Valeska Gert (11 January 1892 – c. 16 March 1978) was a German dancer, pantomime, cabaret artist, actress and pioneering performance artist.
Gert was born as Gertrud Valesca Samosch in Berlin to a Jewish family. She was the eldest daughter of manufacturer Theodor Samosch and Augusta Rosenthal.[1] Exhibiting no interest in academics or office work,[1] she began taking dance lessons at the age of nine.[2] This, combined with her love of ornate fashion, led her to a career in dance and performance art. In 1915, she studied acting with Maria Moissi, and dance with Rita Sacchetto.[3]
World War I had a negative effect on her father's finances, forcing her to rely on herself far more than other bourgeois daughters typically might. As World War I raged, Gert joined a Berliner dance group and created revolutionary satirical dance.[2] She created her first solo dance, Dance in Orange, beginning of 1916 and performed it - as part of a programme by her dance teacher Rita Sacchetto - at Blüthnersaal in Berlin, and the following week at UFA movie palace at Nollendorfplatz in Berlin, in the break between two films.[4]
Following engagements at the Deutsches Theater and the Tribüne in Berlin, Gert was invited to perform in expressionist plays in Dadaist mixed media art nights. Her performances in Oskar Kokoschka's Hiob (1918), Ernst Toller's Transformation (1919), and Frank Wedekind's Franziska earned her popularity.[5]
In the 1920s, Gert premiered one of her more provocative works, titled Canaille (meaning a prostitute). Also in the 1920s, Gert's other progressive performances included dancing a traffic accident, boxing, or dying. She was revolutionary and radical and never ceased to simultaneously shock and fascinate her audiences. When she danced Canaille with an orgasm in Berlin in 1922, the audience called the police.[6]
During this time, she performed in the Schall und Rauch cabaret.[7] Gert also launched a tour of her own dances, including titles like Dance in Orange, Boxing, Circus, Japanese Grotesque, Death, and Canaille. In addition, she contributed articles for magazines like Die Weltbühne (The World Stage) and the Berliner Tageszeitung (Berline Daily News).[2]
By 1923, Gert focused her work partially on film acting, performing with Andrews Engelmann, Arnold Korff, and others. She performed in G.W. Pabst's Joyless Street in 1925, Diary of a Lost Girl in 1929, and The Threepenny Opera in 1931. Also in 1923, she met her love, Aribert Wäscher.[8] Their relationship lasted until 1938. From 1926 at the latest, on the stage she introduced new solo pieces she called Tontänze (Sound Dances), adding her voice - noises and words - to her movements, gestures and facial expressions.
Gert could be by turns grotesque, intense, mocking, pathetic or furious, performing with an anarchic intensity and artistic fearlessness which also recommended her to the Dadaists.[9] Valeska Gert analysed the limits of societal conventions and then expressed with her body the insights that she gained from her analyses.[6]
In 1933, Gert's Jewish heritage resulted in her being banned from the German stage. Her exile from Germany sent her to London for some time, where she worked both in theatre and film.[1] In London, she worked on the experimental short film Pett and Pott, which long stood as her last movie. While in London, she wed an English writer, Robin Hay Anderson,[10] her second marriage.[2]
Beginning of 1939, she emigrated to the United States, where she was cared for by a Jewish refugee community. This same year, she hired the 17-year-old Georg Kreisler as a rehearsal pianist to continue focus on cabaret work. In summer 1940, she found work posing as a nude model for an artist in Provincetown (Massachusetts).[2] By the end of 1941, she had opened the Beggar's Bar in New York City. It was a cabaret/restaurant that was filled with mismatched furniture and lamps. Julian Beck, Judith Malina,[1] and Jackson Pollock worked for her.[11] Tennessee Williams also worked for her for a short time as a busboy, but was fired for refusing to pool his tips.[11] Gert commented that his work was "so sloppy".[12] In February 1945, Gert had to close her Beggar's Bar despite its success, due to a lack of official permits.
Gert spent every summer in Provincetown until 1946, when she opened her new cabaret Valeska's there.[1] In Provincetown, she reunited with Tennessee Williams. She told him stories of hiring a 70-year-old midget named Mademoiselle Pumpernickel for the Beggar's Bar who became jealous whenever Gert went onstage. During the summer 1946, while she ran Valeska's, she was called to Provincetown court for throwing garbage out of her window and failing to pay a dance partner. She called upon Williams as a character witness, which he did with pleasure, despite her having fired him. He told incredulous friends that he "simply liked her".[11]
In 1947 she returned to Europe. After stays in Paris and Zurich, where she ran a cabaret café called Valeska und ihr Küchenpersonal (Valeska and her kitchen staff) for half a year in 1948, she went back to Blockaded Berlin. There she first opened the cabaret Bei Valeska in the former Opernkeller (Opera cellar) at the Theater des Westens in 1949–1950, after that the cabaret Hexenküche (Witch's Kitchen) in 1950. It was active every winter until April 1956. During the same period, she opened her cabaret Ziegenstall (Goat Shed) in the village of Kampen on the island of Sylt in summer 1951.[1] She ran this small but well known cabaret each summer until her death. In the 1960s, she made her comeback in film. In 1965, she had a role in Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits, the success of which caused her to market herself to young German directors in the 1970s. During this period, she played in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's TV series Eight Hours Don't Make a Day and in Volker Schlöndorff's 1976 movie Coup de Grâce.[2]
In 1978, Werner Herzog invited her to play the real estate broker Knock in his remake of Murnau's classic film Nosferatu. The contract was signed March 1 but she died just two weeks later before filming began. On 18 March 1978 neighbors and friends in Kampen, Germany, reported she had not been seen for four days. When her door was forced in the presence of police she was found dead. She is believed to have died on 16 March. She was 86 years old. In 2010, the art of Valeska Gert was presented at the Berlin Museum for Contemporary Art Hamburger Bahnhof, in the exhibition Pause. Bewegte Fragmente (Pause. Fragments in motion). The curators Wolfgang Müller from the art punk band Die Tödliche Doris (The Deadly Doris) and art historian An Paenhuysen included a video Baby showing Gert performing. It was recorded by Ernst Mitzka in 1969.[13] Mitzka's video of Gert performing Baby and Death is also included in the video art collection Record Again! 40 Jahre Videokunst.de part 2.[14]