(Lavinia Berta Schulz)
born on June 23, 1896 in Lübben / Lusatia, Prussia
died on June 19, 1924 in Hamburg, Germany
German expressive and mask dancer, fashion and costume designer, choreographer and actress
100th anniversary of death on June 19, 2024
Biography
A versatile performer of many talents, Lavinia Schulz won the hearts of critics and the public alike during the Weimar Republic with her unusual dances in unusual full-body masks. After her early death, she was largely forgotten until her estate was discovered by chance in 1988 in the attic of Hamburg's Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe. The costumes recovered have remained one of the Hanseatic city's most impressive collections ever since.
“When will I be through?”: First steps
Schulz lived a brief life marked by great heights and painfully deep falls that literally inspired a novel (Berit Ganz: Pixeltänzer. Frankfurt am Main 2019). Suffering from a severe ear disease, Lavinia Schulz grew up as an only child in Lusatia. Her mother Lillie fostered her daughter's many artistic talents to the best of her ability; her father Georg worked at a bank. In 1912, at the age of 16, Schulz moved to Berlin where, according to biographer Athina Chadzis, she in all probability studied art, acting and classical ballet. Lavinia Schulz quickly developed a passion for modern art movements such as Expressionism, Futurism and Constructivism. In 1913 she discovered a new concept of art. The works of art she encountered at Nell and Herwarth Walden's Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (First German Autumn Salon) – among them Sonia Delaunay-Terk's collages, astral cushions and lampshades – not only broke with old conventions, but also aimed to place the focus on everyday life. Schulz would later write in a letter that back then, at the age of 17, she had begun to view life as a kind of “purgatory” and to ask herself, despondently: “When will I be through?” (unless otherwise noted, all subsequent quotations from: Chadzis 1996 and 2002).
Schulz in the Sturm
Berlin, the imperial capital burdened by Emperor Wilhelm’s arch-conservative taste in art, had been transformed into the center of transnational modernism in the early 20th century largely due to the Sturm “empire” of Nell and Herwarth Walden. In addition to the legendary avant-garde magazine Der Sturm (The Storm) published since 1910, the network included the almost even more famous Sturm gallery (since 1912), an art school (since 1916), a publishing house and a theater. The young, inquisitive Lavinia Schulz was fascinated by the Sturm; she enrolled in the art school immediately after its founding in 1916 and she joined Lothar Schreyer’s theater troupe, the Sturmbühne. Schreyer, who later was to direct the Bauhaus stagecraft workshop in Weimar (1921-23), had wholeheartedly adopted the Gesamtkunstwerk ideal of the time and strove for nothing less than a complete transformation of spoken theater into a “cult-like communal happening.” He instructed Lavinia Schulz in stagecraft and pantomime, quickly pinning all hopes on his “first” (quoted by N. Chadzis, 2002, p. 66) - in the sense of best - student. Indeed, despite their many subsequent, vociferous disputes, he was still praising her as a “brilliant person with wild passion” (cited in Bilang, 2013, p. 129) two decades after her death.
Under Schreyer’s tutelage Schulz learned so-called Klangsprechen (tone speaking), an expressionist-inspired form of recitation that sounded strange to the untrained ear. She appeared in October 1918 in the lead role in Sancta Susanna, which was written by playwright August Schramm and was the only play ever performed on the Sturm stage. Schreyer provided posterity with many an anecdote about this tumultuous event during which Schulz performed some scenes dressed in a kind of bikini and needed police protection. He claimed, for example, that Schulz as Sancta Susanna was “naked (...) with the audience anxiously holding their breath - perhaps in horror” (cited in Chadzis, 1996, p. 100) and that she reaped “frenetic applause as well as wild () protests ().” One eyewitness had a more sober recollection of the supposedly scandalous performance, writing in the Vossische Zeitung that it had been no more than a momentary theater storm a teacup (cited in Reetze 2010).
Schulz and the Hamburg Kampfbühne
In 1919, Schulz agreed to Lothar Schreyer’s request to join him in Hamburg at his newly founded Kampfbühne, which soon became the center of expressionistic theater on the Elbe. Sorely underpaid, Schulz worked day and night, creating stage costumes, masks, avant-garde clothing and taking on the leading roles in August Stramm's plays Haidebraut and Kräfte for Schreyer. The premiere in October 1919 at the Kunsthochschule (Hamburg Art Academy) divided opinion: while traditionalists attacked Schulz's tone speaking as an assault on the ears and claimed that she sang “like an animal” (cited by N. Chadzis, 1996, p. 101), Karl Lorenz was still enthusing about the performance two years later and believed that Schulz had succeeded in transforming Stramm's texts into incomparably expressive body language (cf. Lorenz 1922).
