Part 3 · Duncan, Graham, Wigman

Nietzsche’s dancers

“Ye higher men… learn to dance beyond yourselves!”

Nietzsche never saw modern dance. It was invented after his death, mostly by women who read him. This part puts his words next to theirs.

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Source text

The Higher Man, sections 17, 18 and 20

Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part Four (1885) · translated by Thomas Common (1909) · public domain

do all good things come to their goal. Like cats they curve their backs, they purr inwardly with their approaching happiness,—all good things laugh.

His step whether a person already walketh on HIS OWN path: just see me walk! He, however, who cometh nigh to his goal, danceth.

And verily, a statue have I not become, not yet do I stand there stiff, stupid and stony, like a pillar; I love fast racing.

And though there be on earth and dense , he who hath light feet runneth even across the mud, and danceth, as upon well-swept ice.

Lift up your hearts, my brethren, high, higher! And do not forget your legs! Lift up also your legs, ye good dancers, and better still, if ye stand upon your heads!

This crown of the laughter, this rose-garland crown: I myself have put on this crown, I myself have my laughter. No one else have I found to-day enough for this.

Zarathustra the dancer, Zarathustra the light one, who with his , one ready for flight, beckoning unto all birds, ready and prepared, a blissfully light-spirited one:—

Zarathustra the , Zarathustra the sooth-laugher, no impatient one, no absolute one, one who loveth leaps and side-leaps; I myself have put on this crown!

20 (end)

Ye , the worst thing in you is that ye have none of you learned to dance as ye ought to dance—to dance beyond yourselves! What doth it matter that ye have failed!

How many things are still possible! So LEARN to laugh beyond yourselves! Lift up your hearts, ye good dancers, high! higher! And do not forget the good laughter!

This crown of the laughter, this rose-garland crown: to you my brethren do I cast this crown! Laughing have I consecrated; ye higher men, LEARN, I pray you—to laugh!

Isadora Duncan (1877–1927)

Duncan opens her autobiography, My Life (1927), with Nietzsche. Before the first chapter, she prints these lines from Zarathustra, Part Three, “The Seven Seals.”

Source text

The epigraph to My Life

Isadora Duncan, My Life (1927), quoting Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra III, “The Seven Seals,” section 6 · public domain

“If my be a dancer’s virtue, and if I have often sprung with both feet into golden-emerald , and if it be my that every thing heavy shall become light, every body a dancer and every spirit a bird: verily, that is my Alpha and Omega.”
—Nietzsche

Martha Graham (1894–1991)

“I owe all that I am to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.”Martha Graham, as quoted by her biographer Ernestine Stodelle

In 1935 the German government invited Graham to dance at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. She refused. In her answer she said that artists she admired had been persecuted in Germany, and that some members of her company (many were Jewish) would not be welcome there. That December she premiered “Steps in the Street,” a dance about exile and homelessness. Read her letter on the Martha Graham Dance Company site.

Martha Graham.

Mary Wigman (1886–1973)

Wigman is credited with creating German , the “dance of expression.” In 1936 she accepted the invitation Graham refused, and performed on the opening day of the Berlin Olympics. Under the Nazis she was also forbidden to employ Jewish dancers, and later had to close her school.

Mary Wigman.

1950: the philosophers catch up

After 1945, most scholars outside Germany saw Nietzsche as part madman and part . In 1950 Walter Kaufmann, a Princeton philosopher who had fled Nazi Germany at eighteen, published Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, and the English-speaking world began to read Nietzsche again. The dancers had never stopped.

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