Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and

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Gestural Imaginaries
ii

Oxford Studies in Dance Theory

MARK FRANKO, Series Editor

French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop

Felicia McCarren

Watching Weimar Dance

Kate Elswit

Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical

Avant-​Gardes
Gabriele Brandstetter

Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body,

Second Edition
Mark Franko

Choreographies of 21st Century Wars

Edited by Gay Morris and Jens Richard Giersdorf

Ungoverning Dance: Contemporary European Theatre Dance

and the Commons
Ramsay Burt

Unworking Choreography: The Notion of the Work in Dance

Frédéric Pouillaude

Making Ballet American: Modernism Before and Beyond

Balanchine
Andrea Harris

Choreomania: Dance and Disorder

Kélina Gotman

Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and Cultural Theory in the Early

Twentieth Century
Lucia Ruprecht
iii

Gestural Imaginaries
Dance and Cultural Theory in the
Early Twentieth Century

Lucia Ruprecht

1
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1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Names: Ruprecht, Lucia, 1972–​author.
Title: Gestural imaginaries : dance and cultural theory in
the early twentieth century /​Lucia Ruprecht.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2019. |
Series: Oxford studies in dance theory |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018040520 (print) | LCCN 2018053236 (ebook) |
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Subjects: LCSH: Modern dance—​Europe—​History—​20th century. |
Choreography—​Europe—​History—​20th century. | Gesture in dance.
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v

This possibility of bodies to be several things at the same time is a pre-

condition for the imaginary, and thus for the development of gestures
and dance.
—​Jeroen Peeters, Through the Back: Situating Vision between Moving Bodies

Imponderable evidence includes subtleties of glance, of gesture, of tone.

—​Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Every age had its own gait, glance, and gesture.

—​Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life
vi
vi

CONTENTS

List of Figures ix
Series Editor’s Foreword xi
Acknowledgments xiii
List of Abbreviations xv

Prologue: Inaugurating Gestures—​Le Sacre du printemps 1

Introduction: Gestural Imaginaries 23

1. A Second Gestural Revolution and Gesturing Hands in Rainer Maria Rilke,

Auguste Rodin, Mary Wigman, and Tilly Losch 51

2. Gestures of Vibrating (Interruption) in Rudolf von Laban, Mary Wigman,

and Walter Benjamin 71

3. Conducts and Codes of Gesture in Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka 87

4. Gestural (In)visibility in Béla Balázs and Helmuth Plessner 107

5. Gestures between Symptom and Symbol in Aby Warburg and Sigmund

Freud 125

6. Gestures between the Auratic and the Profane: Niddy Impekoven’s and
Franz Kafka’s Reenactments of Liturgy 151

7. Gestural Drag: Baroquism and Modernist Minstrelsy in Alexander and

Clotilde Sakharoff 169

8. Floral Pathochoreographies: Mime Studies by Harald Kreutzberg,

Alfred Döblin, and Jo Mihaly 193

Epilogue: Intermitting Economy, Opening Futurity 221

Notes 229
Bibliography 287
Index 313
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ix

FIGURES

1.1 Hilde Doepp in Dreams and Masks, photographed by Charlotte

Rudolph 57
1.2 Mary Wigman, Hand Study, photographed by Albert
Renger-​Patzsch 63
1.3 Arm and Hand Studies, photographed by Charlotte Rudolph 64
1.4 Arm and Hand Studies, photographed by Charlotte Rudolph 65
1.5 Tilly Losch in Dance of the Hands, photographed by Emil Otto
Hoppé 69
5.1 Birth of the Baptist by Domenico Ghirlandaio 131
5.2 Panel 47 from Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas 133
5.3 Moses by Michelangelo 144
5.4 Drawings of Michelangelo’s Moses by Sigmund Freud 145
6.1 Niddy Impekoven in Bach Dances, Atelier d’Ora/​Benda 154
6.2 Niddy Impekoven in Bach Dances, Atelier d’Ora/​Benda 155
6.3 Niddy Impekoven in Bach Dances, Atelier d’Ora/​Benda 156
6.4 Niddy Impekoven in Bach Dances, Atelier d’Ora/​Benda 157
7.1 Alexander Sakharoff in Pavane royale 177
7.2 Alexander Sakharoff in the Louvre in front of Hyacinthe Rigaud’s
portrait of Louis XIV 182
7.3 Alexander Sakharoff in Pavane royale, photographed by Masao
Horino 183
7.4 Clotilde Sakharoff in Chanson nègre, photographed by René
Gilbert 190
7.5 Clotilde Sakharoff in Chanson nègre, photographed by Masao
Horino 191
8.1 Jo Mihaly in Vision of War 201
8.2 Jo Mihaly in Vision of War 202
8.3 Jo Mihaly in Vision of War 203
x

