More about TUTU
Somewhere in the Netherlands, we picked up an old magic lantern and received a box of old slides, dating back to the 1930s. Special family photos printed on glass plate a child’s portrait of a girl holding a dark doll struck us deeply. Around her we spun a personal story of a child who knows how to make her dreams come true. From her first dance steps, you follow her joys and sorrows in a time of great change: the Interbellum. The dance, then influenced by personal desire for freedom, mechanisation and other cultures, reflects her life. Lichtbende’s projection images are inspired by film clips, dance personalities, music recordings and art movements around the 1930s. In this programme flyer, we have compiled background information on the associative imagery on show in TUTU.
In TUTU, dancing shoes, which in reality are only half an inch tall, are projected across the screen with hand-held lanterns. This is an ancient Japanese technique called Utsushi-e. The magic lantern ended up in Japan through Dutch trade, where it underwent a different technical development than the Western one. The magic lantern is the film projector avant la lettre, invented in 1659 by the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens.
TUTU inspirations
‘The Little Red Shoes’ by Hans Christian Andersen.
Karen, a poor orphan child wears her very first pair of red shoes on the day of her mother’s funeral. They were made by the old shoemaker from the village. A kind old lady sees Karen and takes her home. She takes good care of her, gives her new clothes and burns the red shoes. Karen becomes a sweet, beautiful girl but also a vanity. For her first communion (a Catholic celebration), Karen is allowed to buy new black shoes for the church. In the shop, however, she chooses shiny red shoes again. Auntie is very angry and Karen is not allowed to go to the Baroness’s party as a punishment. When she sneaks off anyway, she meets a shoe-shine man. In reality, he is a magician who uses a spell to make her shoes dance forever. At first Karen loves it but when she gets tired and wants to rest, the shoes dance on and on. Only then does Karen realise that she had to take care of her sick aunt. She meets the shoeshine man again. Will he break the spell?
In TUTU is ook muziek te horen die op een oude grammofoonspeler gedraaid wordt.
De grammofoon van Edison
In 1877, young Thomas Alva Edison invented the dictaphone. A device for recording sound. Edison shouts the nursery rhyme ‘Mary had a little lamb’ into the funnel of the dictaphone, with a needle scratching its voice vibrations into a wax roll via a reproducer. This recording could then be played back with a phonograph in which the needle scanned the sound groove again and reproduced the sound amplified by a horn. Edison improved his phonograph, adding a spring mechanism for constant speed and extending the playback time to 4 minutes. Later, wax rolls were replaced by gramophone records. These were made of shellac, a resinous secretion of the tiny lacquer shell from India.
Shirley Temple (1928 - 2014)
is the child starlet of the 1930s, playing leading roles in Hollywood films at a very young age
At less than four years old, she can already be seen in a series of films called Baby Burlesques. She later describes them as a ‘cynical exploitation of childlike innocence, occasionally racist and sexist’.
In the crisis years of the 1930s, the public fell en masse for her cheerful, disarming smile and golden-blonde curls. President Roosevelt said she boosted the morale of Americans during the crisis. In 1935, Temple receives an Oscar for her role in the film Bright Eyes, in which she sings On the Good Ship Lollipop for the first time. She also gets to put her hand and footprints in the tiles of Hollywood Boulevard. She peaked her career in 1939 with The Little Princess in Colour.
At the age of 12, her star seems burnt out and she disappears from the limelight. In the late 1960s, she becomes politically active for the Republican Party and Richard Nixon. She becomes a US delegate to the United Nations and, in 1974, US ambassador to Ghana and then to the then Czechoslovakia.
In 1972, Temple contracted breast cancer. This made her one of the first top women to talk openly about the disease.
Tap dance
is a form of dance involving rhythmic tapping on the ground with metal plates on the soles of shoes. The dancers make rhythmic sounds e.g. flap=flap, brush=sweep, stamp=stomp and shuffle=shuffle.
