Foregger and The Dance of the Machines

Author(s): Mel Gordon

Source: The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 19, No. 1, Post-Modern Dance Issue (Mar., 1975), pp. 68-73
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1144970
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and

Foregger
of

the

The

Dance

Machines

By MelGordon
Nikolai Foregger (1892-1939), christened Nicholas Baron Foregger von Greiffenturn, the sole descendant of an aristocratic Russo-German family, was one of the most
extreme exponents of mechanization and abstraction in the Soviet theatre and dance
during its first decade. Foregger belonged to that unique generation of Russian writers,
artists, directors, and dance-masters who, born in the 1890's, quickly reached their
artistic maturity in the early Twenties. Writers and artists like Mayakovsky, Sergei
Tretyakov, Isaac Babel, Varvara Stepanova, and Alexander Rodchenko are among the
best known of that era. In the fields of theatre and dance, there were Foregger, Eisenstein, Sergei Radlov, Boris Tikhonovich, Boris Ferdinandov, the FEKS group, Vera
Maya, and Kasyan Goleizovsky. Together, despite acknowledged differences in motivation and style, these young artists accepted the critical appellative Constructivist to
describe their art.
With the exception of Eisenstein (see. T61) and Meyerhold, who was judged accordto
other standards, the scenic work of the Constructivists is not well known, aling
though at the time of the Constructivist period (1920-1924), many of their productions
and techniques were considered more radical than Meyerhold's and in fact prefigured
many of his own post-revolutionary innovations, such as Biomechanics and mobile
decor. Today, Foregger is best remembered for the students who received their earliest
training at his studio before entering the Soviet film industry-Eisenstein, Sergei Yutkevich, Boris Barnet, Vladimir Fogel, Igor Ilinsky; yet, for a brief period, Foregger was
regarded, along with Meyerhold, as the chief proponent of Soviet revolutionary culture,
rejecting both imitative and expressive forms for a new industrial, precision art based on
physical culture and popular entertainments.
Foregger's first work in performance very nearly mirrored the stylized interests of
the Russian pre-revolutionary avant-garde. After graduating from Kiev University in
The title photographandthose on pages71 and 73 arefromForegger'sTheDanceof the Machines.

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philology in 1915, he studied and developed conventional gestures based on the French
pantomimes and dances of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Leaving his native
Kiev for Moscow the next year, Foregger began a brief apprenticeship at Tairov's
Kamerny Theatre until it closed in February 1917, owing to a lack of funds. The
remainder of 1917 was spent in Petrograd, working on stylized acting gestures and
gauging dance movements to the music of contemporary composers like Ravel and
Debussy. Then, after the Revolution, Foregger returned to Moscow, which was undergoing a tremendous cultural upheaval, to begin his first serious work in the theatre.
Operating out of his own private flat, like so many other tiny theatres and studios,
Foregger inaugurated the program of the Theatre of the Four Masks, which was based
on the literature and the partly reconstructed styles of the French medieval court farce
and the commedia dell'arte of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although somewhat more refined than Radlov's Popular Folk Theatre in Petrograd, which also emphasized antique and medieval drama mounted according to the stylized and conventional
grotesque, the Theatre of the Four Masks met with a qualified success. Especially well
received were Foregger's productions of "Lawyer Pathelin" and Platus' "The Twins" in
May 1920. The public quickly lost interest in Foregger's classical revivalism, however,
and the Theatre of the Four Masks closed. Soon afterward, Foregger encountered Vladimir Mass (1896), a young playwright, poet, and theatre critic; and together they
decided to form a satirical theatre based on new social types, or masks. At this time,
civil war erupted in Russia's West and South, and groups of artists and theatre-workers
were encouraged by the Moscow government to create pro-Soviet propaganda for the
Red Army and the people in the countryside. Foregger and Mass joined an agit-train and
began to experiment with many kinds of political humor.
When they arrived in Moscow in 1921, the two had agreed upon six basic masks: 1]
the NEPman (the prototype of the Russian bourgeoisie who were taking advantage of
the liberalized economic policies), 2] the Intellectual Mystic (the prototype of the
Russian symbolists who "accepted" the Revolution), 3] the Militant Female Communist with a leather brief case, 4] the Imagist Poet (a fusion of Sergei Esenin, the
self-conscious "peasant" poet, and Vadim Shershenevich, the ex-Futurist dandy), 5] the
Militiaman, and 6] Auguste (the universal clown). The theatre they were to build was to
be called Mastfor, an acronym for Masterskaya Foreggera (Foregger's Workshop).
With little money, costuming, stage properties, or even a proper staging area-they
lined up a series of tables in the press room of the artistic institute, Vkhutemas-Foregger and Mass mounted a political revue, How They Organized, deriding the interventionists in the Russian civil war. According to Yutkevich, Mayakovsky himself was pleased
with the performance and encouraged Foregger to continue in the same vein.
Designed in part by Yutkevich and Eisenstein, the next production, The Parody
Show, was a series of three sketches satirizing current plays: 1] "For Every Wiseman
One Operetta Is Enough" (parody of Nemirovich-Danchenko's operatic activities at the
Moscow Art Theatre), 2] "Don't Drink the Water Unless It's Boiled" (parody of agitprop plays), and 3] "The Phenomenal Tragedy of Phetra" (parody of Tairov's Phedra
and Tidings Brought to Mary). Set in the "Mosaic" Hall, this performance reached a
wide audience, and its scornful ridicule of those productions struck a responsive chord.
At this time, Foregger taught courses in theatre history and dance movement at the
School of Proletarian Culture and the Main Red Army Studio (First Amateur Theatre).
It was here that Foregger first introduced his psycho/physical system of tafiatrenage
(literally French for molasses or taffy-pulling). Like Meyerhold's Biomechanics (see
T63) and Ferdinandov's metro-rhythms (Experimental-Heroic Workshop), tafiatrenage