x F igures

8.4 Harald Kreutzberg in Three Mad Figures, photographed by Hans

Robertson 206
8.5 Harald Kreutzberg in Three Mad Figures, photographed by Hans
Robertson 207
8.6 Jo Mihaly in Flower in the Backyard 217
8.7 Jo Mihaly in Flower in the Backyard 218
8.8 Jo Mihaly in Flower in the Backyard 219
xi

SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD

With Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and Cultural Theory in the Early Twentieth
Century, Lucia Ruprecht presents us with a new history of modern dance for
the most part in the German ambit of the early twentieth century. By iso-
lating the concept of gesture as crucial to the performance and interpretation
of modern dance and related theatrical, philosophical, and literary as well as
critical enterprises, Ruprecht opens up a new conceptual and performative
domain of European dance modernism. She conceptualizes the field of ges-
ture at this time as a broader one than dance alone can claim as its own, yet
one which signifies its cultural necessity and effectiveness most convincingly
through danced performance. Gesture, for Ruprecht, exists in a proliferating
field that moves across the borders of literature, criticism, film, theater, and
choreography. For this reason, her work differs from earlier reflections on ges-
ture in that she avoids giving an ontological definition of gesture, and this is
also a reason for her to align gesture with the imaginary.1
Ruprecht grounds her understanding of gesture primarily in Walter
Benjamin’s understanding of it as a critical and ethical rhythm governed by
vibrancy and intermittency. Gesture is thus a formal feature of much early
twentieth-​century choreography while also being a hermeneutic category of
inquiry into its own meaning and interpretation or, rather, into its particular
method of constructing meaning choreographically and corporeally. What
Ruprecht calls the modernist field of gestural proliferation exceeds the bounds
of dance and writing, performance and literature, as each proves to be of
theoretical import for the other. In other terms, gesture itself is an operative
concept increasingly seen to blur the boundaries between danced movement
and critical theory.
In addition, this book inaugurates an important new stage in the relation-
ship of dance studies to philosophy. Dance studies has relied since its incep-
tion on philosophical insights into a host of issues touching upon the body
and gesture in order to carve out its own sphere of scholarly inquiry. In the
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xii S eries E ditor’ s F oreword

