Futurism: an Anthology

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. Published with assistance from the Kingsley Trust Association Publication Fund established by the Scroll and Key Society of Yale College. Frontispiece on page ii is a detail of fg. 35. Copyright © 2009 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by Nancy Ovedovitz and set in Scala type by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Futurism : an anthology / edited by Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-08875-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Futurism (Art) 2. Futurism (Literary movement) 3. Arts, Modern—20th century. I. Rainey, Lawrence S. II. Poggi, Christine, 1953– III. Wittman, Laura. NX456.5.F8F87 2009 700'.4114—dc22 2009007811 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 234 than even the most feminist of feminists could have hoped. And even if, after the Rosa Rosà war, they will have to give back to men many of the possibilities which they cur- rently possess, like capital that’s on loan, the feld to which they’re restricted has in all respects been enlarged and will never become as narrow as it was before. But all these are old observations by now. The new dimensions of the situation will kick in after the war. After the war millions of men will return to the companions whom they left behind in tears, as weak as children at the prospect of the torment of separation, as fearful as little girls left at a boarding school and faced with a new life which they now had to confront alone. They will fnd women whom the war has shaken as much as it has them. Those who return will be received with the passionate tenderness that no social transformation will ever be able to destroy in the heart of a woman who truly loves. But they will fnd in these women not the passion of conceited little dolls but that of companions tempered by the greatness of the times, people conscious that their present and future task is to keep alive the energy of the nation. Those who have fought for years and return tired, too tired perhaps to want to make up for the lost time ofered to the fatherland, will fnd their energies re- ignited by the frm will of their companions who have remained at home and also labored for years . And those who before the war were idlers and chatterers, those who from cau- tion or fear liked to stay at home and consume their earnings in peace, now having been dragged away despite themselves by the iron machinery of military duty, will return to fnd, together with the souls of their women tempered by the greatness of the times, that there is no longer room for resuming the old life, for dropping back into the sterility of pleasurable idleness. They will learn that the rivers of Italy are awaiting bridges, the plains awaiting a forest of chimneys, and in the torrents of Italy there are sleeping infnite forces which await the arm of those who will return, in order to work alongside their strong women. MANIFESTO OF FUTURIST DANCE F.T.MARINETTI 8 July 1917 Dance has always abstracted its rhythms and forms from life. The fear and amaze- ment that stirred prehistoric man in the face of an incomprehensible and extraor- dinarily complex universe found their counterpart in his earliest dances, which 235 were inevitably sacred. Manifesto The earliest oriental dances, pervaded by religious terror, were rhythmic and of Futurist Dance symbolic pantomimes that naively reproduced the rotating movements of the stars. Whence, for example, the roundel. The various steps and movements of the Catholic priest who celebrates the mass derive from these earliest dances and have the same astronomical symbolism. Cambodian and Javanese dances are distinguished by their architectural ele- gance and mathematical regularity. They are bas-reliefs in slow motion. Arabic and Persian dances are sensual: imperceptible quivering of the hips to the monotonous clapping of hands or the beating of a tambourine; the spasmodic starts and hysterical convulsions of belly dancing; the furious, enormous leaps of Sudanese dancing. All these are variations on a single motif, that of a man sitting with his legs crossed in front of a half-naked woman who attempts, with canny motions, to persuade him to engage in the act of love. Once the glorious Italian ballet was dead and buried, Europe witnessed the rise of stylizations of savage dances, elegant versions of exotic dances and modernized versions of ancient dances. Parisian red pepper + crest + shield + lance + ecstasy in front of idols that no longer mean a thing + undulations of Montmartre thighs = an erotic passéist anachronism for foreigners. In prewar Paris, dances from South America were the rage: the furious spasmodic tango from Argentina, the zamacueca from Chile, the maxixe from Brazil, the santafé from