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ger schooled actors in tafiatrenage as early as 1920, it is unclear how this precision
method related to the styles of acting in his 1920 and 1921 productions.
On New Year's Eve, 1922, in the House of the Press, Foregger presented Mass's
play, Be Kind to Horses. Divided into two sections, a comic topical revue, using the new
masks, and a parody of a music-hall show, this performance marked an important shift in
Foregger's career. To be sure, Foregger was now accorded a serious role in the Moscow
theatre circles and his Be Kind to Iorses was greeted with a good deal of hoopla, but it
was the second half of the production that impressed the critics and spectators. Yutkevich devised a totally "American," "urbanist," mobile environment, with moving steps
and a treadmill, suspended and grounded trampolines, flashing electric signs and cinema
posters, rotating decors, and "flying lights." Despite the fact that everything was handled manually backstage, the impression was one of extreme mechanization. Eisenstein's
costumes were also no ted for their ingenuity, and his outfits for the female singers,
which were nothing more than hoops of wire fastened to multi-colored ribbons and thin
strips of colored paper, caused something of a scandal for the puritanically raised
Moscow public.
Mayakovsky openly defended Be Kind to HIorses after it received a number of
unfavorable reviews. And Foregger, who set out to parody the music hall, as he had
Nemirovich-Danchenko and Tairov, was now seduced by its techniques and form. In his
Spring 1922 productions, The Kidnapping of Children, an ancient melodrama by
D'ennery, and The Supernatural Son, Foregger attempted to marry his social mask
concept with music-hall and variety forms. The Soviet critic, Pavel Markov, wrote in
1924:
On the one hand, he was tied to the theatreof charlatans,conjurers,acrobats,
and clowns.... On the otherhand,he wantedto combineit with the theatreof
the day-the music hall. His actors are acrobatic;he builds actor's roles as a
combinationof sharp,diverse,andunexpectedtreatments.He drawsthe text of
staged pieces closer to his day. He fills the production-as do most mastersof
the stage-on movement.He observesmovementanddanceson the streetsof his
day. In his productions,he uses a jazz band; he createsdances that convey
machine operations;his actors perform comic roles, using the methods of
clownsand the circus.
(New TheatricalPaths)
In The Kidnapping of Children, Foregger added to the commedia and music hall the
process of "cinemazation" or "electrification." Rapidly revolving discs were placed
in front of the spotlights, giving the impression of the light from a movie projector, and
the tempo of the acting and scene changes approached what a reviewer from Izvestiya

DetailfromMastfor'searliestwork.