Lavinia Schulz must have met her future husband, the actor and dancer Walter Holdt (1899-1924), by the end of 1919 at the latest, when the two of them appeared on stage together in a medieval-style nativity play in Hamburg's St. Catherine's Church with Schulz as an announcing angel and Holdt as Father Joseph. Shortly thereafter an altercation broke out during rehearsals for the play Der Tod des Empedocles, and the pair decided to leave the Kampfbühne for good. There was talk, however, of Schulz actually having been dissatisfied for quite some time with Schreyer's meager pay, his domineering and the increasingly cult-like feel of his productions.
Skirnir, Das Gewürge and Tote Frau: in-house productions
On their own, and for the first time without a fixed stage connection, Schulz and Holdt decided to call themselves Die Maskentänzer (The Mask Dancers). They married in secret against their parents’ wishes, and moved into a small, bare basement apartment in Besenbinderhof. They began to write dances - some satirical and grotesque, others dramatic and ecstatic - with mysteriously ambiguous titles such as Skirnir, Das Gewürge or Tote Frau. Schulz designed all the costumes herself with a meticulous attention to detail, and 19 of these creations were among the items found in the museum attic in 1988. The content of the dances was based on northern European sagas as well as on material published in Sturm, and their performances were lauded as an exemplary critique of industrialization. In 1924, Erich Lüth had gushing praise for the figure that Schulz, influenced by Russian Constructivism, had created and named Große Technik (Big Technology). It represented, he wrote, a “warning of the tyranny of blast furnaces and steel mills over people” (cited by N. Chadzis, 1996, p. 107). Captured in photographs by Minya Diez-Dührkoop in 1924, the extraordinary full-body masks used in the performances represented a break with many a tradition in art; Schulz had created an oeuvre that biographer Athina Chadzis accurately describes as “unique in the world.” To this day Schulz is too often pushed into the shadows of Oskar Schlemmer, whose Triadisches Ballett is more widely known.
Partly out of material necessity, partly out of conviction, Schulz created the costumes for her characters bearing melodious names such as Kipplefips, Tobbogan or Springvieh out of papier-mâché, burlap and wood. Far ahead of her time, she added industrial waste products (wires, cords, hoses, spools of thread, screws, scraps of wire mesh), thereby alluding to the production sites accused of exploiting people and nature. The artist disapproved of using more pleasing materials such as silk, dismissing it as “a byproduct of worms” (cited by N. Chadzis, 2002, p. 79). To protect themselves from the sharp wires, nails and edges of the costumes that each weighed up to 40 kilograms, she and Holdt wore thickly padded shirts underneath. They also had to wrap their heads in bandages. Schulz was convinced that art must never be comfortable; it had to be exhausting. Hewing to Expressionism and the Gesamtkunstwerk ideal, she alluded to continents far away and to times long past with creations in a wild synthesis of different styles and in colors sometimes garish, sometimes in all probability based on Johannes Itten’s color scheme of the four elements. Innovative contemporary movements such as Dadaism or Russian Constructivism also influenced her. Within the context of this constant search for artistic progress and a fundamentally new beginning, some of Schulz's statements and beliefs – including her conviction that northern Europe possessed a purer, “more original” landscape – are disturbing. Whether they are to be regarded more as an apolitical, unreflected adoption of the Heimatbewegung slogans popular at the time among the general public and in avant-garde circles or whether they point to more deeply held political convictions has unfortunately not yet been conclusively clarified.
“A glorius trio, a triad”: Breakthrough
Schulz meticulously sketched every movement and every rhythm of her dances in a specially devised notation system. In May 1921, she published a portfolio of woodcuts with excerpts from her gloomy and dark piece Mann und tote Frau (Man and Dead Woman). At the same time, she expanded her contacts within the theater and arts scene, in particular with the Hamburg Secessionists. She and Holdt were especially close to the pianist and composer Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt (1901-1988); they named their son, born in 1923, after Stuckenschmidt and for a time they shared their apartment with him. He accompanied Schulz and Holdt with atonal pieces on the piano when they performed during the literary and artistic regulars' table Die Tafelrunde in the cabaret venue Die Jungfrau, in the theater café Haka, at the legendary artists' festivals of the vocational arts academy in the Curio-Haus and in various other studio theaters.
