Valeska Gert

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.

Exhibiting no interest in academics or office work, she began taking dance lessons at the age of nine.

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.

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.

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.

In the 1920s, Gert premiered one of her more provocative works, titled "Pause".

Performed in between reels at Berlin cinemas, it was intended to draw attention to inactivity, silence, serenity, and stillness amid all the movement and chaos in modern life.

She came onstage and literally just stood there.

"It was so radical just to go on stage in the cinema and stand there and do nothing," said Wolfgang Mueller.

Gert began acting at the Munich Kammerspiele.

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.

In the late 1920s, she returned to the stage with pieces emphasizing Tontänze (Sound Dances), which explored the relationship between movement and sound.

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.

Valeska Gert analysed the limits of societal conventions and then expressed with her body the insights that she gained from her analyses.

When she danced an orgasm in Berlin in 1922, the audience called the police.

During this time, she performed in the Schall und Rauch cabaret.

Gert also launched a tour of her own dances, with titles like Dance in Orange, Boxing, Circus, Japanese Grotesque, Death, and Whore.

In addition, she contributed articles for magazines like Die Weltbühne (The World Stage) and the Berliner Tageszeitung (Berline Daily News).

By 1923, Gert focused her work more on film acting than live performance, 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.

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.

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, her second marriage.

In 1938, she emigrated to the United States, where she was cared for by a Jewish refugee community.

She found work washing dishes and posing as a nude model.

This same year, she hired the 17-year-old Georg Kreisler as a rehearsal pianist to continue focus on cabaret work.

By 1941, she had opened the Beggar Bar in New York.

It was a cabaret/restaurant that was filled with mismatched furniture.

Julian Beck, Judith Malina, and Jackson Pollock worked for her.

Tennessee Williams also worked for her for a short time as a busboy, but was fired for refusing to pool his tips.

Gert commented that his work was "so sloppy".

By 1944, Gert had relocated to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she opened Valeska's.

Here, she reunited with Tennessee Williams.