Sang to the sun
Sang an die Sonne is an epochal dance drama by Rudolf von Laban, performed for the first time on the night of August 18-19, 1917 . He himself described the "three-part natural dance" as a "movement choir" belonging to the "choral games".
The creation of the work coincides with the time after the emergence of modern expressive dance , the ballet, in the years 1913 to 1919. Monte Verità is one of the most important places of origin of this art form. Here Laban founded the summer school for the art of movement, which he directed, and worked with important dancers such as Mary Wigman , Suzanne Perrottet , Berthe Trümpy and Katja Wulff using holistic methods. The libretto is by Otto Borngräber .
In 1914, the play Victory of the Victim was on the program, in which a dark incest was staged and in which the dancers also had to prove their acting skills. Acting deficits and the lack of male mimes caused the performance to fail. In addition, the First World War broke out soon after the rehearsals began and the German men - dancers and sanatorium guests - had to return to Germany. But the longer the war went on, the more came back.
The song to the sun as well as Istar's journey into hell are final works of the summer school, which were performed in front of a larger audience. Both works are symbolically inflated . They are about inner purification and reincarnation . While the programmatic liberation of the people from ancient Babylon through a turning away from civilization is the theme of the Descent into Hell, the Sang to the Sun is about the glorification of the sun from its evening setting through the dance of demons to the dance of the singing sun as Welcome the next morning. The setting and rising sun are included in the game, so the performance must last all night.
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The performance initially took place on a mountain meadow surrounded by groups of trees. To the west the meadow was sloping and ended abruptly on a steep mountain slope. There at the edge was a fireplace, delimited with field stones. The view of the audience went beyond it to the open area of Lake Maggiore as well as the mountain ranges of Monte Limidario , towering in the blue haze behind , which mark the border between Switzerland and Italy.
The beginning of the performance was chosen so that the sun disk just touched the horizon. At the beginning, the speaker's head, climbing the slope, appeared near the fireplace against the setting sun. The train of actors followed him. The speaker turned to the sun and spoke to it. At a second address he was already surrounded by his entourage. This was followed by a farewell dance, which was performed at the exact moment of sunset. In addition, individual women and children came from the audience. They lit the fire in the fireplace and made the smoke vibrate gently. A fourth saying followed, dedicated to the twilight. With it, a train formed that took the audience away from the playground.
The second part of the performance began around midnight with the game Demons of the Night . Dancers were equipped with percussion instruments and flutes and gathered the audience in order to climb the path to the top of the mountain, lit by torches and lanterns. Eerily bizarre rocks were illuminated by a bright fire, goblins performed jumping dances.
Marcel Janco created the masks from twigs and grasses that covered the whole body of the dancers when they appeared with their entourage. Diverse figures represented witches and fiends who unveiled themselves in wild dances and gave their masks to the fire. A fire that went out later was the time of the dance of shadows . Then the crowd of spectators, surrounded by torch-bearing dancers, walked the arduous path back downhill, this time to a meadow with a clear view to the east, where dusk was slowly rising. The dark ghost disappeared with the rising sun, which shone through the thin robes of the dancers during the morning dance.
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The performance is closely related to the ideas of Theodor Reuss , who as Grand Master established the Ordo Templi Orientis on Monte Verità. Although Sang to the sun to be seen as an independent work of Laban, but the performance "climax and swan song was for Reuss at the same time, at least in [his] work on Monte Verita concerned. He too was a catcher and seducer of women like many others in the area. ... When he was preparing to turn Ida Hofmann 's head, Henri Oedenkoven threw him out. The whole episode left an embarrassing aftertaste and in Ascona the idea of the sinful Monte Verità for a long time. "
The intention of Laban to perform the works in a meaningful way could not always be understood appropriately by the audience: Karl Vester (1879–1963), second hour man on Monte Verità, wrote in his diary how embarrassing it was for him to “ to see close and appreciable people, especially as women in airy robes dance to a sometimes lascivious, mopsic audience ”. Apparently the audience was more interested in the bodies of the mostly female actors than in the characters they wanted to portray.
reception
Based on Laban's open-air dance play, for which neither text, music nor choreography have survived, the three-part dance spectacle "Sun Festival" was performed on the Monte Verità hill 71 years later under a similar astrological constellation on the night of August 14th to 15th, 1988 (Among others with Margit Huber and Maria Bonzanigo, recorded by the television of the Italian Switzerland TSI).
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Andreas Schwab : Monte Verità. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . November 17, 2009 .
- ↑ Rudolf von Laban : A life for dance. Dresden 1935, pp. 195–197.
- ↑ a b Ulrike Voswinckel: Free love and aanarchy . edition monacensia, Allitera Verlag, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-86906-027-9 .
- ^ A b Andreas Schwab: Monte Verità - Sanatorium of Sehnsucht. Orell Füssli, Zurich 2003, ISBN 3-280-06013-3 .
- ↑ Sang to the Sun Monteverita.net