Tap dancing originated in New York in the 1930s as a mixture of the African Shuffle and Irish, Scottish and English step dances. Dancers from different immigrant groups competed with their best steps, from which an American style emerged. Tap dancing was the main show dance in Vaudeville and on Broadway from about 1900 to 1955. From the 1930s, the best tap dancers were also seen on television and in films. Tap dancing was also called jazz dance before World War II because of the music danced to. In tap dance, dancers often use syncopation and usually start on the eighth bar or between the eighth and first bars. Tap dance is often improvised, with or without accompanying music.
Anna Pavlova (1882 - 1931)
is the prima ballerina who, at the beginning of our century, made classical ballet, as it was still danced in Russia, known all over the world. Anna Pavlova was trained from the age of 10 at the Imperial Ballet School in Petersburg. In 1899, she immediately became a soloist in the ballet of the Mariinsky Theatre. In 1905, Mikhail Fokine asked her to perform a very simple dance, without difficult pirouettes, big jumps and pantomime. A dance that brought a believable living being to the stage, as he had seen with Isadora Duncan. For this, Fokine devised a white swan that glides calmly over the water, is suddenly struck and dies, not with great pathetic gestures, but as a beautiful animal, from which life disappears. He chose as his music the swan from Camille Saint-Saëns’s ‘The Carnival of Animals’ and called his dance ‘The Dying Swan’. Anna Pavlova danced this at least six thousand times. In 1910, she left Serge Diaghilev’s ballet company, where she had to share all the successes with others, and went to the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. From then until the end of her life in 1931, she always had her own troupe in which, apart from her changing partners, she was the only star. Pavlova was married to Victor Andre and had lived in London since 1912 in a house with many animals, including swans.
Oskar Schlemmer (1888 – 1943).
A German artist who was part of the constructivist art movement. In 1922, he created Das Triadisches Ballet in Stuttgard, in which he wrapped dancers in mathematical figures. One dancer’s costume consisted of cubes, around his head, body, arms, legs and feet. Another dancer was dressed entirely in spheres, yet another in spirals and so on. Oskar Schlemmer wanted to explore how these different figures should move and how music should sound to accompany them. In 1971, a few dancers re-enacted those experiments, which was then filmed.
“Besame Mucho”
(Kiss me many times) is a song written in 1940 by Mexican songwriter Consuelo Velázquez. It is one of the most famous boleros. She wrote this song out of pure imagination because she had never kissed herself. She was inspired by the 1911 piano piece ‘Quejas, o la Maja y el Ruiseñor’ by Spanish composer Enrique Granados. This suite Goyescas was included as Aria of the Nightingale in his opera.
Tango
The Argentine Tango dance style originated over a hundred years ago in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Poor immigrants made music from the musical traditions of Italy, Spain and Eastern Europe, these blended with indigenous South American music. After the bandoneon, a melancholic sounding instrument originally intended as a portable church organ, was incorporated into tango music as a fixed instrument, the melancholic sensual music called tango gradually emerged. People started dancing to it. In a society with more men than women, tango was an important means to have a woman in your arms after all.
Men practised together so that when they then danced ‘in real life’, they made a good impression on their dance partners. What is particularly striking is the razor-sharp leg and foot work and the proud and confident posture of dance couples. It is an interplay between desire and sorrow, between resistance and surrender. Tango is emotion. Some call Argentine tango the vertical expression of horizontal desire.
Originating in working-class neighbourhoods and slums, the tango increasingly attracted interest from the well-to-do classes. After a tour of Europe by a few orchestras and dancers, it became hugely popular in many European capitals in the 1915-1920s.
Mary Wigman (1886 - 1973)
A dance form called Ausdrucktanz occurred in Germany around 1920 because of its expression and expression.
The basis for these dance technical principles was laid by Rudolf von Laban. One of the first, Wigman created pieces without musical accompaniment but with only percussion to indicate rhythm. Her dance was inspired by expressionist visual artists Käthe Kollwitz and Emil Nolde, among others. For Wigman, dance was an art form in its own right, an expression of deep and strong emotions through the expressiveness of the movement itself. For the natural tension and relaxation of her movements, breathing is very important in her dance style. This creates undulating, harmonious movements. The body is an instrument that sings and moves/vibrates. Also striking is the pose-like movements of hip, arms and hands. She often used masks in her dancing. The theme of her dances is sombre, the character expressionistic. Thus, already in the years around World War I, feelings of fear and sadness dominate. Wigman became famous with her tragic, dramatic dance piece Hexentanz from 1914, in which she confronted the audience with the bad sides of man: decay, destruction and death. Like a witch, she danced across the stage as if to conjure the audience with magic formulas.