burgeoning of dance analysis and of dance as a cultural text, something that

had received virtually no attention prior to the emergence of this new field in
the humanities, dance studies was known to “borrow” from other disciplines
as well as to “gesture” to other disciplines by way of indicating the importance
of this unexplored material to the larger project of the humanities in its diverse
facets. In the course of this development over the last thirty years, a few im-
portant philosophers declared themselves interested in writing about dance,
which created an enormous wave of interest in their work, and occasioned a
second phase of wonderment as to the ability of philosophy to open its borders
to unexpected inquiry and hold the analytic high ground. But with Gestural
Imaginaries, something has changed.
Gestural Imaginaries marks a new stage in the relationship between dance
and philosophy. To a more fundamental and systematic degree than had earlier
been the case, philosophical investigations of gesture are now being examined
under the microscope of danced criteria, and their methodologies subjected
to scrupulous examination and critique. It is here that Lucia Ruprecht’s book
intervenes—​not accidentally on the terrain of gesture itself—​to dialogue with
the work on dance and gesture by Jacques Rancière, Georgio Agamben, and
others (including Theodor W. Adorno). This is a significant critical move when
undertaken on the scale of this book, and it is one that, coincidentally, opens
up the domain of gesture to dance studies from fully contemporary as well as
fully historical angles.
Mark Franko
Series Editor
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is a conversation with many people, but without two of them, it would
not exist in its current shape: Gabriele Brandstetter, who hosted my Humboldt
Fellowship at the Institute of Theater and Dance Studies at Free University Berlin
from 2013 to 2015, provided a wonderfully stimulating research environment,
and offered feedback and presentation space, mentorship, friendship, and sup-
port; and Mark Franko, who published an early version of one of the chapters,
agreed to include the book in the Oxford Studies in Dance Theory series, invited
me to teach and present at his department in Philadelphia, and instigated in-
tellectual exchange that sparked my thinking over the past few years. I am im-
mensely grateful to both of them. There are more friends and colleagues whose
comments and advice were instrumental. Susan Manning was an enthusiastic
interlocutor from the start, continuing our conversation that began many years
ago. Susan Leigh Foster’s suggestions steered me into productive directions. My
engagement with Weimar dance was triggered in discussions with Kate Elswit,
first as her supervisor, then as colleague and friend; her energetic presence is
visible on the pages of this book. Carrie Noland, Rebecca Schneider, Astrid
Deuber-​Mankowsky, Michael Minden, Alexander Schwan, and Jonas Tinius
contributed fabulous papers to the symposium on the ethics of gesture that
I organized at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 2016; the thinking that went
on during this day has marked my work on Gestural Imaginaries. My profound
thanks are due to Andrew Webber, as always, for his comments on selected
book chapters, his mentorship, and his friendship. Katja Haustein and Marie
Kolkenbrock sent perceptive remarks on a chapter-​in-​progress. Barry Windeatt
shared literature on gesture. Christopher Johnson provided a warm welcome to
his gesture workshop at the Warburg Institute in December 2016. I am grateful
to colleagues and friends who invited me to present aspects of my research on
this book at conferences and lecture series in Germany, the United Kingdom,
Ireland, and Poland: Carolin Duttlinger, Sabine Huschka, Benjamin Schofield,
xvi

xiv A cknowledgments

Clare Foster, Yvonne Hardt, Nikolaus Müller-​ Schöll, Sabine Egger, Nina
Tolksdorf, Mona de Weerdt and Andreas Schwab, Georgina Born, Christopher
Haworth, and Jonas Tinius, Deborah Holmes and Heide Kunzelmann, and
Joanna Szymajda and Wojciech Klimczyk.
I would like to extend my thanks to the director and staff at Deutsches
Tanzarchiv Köln, Frank-​ Manuel Peter, Donatella Cacciola, Bettina Hesse,
Christel Dreiling, and Garnet Schuldt-​Hiddemann; to Hedwig Müller at the
Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung Schloss Wahn; and to the staff at the archives
of the Akademie der Künste and the Lipperheidesche Kostümbibliothek, Berlin.
Earlier versions of two chapters have been published elsewhere: ­chapter 2
appeared in Dance Research Journal 47, no. 2 (2015), and parts of ­chapter 3 in
Franz Kafka in Context, edited by Carolin Duttlinger (Cambridge University
Press, 2017). I wish to thank the editors of these publications for permission
to reprint here. I am grateful to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for
offering me a Fellowship during which I began my research toward this book.
At Cambridge I owe thanks to the directors of the German Endowment Fund
and the Schröder Fund, and to Emmanuel College. At Oxford University Press,
heartfelt thanks go to my anonymous readers, to Norman Hirschy and Lauralee
Yeary, and to Christina Nisha Paul.
Finally, I wish to thank my parents and mother-​in-​law, for their unstinting
help with the running of life between work and family. Above all, I wish to
thank Jens and Lisa Antonia.
xv

ABBREVIATIONS

AdK Akademie der Künste Berlin

AS Rancière, Aisthesis
DTK Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln
GS Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften
IS Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society
LC Plessner, The Limits of Community
MM Freud, The Moses of Michelangelo
NG Agamben, “Notes on Gesture”
OT Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama
PH Plessner, “Zur Geschichtsphilosophie der bildenden Kunst seit Renaissance
und Reformation”
PM Adorno, Philosophy of New Music
SH Freud and Breuer, Studies in Hysteria
SP Rivière, “Le Sacre du printemps”
SW Benjamin, Selected Writings
VM Balázs, “Visible Man or the Culture of Film”