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(April 23, 1922) called "some kind of

mad gallop." Depicting Foregger as "the
professional of bustle and clamor," the
critic from Ermitazh (No. 5/1922) wrote
of him: "In love with movement, familiar
with its zealous turbulence, he knows
that words are just the auxiliary weapons
T
of the theatre," whose productions porof
"voice
the
drunkthe
zealous and
tray
en city, giving birth to new sounds and
new movements."
Before the premiere of Meyerhold's
Magnificentt Cuckold in April 1922,
Foregger and his Mastfor left to tour
Petrograd for the Summer. There, Foregger met with the members of FEKS (acronym
for the Factory of the Eccentric Actor) and probably saw their production, The
Eccentric Railroad. In Moscow, the Constructivist movement in the theatre was at its
high-point. Even the academic theatre and dance troupes began to consider the use of
Constructivist stage settings.
When Mastfor returned to Moscow in the Fall, Foregger finally managed to open a
permanent theatre, the Free Workshop, on Arbat Street. Echoing phrases from Marinetti's "Variety Theatre Manifesto," Foregger announced that the theatre was living
out its last days; there was only film and music hall. He called for "music hall in
proletarian attire," but as Mastfor settled down on Arbat Street, it was becoming
obvious that Foregger's "electric" theatre was less and less concerned with political
meaning or content; Foregger even staged a parody of Meyerhold's Magnificent Cuckold. Discarding logical narrative for the "music-hallization" of theatre, Foregger was
moving across two non-intersecting planes-toward pure abstraction and pure entertainment.
Eccentric-vaudeville-like-dances
usually appeared in Mastfor productions as
individual components. But, in order to effect an even greater "music-hallization" of the
theatre, Foregger started to personally work with these dancer-acrobats. Striving to
perfect every dance movement and gesture of the dancers until each acrobatic group
resembled the inner workingsof some complex piece of machinery, Foregger was able to
achieve something that not only rivaled Twenties precision-dancers, like the Tiller Girls,
but a uniquely proletarian spectacle. Accompanied with "noise orchestras," the groups
of machine-dancers were so successful that Mastfor began presenting them as afterpieces.
Also, judging from the tenets of Constructivism in the plastic arts, Foregger's
machine-dance, in as much as it pointed toward pure movements and sounds and
demonstrated industrial-like gesticulations, was the Constructivist, logical end of theatre. In his New Spirit in the Russian Theatre (New York, 1929), Huntly Carter wrote
that Mastfor's "studies revealed the interesting fact that the popular dances of the day,
in particular those that were fashionable in America-Fox Trot, Jazz, etc.-were being
danced all day and night long by machinery in factories and workshops, and that
workmen . .. danced these fashionable dances . . . every moment of their leisure hours."
In a sense, Mastfor attempted to supply a "functional" entertainment, and in fact, the
machine-dances were quite a success.
The other direction Foregger moved in was toward the musical buffonade, or
comic-operette; these productions were condemned as being anti-Soviet, that is, nonpolitical, and erotic-later the term "Foreggerism" appeared as an epithet for a certain

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72

Woodcutof Mastfor'scomic-opera.

