‘Slide on the Razor’ | Radical Cabaret and the Expressionist Avant-Garde

Meredith Ventura is well on her way to becoming one of the choreographic icons of 21st-century dance-theater. Her visually stunning creations occupy the crossroads between dance, visual art, history, and social commentary.

Much as dancers and audiences recognize the movement vocabularies invented by Martha Graham, José Limón, George Balanchine, and other luminaries, we will begin to recognize the movement vocabulary invented by Ventura, infused with dance gestures taken from her research into the boundary-breaking performers of the Radical Cabaret movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

As Ventura wrote on the art wall that introduces her exhibit (on view in UCSB’s Humanities and Social Sciences building for the next six months): “Slide on the Razor invites you into the underground world of Radical Cabaret, a global performance form that shattered the boundaries between theater, dance, and popular spectacle.”  

She asks, “What does it mean to make the body a stage for radical play, a site of refusal, beauty, and excess?”

This question permeates Ventura’s signature choreographic works, Palermo! and Sound and Smoke, which are also on display on two large monitors in the gallery.

The exhibit is divided into six walls, each highlighting a different aspect of Ventura’s research. Through her photographs, Ventura chronicles the progression of Radical Cabaret, which became the foundation for the modern dance movement, itself a rebellion against the rigid rules of classical ballet.

Wall One: The Edge of a Volcano: Pleasure and Protest in Weimar Berlin, depicts the rise of radical cabaret out of the devastation of World War I in Germany’s Weimar Republic (1918-1933). Here Ventura showcases artists such as Anita Berber, Valeska Gert, the Sisters G, and the American Dodge Sisters, Betty and Beth. Ventura writes, “Cabaret artists danced at a dangerous moment as Germany witnessed the rise of National Socialism…. [They] remind us that movement is never neutral.”

Are we not now at a dangerous moment, considering the rise of authoritarianism in the world today and in our own country? How are artists today responding to the edge of the volcano?

Wall Two: Valeska Gert: The Grotesque Feminine is devoted to the work of German-Jewish cabaret artist Valeska Gert whose work, according to Ventura, laid the groundwork for the Punk Movement of the 1960s and ‘70s.

Wall Three, titled Ornamental Body, Modern Lens: Cabaret and the Vienna Secession, is devoted to some of the venues where radical cabaret flourished, such as Kabarett Leopoldi-Wiesenthal, and Cabaret Fledermaus, where the aim of the founders was “to stimulate the senses through a synthesis of modern architecture, painting, poetry, music and dance, creating a space where none of the arts were excluded.” In this section Ventura describes how “Viennese cabaret defied dominant narratives of modernism and forged a radical aesthetic of dissent”; how “performers adorned their bodies as living canvases, unsettling bourgeois morality”; and how the cabaret body was elevated into the realm of modern art.

The radical cabaret movement embraced, performed, and exalted queerness. Wall Four: Queer Bodies and the Cabaret Imagination, showcases some of the performers who “blurred the distinctions between masculine and feminine, as well as sacred and profane.” Performers such as Barbette, Willi Pape and others “defied categories and inspired both fascination and fear.”

Queer culture was vibrant in clubs such as the El Dorado in Berlin, one of three such performance venues of the Weimar Republic. The sign above the door states, “Hier Ists Richtig!” meaning “Here it is right.” Somewhere between 1932 and 1933, the owner of El Dorado Berlin handed it over to the local Nazi party and fled for his life, and the Nazi party turned it into their local headquarters. The parallels with what we are experiencing today, when trans and gender-nonconforming citizens have to flee the U.S.,  are beyond chilling.

Among the many fascinating photographs Ventura has chosen to display, the image of a performer dressed as half man, half woman particularly caught my eye. Whether for its irony, each half gesturing to the opposite gender’s door, or the tragicomic, almost embarrassed, expression on the dancer’s face, or the helplessness of the outstretched hands, I can’t quite say. What would contemporary choreography based on this image look like? What music would one choose?

Ventura’s exhibit, besides being a fascinating, scholarly work, invites the viewer to imagine creating a response.

Walls Five and Six are devoted to Staging Theory, and showcase photos of Ventura’s company, Selah Dance Collective, performing her two major works: Sound and Smoke and Palermo! If you have not seen either of these works in the theater, and even if you have, I strongly recommend watching them in this gallery setting. Immerse yourself in the flavors and emotions that come through the photographs, and you will recognize them in the music and gestures of the dancers.

The afternoon included two solo performances, both based on the life and work of Valeska Gert. Ventura explained, “The first solo by Hailey Maynard was from Sound and Smoke, which was an exploration of Valeska Gert’s career and legacy. The second solo, danced by Avery Trask, is from Palermo! and is directly inspired by my research at the Akademie der Kunst in Berlin and the Valeska Gert museum in Sylt, Germany that I visited during July 2024. The solo is [composed] of movements inspired by images of Valeska Gert in the 1920s, but is more in line with the storyline of Palermo! than anything.” (Click here for my review of Palermo!)

Through her staged work, Ventura asks us to “feel history kinesthetically” and reminds us that “the past is never still, and that to move is to think, to remember, and to envision anew” (Wall Six, Staging Theory). 

Take this thought with you this season, as you attend various performances, whether classical ballet, contemporary dance, cabaret, flamenco, Middle Eastern dance, or other styles: “The dancing body becomes a site of memory, critique, and radical imagining” (Wall Six, Staging Theory).

Slide on the Razor will be ongoing for the next six months in the front hallway of UCSB’s Humanities and Social Sciences building, facing the main campus walk. Click here for a map of the building, and here for a map of campus. Parking is available for visitors (for a small fee) near the Events Center.

Selah Dance Collective will be performing excerpts from Palermo! at the Lobero Theater on Wednesday, October 22, opening the show for Nebula Dance Lab. Click here for tickets and more information.