Where not otherwise stated, translations of passages from Benjamin’s

Gesammelte Schriften and of other texts of which no official translations exist
are my own.
xvi
1

Prologue
Inaugurating Gestures—​Le Sacre du printemps

On 29 May 1913, Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) premièred at

the Théâtre des Champs-​Élysées in Paris. The piece is nearly plotless: an ar-
chaic community gathers to conduct its annually recurring fertility cult,
culminating in the selection and sacrifice of a young girl who dances herself
to death. The collaboration between composer Igor Stravinsky, choreographer
Vaslav Nijinsky, painter and archaeologist Nicholas Roerich, and impresario
Sergey Diaghilev created a scandal. Staged in a recently finished theater that
had been built for the purpose of providing contemporary trends in music
and performing arts with a dedicated space, the performance famously ended
in riot. Yet once the sensationalist waves of the social event had receded, it
was hailed as the first post-​Impressionist masterwork.1 Soon it would become
one of modernism’s most powerful legends. Combining a viscerally brutal
score with primitivistic stage décor and a new language of movement, Sacre
touched a nerve among the excitable cultural elite. Despite its enduring im-
pact, it was performed only nine times in its first iteration: after five evenings
at the Champs-​Élysées, it was shown four times at the Theatre Royal, Drury
Lane, in London, where the curtain fell after a final performance on 23 July
1913. Nijinsky never notated the choreography. It is well documented, however,
that he was adamant to continue on his course of radical modernism against
the will of his impresario.2 When on tour in South America during autumn of
that year, he announced his surprise marriage to Romola de Pulszky. Diaghilev
dismissed his star dancer from the Ballets Russes; half a year later, the First
World War broke out, severely affecting the company’s operations. Nijinsky
was interned in Hungary and unable to continue work with the troupe that he
had, by this point, founded. He returned to the Ballets Russes a couple of times
for performances in North America and Spain before retreating, in 1919, into
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2 P rologue : I naugurating G estures

an increasingly private life marked by mental illness. On 15 December 1920,

Sacre premièred again at the Théâtre des Champs-​Élysées, in a new staging
with choreography by Léonide Massine.3 It was this version that finally entered
the repertoire of the Ballets Russes, the first in a long row of restagings and
adaptations that continue to this day.4
This Prologue engages with The Rite of Spring as a gestural event. It argues
that the piece and its surrounding discourses inaugurate a cultural imaginary
that explores choreographic gesture as a prime site of aesthetic, social, political,
and ethical reflection. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the meaning
of gesture exceeds its association with the unintentional gesticulation that
accompanies speech. As a somatic reaction, but even more so as an element
of self-​reflective or expressive bodily performance, gesture enters thought, and
becomes itself a performance of critical thinking and agency. It does so both
theoretically and choreographically, in discourse and on stage, but it also acts as
a relay between the discursive and the corporeal, forming the means by which
a thinking body articulates itself. Dance takes on a leading function in this en-
deavor. Arriving after Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Maud Allan, and others,
Nijinsky is not the first one to engage with the new gesturality that takes hold
of the field of movement. His choreography for The Rite of Spring, however,
due to its extraordinary collaborators, the sheer scale of its production, and the
exposure it received as part of the repertory of the most famous ballet com-
pany at the time, crystallizes the early twentieth-​century explosion of gestural
discourse and performance. In this book, Sacre is considered a primal scene of
modernist gesturality: it is the moment at which the revolutionary power and
conceptual reach of gesture become discernible.5
The following will investigate Sacre’s gesturality in a triangular reading,
juxtaposing an analysis of the historical performance with two signature texts
on the piece: Theodor W. Adorno’s chapter on Stravinsky in his 1949 Philosophie
der neuen Musik (Philosophy of New Music), and Jacques Rivière’s essay on the
original production, published in La Nouvelle Revue Française in November
1913.6 Both texts are also key documents of gestural theory. While Adorno
develops an intensely anti-​gestural argument with regard to Stravinsky’s mu-
sical aesthetic, Rivière celebrates Nijinsky’s choreography as a technique that
excavates movement’s gestural core. The juxtaposition of Adorno’s and Rivière’s
writings carves out a theory of gesture that defines the gestural as a form of in-
terruption of the flows of music and movement. Choreographic gesture is asso-
ciated with a punctuating and punctuated energy that will be further explored
especially in the Introduction, and in ­chapters 2, 3, 5, and 7. In my analysis
of the historical performance of Sacre, I consider punctuation as an aesthetic
strategy of productive impairment that not only manifests, but also critically
exposes the primitivism that is Sacre’s signature trait.
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Prologue: Inaugurating Gestures 3