‘La vie en rose’ by Edith Piaf (1915 - 1963)
Piaf was born in Paris to an Italian-Berber pub singer and a French acrobat. She was raised by her grandmother, who ran a brothel in Normandy. She made her debut as a singer around the age of 15 as a street singer. When Piaf was 17, she had a daughter (Marcelle) from a Parisian courier with whom she had fallen in love. The child died of meningitis at the age of two. Piaf was discovered as a singer at the age of 20 by Louis Leplée, the owner of the Paris Cirque Médrano where she first performed in 1936. Because Piaf was very nervous at public performances, Leplée nicknamed her La Môme Piaf (The Girl Sparrow). He was murdered a short time later and Piaf was suspected of complicity but acquitted. Piaf became friends with several celebrities, including the singer Maurice Chevalier and the poet Jacques Borgeat. In 1940, Jean Cocteau wrote the play Le Bel Indifférent for her.
During the German occupation in World War II, Piaf wrote her famous song La Vie en rose. She was a popular singer with both the German occupiers and the French population at the time. After the war, she performed all over Europe and her fame spread beyond France. Her tragic life is reflected in her music, the speciality being the sharp ballads recited in a heartbreaking voice.
Ballroom
is the collective term for ballroom dances in which the steps and posture are fairly precisely defined, such as the English waltz, tango, quickstep, slowfox and Viennese waltz. Ballroom is danced as a couple, against each other or at a small distance. It is danced around the dance floor. The dance direction is anti-clockwise. Between 1920 and 1930, the rules for each separate dance were laid down. This allowed them to be danced by the general public to the popular music of the time.
“El Negro Zumbon”
By Silvana Mangano from the film Anna (Alberto Lattuada, 1951).
The story of ‘Anna’ is largely set in the city, where the nurse and nun Anna becomes obsessed with her past in prostitution. The song Mangano sings (in Spanish!) under the title ‘Anna’ became a big international hit, including in the US charts.
Josephine Baker (1906 – 1975)
Baker grew up in poverty. As a child, she was a maid for several families and from the age of 12 she lived as a homeless person. She begged by dancing in the streets for passers-by. At 15, she performed at the Vaudeville in Saint Louis. She moved to New York City and debuted on Broadway in the early 1920s. After this, she performed in Europe and South America, in Paris for the first time in 1925, including at the Folies Bergère. During this time, she also appeared almost naked on stage and became famous for her erotic dances. She often then had a cheetah with her, which even jumped into the orchestra pit once. In 1937, she took French citizenship by marrying Frenchman Jean Lion and went to live permanently in France. In 1941, Baker had a miscarriage after which her uterus had to be removed. She later adopted 12 children from all over the world, her children were therefore called the rainbow children (la tribu arc-en-ciel). For a while, she lived with her children at the Château des Milandes in Castelnaud-la-Chapelle in the Dordogne.
During World War II, she did resistance work for the Résistance by using her position to obtain intelligence. For this, she later received high honours. Baker campaigned for the rights of African-Americans after the war. For instance, she refused to perform in segregated venues herself. In 1951, she was denied entry to a club in New York. Grace Kelly, who did get let in, immediately decided to leave the premises with all her friends and never come back. After this, Baker and Kelly became close friends. In 1963, she walked with Martin Luther King in the March on Washington in which she was the only female speaker. After Martin Luther King’s assassination, she was asked to take his place. She declined the honour as she felt her children were too young to lose their mother. On 12 April 1975, four days after opening a successful premiere of a new revue, Baker was found dead in bed. She had suffered a brain haemorrhage. She is buried at the Cimetière de Monaco in Monte Carlo. An exhibition of wax figures, clothes and objects about Josephine Baker’s life is on display at Château des Milandes.