Schulz and Holdt performed several times at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe. When the local chapter of the Deutscher Werkbund held the exhibition Masken, Tänze, Puppentheater (Masks, Dances and Puppetry, 1922) at the museum, the couple’s performance in the accompanying program was so successful that they were asked to perform a second time. At times the praise was effusive. Karl Lorenz, for example, predicted in 1922 that Schulz and Holdt would “certainly be of great importance for the German language, for dance and for theater culture” in the future, having avowed that it had been his good fortune to have witnessed “a beginning that is so completely new and yet already so solid. (...) Dance, sound design and mask—a glorious trio, a triad.” Two years later, Erich Lüdt was no less enthusiastic in the Hamburger Anzeiger, writing that the couple succeeded in giving their unforgettable characters a “fantastic, monstrous life of their own” (quoted by N. Chadzis, 2002, p. 77). He was particularly fascinated by Schulz's attention to detail in costume making: “every stitch was so expertly and conscientiously” placed that one could be forgiven for thinking that she had tried to “breathe eternal life into the masks.” Yet the artist paid a heavy price for her perfectionism; the costumes required vast amounts of time that she then lacked for rehearsals. Schulz intentionally designed the extremely heavy full-body masks so as to distort natural body movements; the rigid headpiece and solid wooden panel of the audience favorite Skirnir, for example, rendered any subtle or spontaneous movement impossible. Yet at the same time she admitted that she found it demoralizing that some of her awkward movements during performances were due solely to insufficient practice. She explained that she always tried to achieve her maximum on stage. Feeling that she fell short, she apologized for the failure to achieve a greater result due to her age, the “day and night shift(s)” and the constant “tension of the extreme nervous forces” she experienced (quoted by N. Chadzis, 1996, p. 107).
“Spirit and money are two antagonistic poles”: life on the edge
Schulz and Holdt, idealistic and determined to maintain their artistic independence, never accepted payment for performances. Schulz believed that “selling spiritual ideas for money” was a “mortal sin” (quoted by N. Chadzis, 2002, p. 72). Critics and audiences alike considered the couple to be among the most impressive performers of modern dance in the Weimar Republic, yet towards the end their life was marked by agonizing hunger and gnawing fears for the future. Their desperate attempts to earn a bit of money by selling dress designs, performing in jazz clubs or appearing in dance films all failed. After the couple lost their last engagement in May 1924, Schulz — considered by many of her contemporaries the driving force both artistically and privately –- searched for solutions. However, as witnesses later reported, Holdt remained lethargic and apathetic. Possibly suffering from depression, he boycotted any countermeasures. On June 18, 1924 - under circumstances that were never clarified – Schulz shot him dead and turned the gun on herself only hours later. The news of the couple's death aroused widespread, deep sympathy; the press refrained from any sensationalism in its reporting. It was regarded not as a case of murder, but of double suicide. Upon the opening of the Schulz-Holdt memorial exhibition in 1925, Max Sauerlandt, then director of the Hamburg Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, therefore warned the public: “Never again abandon those swimming so bravely against the current” (cited by N. Chadzis 2002, p. 82). Yet it seems that only very few have heeded his warning. Far too few.
(Text from 2021; translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2024)
Please consult the German version for additional information (pictures, sources, videos, bibliography).
Quotes
“But is it not wonderful to feel what is happening here?! Is it not our good fortune to witness a beginning that is so completely new and yet already so solid?! (...) Dance, sound design and mask—a glorious trio, a triad. This undertaking will certainly be of great importance for the German language, for dance and for theater culture. Where are the people who are far-sighted enough to support these two people?” (Karl Lorenz 1922)
“Here the body, losing its own essence, crawls into a casing made of glass and wood, into rattling joints, into sharp-edged, flat, wide shells that represent a strange projection of intricate souls onto dead things, which take on a fantastic, monstrous life of their own, an almost 'abstract organicity.' These mask dances, completely detached from the corporeal, are in the most audacious sense demonic self-glorification, they are a grimace of lived life that breaks out up from the primal reasoning within and finds the meaning of absolute contradiction in the most perfect nonsense.” (Erich Lüth in: Hamburger Anzeiger, February 23, 1924; quoted by N. Chadzis, 1996, p. 107)
“The terrible deed of this extraordinarily kind and clever woman is due to tragic circumstances ... They were without engagements for the last six weeks and literally starving. Walter Holdt (...) had his human weaknesses, perhaps more human weaknesses than his wife, who surpassed him in artistic maturity…”. (Obituary in the Hamburger Anzeiger 1924, quoted in Chadzis 2002)
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