ADORNO ON STRAVINSKY: GESTURAL SHOCK

Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music is polemical throughout, yet its second
part, entitled “Stravinsky and the Restoration,” constitutes an outright mani-
festo against the composer. This second part is devised as a counterfoil to the
book’s first part, “Schoenberg and Progress,” setting up a contrast between the
avant-​garde modernism of Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-​tone technique and
Stravinsky’s “regressive” modernism of rhythmical musical mimesis. Radical
newness, which Adorno associates with Schoenberg’s venturing into fresh
atonal territory, is set against Stravinsky’s return to the ostensibly archaic re-
source of popular musical traditions. In Adorno, Stravinsky’s restorative
inclinations are not only aesthetically doubtful. They are deemed “fundamen-
tally complicitous with the destructive tendencies of the age,” and thus fail on
a political level too.7 Yet despite his preference for Schoenberg, Adorno grants
neither of the two composers the ability to establish a new sense of subjec-
tivity as the ethical instance that might be fully reflective of the twentieth cen-
tury: Schoenberg falls short because his music eventually turns around itself by
fetishizing its own principle of seriality, and Stravinsky because he renounces
the subjective element of melody. The latter, however, remains the persona non
grata of Philosophy of New Music, as Adorno berates him for siding with fascist
ideology, in spite of his liberal roots (see PM, 112).
Philosophy of New Music was published around the first time that Adorno
returned to Germany from American exile. His sense of historical trauma and
his fear of a renewed rise of Nazism amounted to forms of personal involve-
ment that were too acute to allow for a distanced attitude toward a composer
who employed a potentially pre-​fascist aesthetic. Not unlike other contempora-
neous examples of cultural criticism such as Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari
to Hitler or Lotte Eisner’s The Haunted Screen, both of which deal with cinema,
Adorno’s treatise formulates a reassessment of modernist aesthetics from a
post-​Holocaust perspective; and it follows an impulse to dismantle ideolog-
ical thinking in early twentieth-​century art that is similarly passionate if less
explicit than that evinced in Kracauer’s and Eisner’s texts.8 In the Stravinsky
chapter, pre-​fascism is traced back to Le Sacre du printemps as a piece of music
that still “resounds with the uproar” (PM, 113) of World War I. In the introduc-
tion of Philosophy of New Music, this psycho-​historical dimension is equally
present: when Adorno talks about dissonance, his use of the concept reaches
beyond the musical paradigm, denoting an existential rift that goes right
across the outside world and into the listeners’ minds for whom it is “intol-
erable” as it speaks of their own situation (PM, 11). Dissonance, in fact, has
certainly entered Adorno’s own discourse in “Stravinsky and the Restoration,”
generating a tormented piece of cultural criticism,9 while his tendency to (a)
4

