Gertrud Kraus's Imaginative Acts at the Intersection of Dance and the Visual Arts

Abstract

ABSTRACTGertrud Kraus was an interdisciplinary artist. She created in various media, such as dance, music, and the visual arts, and thought of art and dance in interactive terms, based on her imaginative acts and on poetically experiencing an active correspondence between the senses. Dance thereby became a special poetic space in which she blended art forms, and the kinesthetic and the visual dwelled intimately together. In this essay I consider key properties of Kraus's dance and visual works in order to explore her interdisciplinary creativity as a distinguishing element of her artistic persona, incorporating what Gaston Bachelard has termed the poetized I. Drawing on this notion, I unfold Kraus's creative process and discuss how she turned reverie and its poeticizing power into a creative method of experimenting and exploring unfamiliar possibilities and new potentialities. Poetic reverie and imaginative acts became an artistic requisite for Kraus, and the source and inspiration for her staging of dance works. As an experimental space, reverie allowed Kraus to delve into the interactivity and interchangeability among the arts and thereby to foster her interdisciplinary approach.