graphs showaslender womanre-enacting proletarian masculinity through the
tension between oppression andresistance. Knowledge of the dancer’sgender
onlyheightens the underlying sense of provocation.With her dark hair closely
cropped and her breasts tightlybound,Mihalyconveys both strength and vulner-
ability;insodoing,she foregrounds the conventions that define the working
class in highlygenderedterms.Evenasthe fistsraised to protect the chest sug-
gest adefensivegesture,the feet firmlyplantedonthe ground expressasense of
stability.She is clearlyprepared for assaultsbyimagined enemies, includingby
those provoked by suchabold assumption of male privilege.
In their performances of class struggle, Weidt and Mihalycontributed to
what dance historian Gabriele Brandstetter,buildingonAby Warburgsnotion’
of pathos formulas, has described asaselective appropriation of the discourse
of pathos by the historicalavant-gardes.²²Pathos formulas, as defined byWar-
burg, are the primevalvocabulary of passionategesticulation; in the arts, they
establish highlycodified (and universallyvalid) connections between emotions
and bodies, especiallyinthe form of bodygesture and facial expression. In
Brandstetter’sreading, these pathos formulas were claimed foramodernist aes-
thetic arising out of thetension between bodylanguageand textual corpus.Very
similar processes can be observed at the intersection of classperformance and
politics in the context of communist agitprop and its proletarian modernist cre-
dentials. Here, however,pathos formulas always aim to escape the confines of
bodies and texts and use expanded notions of performativity to affectreal polit-
ical change. Their meaningisalways defined in relational and referential terms.
Developed within the divided political landscape of the lateWeimarRepublic,
particulargestures thus mean somethingvery different,depending on whether
they are performed in middle-class or working-classsettings, whether they ad-
dress KPD,SPD,orNSDAPaudiences,and whether they focus on embodied emo-
tions as part of the political instrumentalization orradical transformation of the
work of art.
Onewayofassessingthe communist appropriation of pathos formulas in-
volves looking at the instructions by practitionersofagitprop about the right
(and wrong)ways of standingand speaking.The Rote Sprachrohr (Red Mega-
itiesAcross Borders,ed. Jennifer Fisher and AnthonyShay(Oxford: OxfordUniv ersity Press,
2009), 258 – 275. Forathen-contemporary overview of modern dancefromaworking-class per-
spective,also seeJohn Schikowski,Geschichte desTanzes(Berlin: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1926).
See Gabriele Brandstetter,Poetics of Dance: Body,Image,and Space in the HistoricalAvant-
gardes,trans.Elena Polzer(Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press,2015), especiallythe introduction.It
should be noted that pathos formulas,whichWarburgdescribesasvisual tropes,havenothing
in common with the pathetic as defined by Schiller.
250 Chapter 13