing body shattered, dissolving into a multiplicity of signs that the viewer’s sensorial apparatus was unable to fully process in spite of their clarity. Taeuber seemed at once to emphasize the corporeality of her limbs and to abstract them through her linear movements.3