During the Weimar era in Germany, Lavinia Schulz was a key example of a new type of dancer. Considered an accessible form of expression for women, dance had fast become a component in the repertoire for modern living. Along with her husband and artistic partner Walter Holdt, she performed Expressionist dances from 1919 until 1924 in Hamburg in a style that built on varying intensities of “creeping, stamping, squatting, crouching, kneeling, arching, striding, lunging, and leaping in mostly diagonal-spiralling patterns.” Schulz and Holdt created a series of fantastical costumes that transformed dancers into a type of hybrid artwork. In contrast to the costumes made at the Bauhaus by Oskar Schlemmer and Xanti Schawinsky, Schulz and Holdt’s costumes were characterised by forms drawn from nature and the animal world. Maskenfigur “Toboggan Mann” (1924) don outlandish split red and multi-coloured patterned suits, topped by large masks shaped like a bug’s head, while the blobby, cartoonish Tanzmaske “Technik” (1924) has googly eyes that pop from its triangular face. In the 1980s, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg rediscovered the costumes, as well as a series of studio photographs taken by Minya Diez-Dührkoop. This finding revealed Schulz’s work to be a significant testimony to the fantastic creativity and artistry of Weimar-era dance culture.
Madeline Weisburg