4 P rologue : I naugurating G estures

rhythmically pound in his claims seems to function like an act of subversive

mimicry, exorcising that which he criticizes most in the composer.
Philosophy of New Music is embedded in the author’s and Max Horkheimer’s
larger project of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, which enquires into the dy-
namic in which progress remains haunted by that which it leaves behind, or,
as Robert Hullot-​Kentor puts it, where “the possibility of the new is consumed
in the modern’s reproduction of itself as the recurrently primitive.”10 Adorno’s
aesthetic theory is based on the conviction that both highbrow and lowbrow
art reveal a culture’s political self-​understanding. In his 1950 response to criti-
cism of Philosophy of New Music, entitled “Misunderstandings,” Adorno is very
clear about his preoccupation with an “objective spirit” that asserts itself in art,
but does so “over and above the heads of individual artists as well as beyond
the merits of individual works” (PM, 165). Apart from Kracauer’s 1927 essay
on the “Mass Ornament,” which famously discusses the kick-​lines of the Tiller
girls as corresponding to the conveyor belts of rationalized mass production,
early twentieth-​century sociopolitical critique of a comparable quality does not
include dance within its range of subjects. Dance writing of the same period,
in turn, does not develop an equally acute socio-​political and psychoanalytical
critique.11 Adorno’s scattered remarks about ballet music and dancerly gesture
in “Stravinsky and the Restoration” are valuable, then, but they are also reduc-
tive, associating gesture with an unthinking, somatic kind of reflex, set in the
vicinity of what Martin Puchner summarizes as modernist gesture’s propen-
sity toward “ritual, archaism, fascism, and uncritical violence.” Puchner argues
that this regressive context “remains an implied danger, from Wagner on,” and
that it stimulates an important critical debate on the politics of gesture.12 But
Adorno’s reading also excludes a more balanced view of the complex and het-
erogeneous field of embodied modernist gesturality. As David Levin shows,
Adorno dismisses a closer analysis of Sacre as a work for the stage because of
a surprisingly undialectical understanding of the performative dimension of
music, which stands in sharp contrast to his sophisticated analysis of musical
scores.13
Adorno, who was ten years old in 1913, never attended any of the few
performances of the original version of Sacre, and does not seem to have been
interested in finding out about Nijinsky’s choreography in retrospect. If gesture
gains prominence in his thinking on literature, opera, and film, as well as “a
central category for modern music,” it is an intra-​musical rather than a theat-
rical element.14 But while he neglects the theatrical nature of Sacre as a work for
the stage, Adorno infuses his musical analysis with performative associations.
These associations are instrumental for his reading of the place of the subject,
and of subjectivity, in Stravinsky’s score. In Philosophy, Adorno declares from
the outset that he treats “the antipsychological Stravinsky” dialectically, from
5

Prologue: Inaugurating Gestures 5

the perspective of the “damaged subject on which his œuvre is patterned” (PM,
4). Damage is represented musically by replacing the agency of the autonomous
individual with forms of merely instinctual defense. Gesture, here, is prone to
the de-​individualizing drive of the score’s irregular rhythmical structure, which
asks for immediate physical responses; it is associated with a form of “shock”
that makes “the individual directly aware of his nullity in the face of the titanic
machinery of the entire system” (PM, 117). Gesture is reactive rather than ac-
tive; more than anything else, it is a physical reflex of (failed) protection against
harm.15
Adorno’s aesthetic of gesture thus rehearses the theory of psychic trauma that
Freud developed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In Freud, trauma is induced
by an element of surprise in the fright experienced by the victim, “the state that
possesses us when we find ourselves plunged into danger without being pre-
pared for it.”16 In Adorno, this happens to Sacre’s girl victim, the Chosen One.
She is at the mercy of Stravinsky’s polyrhythm, unable to foresee or assimilate
the music’s arbitrary blows:

This is manifest in the “Danse finale de l’élue,” in the human sacrifice, where
the most complicated measures alternate with each other in the smallest tem-
poral segments. This compels the conductor to walk a tightrope for the sole
purpose of using convulsive blows and shocks that cannot be anticipated by
any preparatory anxiety to hammer into the dancer and the audience an im-
mutable rigidity. [. . .] it is accepted that the shock cannot be integrated into
the self. The musical subject abdicates the struggle to bear up and instead
makes do by acceding to the blows in its own reflexes. He [sic!] acts literally
like someone gravely wounded, the victim of an accident that he cannot ab-
sorb and that he therefore repeats in the hopeless exertions of dreams. What
appears to be the complete absorption of the shock, the compliance of the
music with the rhythmical blows inflicted on it externally, is in truth pre-
cisely the sign that the absorption has miscarried. (PM, 117–​18)

