Staging language: Milca Mayerova and the Czech book Alphabet

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Mayerova evidently responded to the craze for music-hall entertainment in her own work; in one recital, for example, she parodied the Charleston. (76) This mixing of "high" and "low" dance was not simply a question of form, although, like the Jakobsonian foxtrot, it indicated Mayerova's receptivity to nontraditional areas of poetic functioning. Her choice also registered the social connotations of dancing for women, who were understood to lose their innocence through this sexualized activity. A letter from fellow modern dancer Jarmila Kroschlova to Liberated Theater director Jindrich Honzl gives a sense of the titillation afforded by seeing up-standing young ladies performing in a revue: "At any rate, I'd get a real kick out of working several of those young boarding-school misses into girls [in English]--and I could find some good themes in there." (77)

A cartoon of March 1926 titled "Fancy Dress Ball" takes Kroschlova's suggestive proposal still further. A learned man in a tuxedo is asked by his flapper-age dancing partner to explain his observation that today's progressive styles are actually reactionary. "Of course!" he replies. "For if this continues, our fashions will end up straightway at the fig leaf!" (78) With greater graphicness--and a less routine take on gender relations--Devetsil painter Toyen (Marie Cerminova) depicted the spectacle of this Adamic couture in her 1925 work Three Dancing Girls (Tri tanecnice) precisely as a cabaret, in which professorial men are reduced to Lilliputian onlookers before a trio of modern goddesses (Fig. 10). For Toyen, the aggressive sexual allure associated with dancing presented no threat; however, this social revolution did not generally meet with such humorous acceptance. A lengthy court story reported in February 1926, for instance, sums up its tale of one young girl's seduction, elopement, abortions, and eventual crime de passion with the headline: "They met at dance classes." (79) Another court report from 1924 describes the lust and debauchery that follow from dancing:

  She is the true daughter of Venus and her father is Bacchus
  himself. She dances in the spotlight, showing the
  wiriness of her snakelike body; she answers the applause
  with thanks, and the bouquet with greeting card as well.
  She flashes her healthy white teeth, looks around coquettishly
  and then drinks herself blind, spending the night
  with many a gadabout in luxury hotels. Her body is limber--she's
  appealing, has a pretty face and is much
  loved .... (80)

The sphere of dance mapped out by Mayerova and her colleagues was thus caught up, their training and ambitions notwithstanding, in a larger social context within which dance was viewed as an alluring, risque activity for women. Sensual, erotic interpretations of serious choreography were surely not lost on Mayerova, who performed for at least one person in private as well as in the public realm. An extensive series of photographs dated between 1919 and 1927 documents that Hugo Boettinger, Mayerova's initial mentor in the dance, asked his niece to pose in explicit, though not sexually active arrangements, both alone and with another nude female model. (81) Some of these photographs he worked into sketches. In addition, Boettinger made several drawings of Mayerova performing "Alphabet" that have a distinctly erotic character, adding sensuous curves to poses that appear largely impersonal in the photographs (Fig. 11). There is no indication that the modeling sessions inspired conflictual feelings in Mayerova, who seems to have referred to her uncle always with admiration. Her participation in his fantasies suggests, however, that Mayerova likely had a keen understanding that her dances could mean one thing to the body performing them and quite another to those in the audience.