This lecture is the Opening of the Valeska Gert Season and the introductory lecture for the series Valeska Gert and her Afterlives. FU Berlin / AdK / DAAD: Celebrating 20 years of the Valeska Gert Professorship. 

If this lecture series addresses a Weimar dancer and her afterlives, one aspect of the topic must be to explore how the ephemeral art of dance can gain an afterlife in the first place. Given the intensely gestural nature of Valeska Gert’s performances, this opening lecture considers how (Gert’s) gestures travel through time, how they maintain or change their connotations, and how they unfold their energetic charge in the present. At stake will be a triangulation of Aby Warburg’s engagement with the mnemonic potential of gestures, Sara Ahmed’s ‘sticky’ affects, and Gert’s reenactments of some of her Weimar dances together with Pola Kinski in Volker Schlöndorff’s 1977 documentary Nur zum Spaß, nur zum Spiel. Kaleidoskop Valeska Gert.  

Lucia Ruprecht is professor of Critical Dance Studies at the Institute for Theater Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research and teaching interests cover dance and movement research, especially theories and aesthetics of Western theatre dance since 1800, theories, practices, and ethics of gesture, dance historiography, dance and literature since 1800, dance and film, and broader questions of critical theory in relation to the body.