The gestural body that emerges as a result of such music is defined by repet-
itive reactions. In this, as Adorno has it, Stravinsky’s score is representative
of all traditional ballet music, which “prescribe[s]‌gestures, and, beyond that,
comportments” (PM, 126); what is more, Stravinsky even “reestablished” the
“disciplinary nature of dance [. . .]. His accents amount to so many acoustic
signals to the stage” (PM, 143). Adorno’s musically defined gesture does not
partake in the “expressive-​dynamic” (PM, 145) paradigm of the psychological
tradition, nor in any other lost model of individuation. But neither does it be-
long to the progressive forms of Schoenbergian constructivist modernism.17
Gesture is at the service of ritual violence, becoming “a name for everything
6

6 P rologue : I naugurating G estures

that is regressive, primitivist, and therefore non-​ modernist,” as Puchner

writes, referring to Adorno’s narrow definition of modernism as exclusively
avant-​garde.18
Adorno links the condition of his gestural subject to the “disproportion in
late industrialism between the body of the individual and the things and forces
of technical civilization” (PM, 117). In Minima Moralia, this disproportional
relationship between technology and the human prognosticates fascism: “The
movements machines demand of their users already have the violent, hard-​
hitting, unresting jerkiness of Fascist maltreatment.”19 In Adorno’s account of
Sacre, the rhythm of archaic ritual thus meets that of machinic pulse, resulting
in a musical style that he characterizes as “motor function”: “even and persistent
stomping.”20 Now shifting attention from irregular to regular beats, this style
builds up toward a surge to merge and comply, as becomes obvious in the pas-
sage entitled “Identification with the Collective”:

[. . .] there is no aesthetic antithesis between the one sacrificed and the tribe;
rather, her dance accomplishes the uncontested, immediate identification
with it. [. . .] The girl chosen dances herself to death [. . .]. Nothing of her
as an individual is reflected except the unconscious and accidental reflex of
pain: In terms of its inner organization, her solo, like all the other dances, is
a collective circle dance bereft of any dialectic of universal and particular.
(PM, 118–​19)

The totalitarian ideology of Sacre consists, then, in a logic of non-​distinction

between individual and collective that culminates in the fact that the girl victim
chooses her own destruction in accordance with the choice of the group. It is
also at work in the music’s alliance with its own archaisms, inciting the public’s
“sadomasochistic” enjoyment of the “subjectless condition” that is performed
in the score: “If the viewer does not simply enjoy the liquidation of the young
girl, he empathizes with the collective and, himself its potential victim, thereby
imagines participating in the collective force in magical regression” (PM, 119).
In Adorno’s reading, the result of this “is certainly not the identification of the
public with the psychic agitation allegedly expressed in the dance; rather, it is
an electrification equal to what seizes the dancers” (PM, 144).
In the dedication of Minima Moralia, Adorno links the destruction of the
subject that results from such a setting explicitly to the Holocaust: “the nullity
demonstrated to subjects by the concentration camp is already overtaking the
form of subjectivity itself ”;21 in Philosophy, he writes in a prognostic mode:

In Stravinsky, subjectivity takes on the character of sacrifice, but—​and in

this he mocks the tradition of humanistic art—​the music identifies not with
7

Prologue: Inaugurating Gestures 7

the victim but with the annihilating authority. Through the liquidation of
the victim, it rids itself of intentions, those of its own proper subjectivity.
(PM, 109–​10)

