Dancer, cabaret artist, choreographer, actor, singer, and writer, Valeska Gert invented a style at the start of the 1920s that promptly excited the admiration of the likes of Brecht, Meyerhold, and Eisenstein. Her dancing—which could be described as satire, caricature, outlandish pantomime, and hallucinated realism—set up and sustained a tension between the grotesque and abstraction. She managed through collage and montage to condense the expressiveness of the silhouettes, characters, and figures she borrowed from social reality. Her danced theater is thus also a political theater (Zeittheater) and a syncopal theater, with the ability to forge types and fictionalize aspects and rhythms of the urban civilization of her day.

“Now that established values are breaking down and what seemed to feed common sentiment and intelligence has become problematical, now that no converging cultural will can keep the need for invention within stable forms, I declare that grotesque dance crystallizes in a single gesture and for our time the extremes that are about to explode.” These lines, written by Gert in 1920 in Berlin, resonate for us today in ways that motivate the work that Latifa Laâbissi, I-Fang Lin and Christophe Wavelet are embarking upon, the first public performance of which is being presented at the Taipei Biennale.