kind of sophisticated obsceneness in avant-garde art. Whether or not Foregger deliberately staged his productions in this manner solely to attract the money-spending
NEPmen, who gathered across the street at the "Prague" restaurant, is not known
although many Soviet critics implied as much. In either case, after mounting the musicals Mystery of the Isle of Canaries, Fifteen Days of Ecstasy, and Parade of Charlatans,
toward the end of the 1922-23 season, Mass, Yutkevich, and a group of actors broke
with Foregger, seeking a more agitational, political theatre.
Carter in the book, New Theatre and Cinema of Soviet Russia (London, 1924),
provides an interesting account of the Mystery of the Isle of the Canaries. After comparing the costumes and scenery to the shapes and colors of "a studio of a Futurist painter
the day after a drunken orgy," he describes the style of the acting and dancing:
The movementsof the characterswerein harmony,extremelyexaggerated,and
funny. Perhapsthe best descriptionof the actorswouldbe Futuristmarionettes.
They were very much like mechanicaldolls with patches of color dabbedon
their faces and bodies, and a sort of cerebralaction, as the Futuristscall it. I
mean the action you get after a movementhas been brokenup by the brain.
These figureslaughedall over, features,bodies, limbs. At the same time they
indulgedin a good deal of clowningand knockaboutbusinessand downright
vulgarity.
Carter, also, reported that "the workers" were so indignant about the performance,
calling it pornographic and anti-Soviet, that they wrote Zrelishcha, the theatrical trade
magazine, threatening to bring the production to the attention of the Cheka (the internal police). Only Mastfor's machine-dancing was held useful. "As a sop to the workers, the editor of "Scene" [Zrelishcha] strongly advised Foregger to set to work and
reorganize his theatre."
On February 13, 1923, Foregger presented his most famous work, The Dance of
the Machines. Essentially a revue of various machines portraying the industrial process,
each group enacting the movements of gears, levers, fly-wheels, motors, etc., The Dance
of the Machines created more excitement than any of Mastfor's mechanical after-pieces.
Rene Fulop-Miller, writing in 1926, analyzed this machine-dancing in a social context:
It was as if priestsand priestesseswerecelebratingin dancethe new God of the
Machine.Theirbodies becamecorrectlyconstructedappliances.They no longer
moved, they "functioned."WhatForeggeraccomplishesis a cinematicsof the
living organism,an analysisin danceof the humanmechanism,workedout in
exhaustive physiological, mechanical,and psychotechnicalstudies. The new
dancing,in Foregger'ssense, triesto expressthe most generalmovementsof the
human organism,rhythm no longer individual,but universal.All gesturesare,
therefore,as far as possibletransformedinto partialfunctionsof a total movement, and strictly geometrized.The spectatoris intended to recognizein the
activity of each singlegroupof musclesa motor reflex within the frameof the
wholegreatstagemachine.Dancingis intendedto be nothingbut a vividdemonstrationof the adequateorganizationof the humanmachine.
(TheMindand Face of Bolshevism,New York, 1927)

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from Leigova. How these performances differed esthetically or politically from The
Dance of the Machines is not clear, but by February 1924, Mastfor was again receiving
harsh criticism. Zhizn iskusstvo (1924/No.6): "Innovation has been replaced by the
frankest epithets. NEP instincts and needs have become an imperative for the theatre."
N. Volkonsky attacked Foregger in Evening Moscow (March 21, 1924), as "a man who
possessed the gift of speech, but who had nothing to say."
Late in 1924, Foregger's theatre on Arbat Street was destroyed by fire. His attempt
tore-establishthe Free Workshop in Leningrad (formerly Petrograd) during the next year
failed, and Foregger turned to the teaching of the dance. In 1936, Pavel Markov maintained that Foregger's studio was actually "killed by its blind dependence on vaudeville
forms."
By 1929, Foregger secured a position as ballet-master at the Kharkov State Opera in
the Ukraine, where a considerable amount of experimentation in dance was still being
permitted. From 1929 until his death in 1939, Foregger traveled between Kharkov and
Kiev assisting, advising, and directing modern Soviet ballets and operas.
Foregger's place in the history of avant-garde dance and theatre-by the way of
influences-is difficult to assess. To be sure, several satirical theatres in Russia and the
Blue Blouse movement (see T57) were affected by his work; Meyerhold considered
Foregger important enough to invite him and an acrobatic section of Mastfor to perform
their machine-dance back-to-back with Biomechanics at Meyerhold's twenty-fifth year
celebration in the theatre in 1923; the Constructivist movement in theatre and dance
owes much to Foregger. Yet, much of the problem of understanding Foregger lay with
his failure to publish any significant literature on either his theatre or his training/performing techniques.
The following article, which is a translation of the second half of "Experiments in
the Art of the Dance," printed in 1926, is one of the few articles Foregger ever published. The first part was deleted since it hardly more than surveys the history of
dance; Foregger almost acknowledges this as a philological duty, "When one customarily
begins an article, he removes the works of authorities from the shelves and begins an
'historical excursion.' " In the second section, Foregger, who evidently felt that he was
writing for his dance colleagues, assumed that the reader had at least some practical
knowledge of his system of tafiatrenage. This is unfortunate since the 400 or so tafiatrenage exercises that Foregger alludes to may be now lost in time, and Foregger's
rejection of classical and plastic-or Modern-dance in the Twenties predates him by
more than fifty years in the history of avant-garde dance, placing him among our
contemporaries.

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