Paraguay.1 The last of these registers the gallant turnings of an ardent and audacious man in front of an attractive and seductive woman whom he fnally seizes with a lightning leap and drags away into a whirling version of the waltz. The Ballets Russes, organized by Diaghilev,2 was extremely interesting from an artistic viewpoint. It modernized popular Russian dances with a marvelous fusion of dance and music which interpenetrated each other and gave the spectator an original and perfect expression of the race’s essential force. With Nijinsky, dance’s pure geometry appears for the frst time, free of imitation and without sexual stimulation. The muscular system elevated to divinity. Isadora Duncan has created free dance, again without preparatory imitation, that ignores musculature and eurythmy in order to devote everything to emotional expression, to the aerial ardor of its steps.3 But fundamentally she merely proposes to intensify, enrich, and modulate in a thousand diferent ways the rhythm of a woman’s body that languidly rejects, languidly invokes, languidly accepts, and languidly regrets the masculine giver of erotic happiness. I often had the pleasure of admiring Isadora Duncan as she performed free improvisations among the smoky, mother-of-pearl veils that flled her studio. She 236 would dance freely, as without a thought as someone who is just talking, desiring, F. T. loving, weeping—to any sort of little tune, no matter how vulgar, such as “Mariette, Marinetti ma petite Mariette” pounded out on the piano. But she never managed to project anything but the very complicated feelings of desperate nostalgia, spasmodic sen- suality, and childishly feminine cheerfulness. There are many points of contact between Isadora’s art and pictorial Impression- ism, as there are between Nijinsky’s art and Cézanne’s constructions of volumes and forms. So, naturally, under the infuence of Cubist experimentation and especially of Picasso, a dance of geometricized volumes was created, almost independent of the music. Dance became an autonomous art, the music’s equal. It no longer submit- ted to the music, it replaced it. Valentine de Saint-Point has conceived an abstract and metaphysical dance that was meant to embody pure thought, without sentimentality or sexual excitement.4 Her métachorie consists of poems that are mimed and danced. Unfortunately it is passéist poetry that navigates within the old Greek and medieval sensibility: ab- stractions danced but static, arid, cold, and emotionless. Why deprive oneself of the vivifying element of imitation? Why put on a Merovingian helmet and veil one’s eyes? The sensibility of these dances turns out to be elementary limited monotonous and tediously wrapped up in an outdated atmosphere of fearful myths that today no longer mean a thing. A frigid geometry of poses which have nothing to do with the great simultaneous dynamic sensibility of modern life. With much more modern ambitions, Dalcroze has created a very interesting rhythmic gymnastics,5 which nevertheless limits its efects to muscular hygiene and describing agrarian feld work. We Futurists prefer Loie Fuller and the African American “cakewalk” (utiliza- tion of electric lights and mechanical movements).6 One must go beyond muscular possibilities and aim in the dance for that ideal multiplied body of the motor that we have so long dreamed of. Our gestures must imitate the movements of machines assiduously paying court to steering wheels, tires, pistons, and so preparing for the fusion of man with the machine, achieving the metallism of Futurist dance. Music is fundamentally and incurably passéist, and hence hard to deploy in Futurist dance. Noise, because it results from the friction or the collision of solids, liquids, or gases that are in rapid motion, has become by means of onomatopoeia, one of the most dynamic elements of Futurist poetry. Noise is the language of the new human-mechanical life. Futurist dance, therefore, will be accompanied by organized noises and by the orchestra of noise-tuners which Luigi Russolo has invented. Futurist dance will be: 237 Manifesto anti-harmonic of Futurist ill-mannered anti-gracious Dance asymmetrical synthetic dynamic free-wordist. In the Futurist epoch that we live in today, when more than twenty million men have formed battle lines that make a fantastic Milky Way of exploding shrapnel- stars that bind together the earth; when the Machine and Great Explosives, co- operating with the war, have multiplied a hundredfold the force of races, obliging them to give all they have of boldness, instinct, and muscular resistance, Futurist dance can have no other purpose than to immensify heroism, that master of metals which has been fused with the divine machines of speed and war.

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