Adorno observes this loss not only in the prominence of rhythm as blow, but
also in the absence of melody.22 Melodious musical subjectivity is replaced with
the detached attitude of pastiche, of “musical quotation, self-​reproduction,
willful fragmentation, imitation of ancient forms,” which together produce “the
prehistorical” as artistic “effect” rather than authentic reconstruction.23 This
strand of Adorno’s argument jars with the otherwise unrelentingly accusatory
tone of the Stravinsky chapter. It detects a salutary “dialectical ambiguity” (PM,
112) in the works of the composer through which he is in fact partly redeemed.
In anticipation perhaps to objections against his diatribe, Adorno here
acknowledges a type of thoroughly self-​aware musical bravura in Stravinsky.
This bravura may take pleasure in the archaism that it produces, but does not
actually believe in it: “all regression in Stravinsky’s work is manipulated pre-
cisely as a copy that never for a moment forgets aesthetic self-​control.” In other
words, if regression in this context equals violence, “The Rite of Spring wants
not simply to surrender itself ” to the violent impact “but to gain mastery over
it through copying it” (PM, 113). In “Misunderstandings,” Adorno argues that
those among Stravinsky’s works that dedicate themselves “most shrewdly to
such mimesis are the most productive ones” (PM, 167). Accordingly, in the
Stravinsky chapter we encounter passages where Adorno presents the “detach-
ment” (PM, 111) of Sacre’s staged disclosure of barbarism as “mimetic defense”
(PM, 126) against the actual madness of war, rather than as war’s unthinking
propagation. The more positive passages even associate Sacre with the lib-
eral spirit of bourgeois revolution. Fascism, Adorno claims, “which literally
liquidates liberal culture along with its critics,” is “just for this reason unable to
tolerate” in its theaters such disclosure of barbarism as spectacle:

In the Third Reich of countless human sacrifice, The Rite of Spring would
not have been performable, and whoever dared directly to acknowledge the
barbarism of the ideology’s modus operandi was dropped and disgraced.
Without its lies, German barbarism—​as may indeed have occurred to
Nietzsche—​might well have exterminated barbarism itself along with the
lies. (PM, 112)

At the same time, however, an aesthetically advanced strategy that distances

itself from that which it pronounces is ultimately considered utterly cynical,
given the subject matter of the piece (PM, 132). The argument turns around
again: in addition to demonstrating how detachment is out of place in the face
8

8 P rologue : I naugurating G estures

of violent death, Adorno also shows how this strategy does not hold in the
first place. Carried away by its perfect construction of archaic essentialism,
the music buys into its own simulacrum. Fending off the drastic brutality of
regression by exposing it does not mean that this brutality is redeemed. The
music’s production of archaic effect, that is, works, in the end, only too well.
Even if brutal “nature” is only a phantasm in Rite of Spring, this phantasm ulti-
mately proves to be the “herald of absolute oppression” (PM, 113). Stravinsky’s
“already-​lapsed modernism” thus implies “an opening” toward the tyranny of
“the primordial past” (PM, 111). Self-​reflective play as a form of distanced sub-
jectivity becomes complicit with the sacrifice of the subject; antipsychological
strategy dissolves into diffuse communality. Adorno uncovers a troubling ten-
dency toward positivistic essentialism both in Sacre and in other works by the
composer.24 Superseding anydetachment, “aesthetic nerves” ultimately “quiver
to return to the Stone Age” (PM, 113):

[. . .] with this virtually historicizing evocation of a primordial age, at heart

held playfully distant, [. . .] Stravinsky was soon unable to satisfy his urge for
objectivism. He settles the tension between the archaic and the modern in
such a way that for the sake of the authenticity of the archaic, he jettisons the
primeval world as a principle of stylization. (PM, 120)

If Philosophy of New Music is at once disheartening and intellectually engaging,

it is so because both its discourse and its content are driven by the presence of
a post-​Holocaust subject that is irrevocably “damaged.” The poly-​rhythmical
elements of music and plot resonate in the dissonant tracks of Adorno’s argu-
ment in “Stravinsky and the Restoration” and its side texts. Within Adorno’s
reading of Stravinsky’s “antipsychological” (PM, 4) modernist aesthetic, the
twentieth-​century subject finds its most prescient and concise expression in
the automatic shock reactions of gestural trauma: gesture, in Adorno’s Sacre,
is a somatic reflex of defense or submission rather than intentional action or
expression. In Nijinsky’s choreography, Adorno’s damaged subject acquires a
more multifaceted gestural register; and it is this register that Rivière traces in
his response to the staged dimension of Rite of Spring.

RIVIÈRE ON NIJINSKY: NEW GESTURAL EXPRESSION

Rivière’s essay titled “Le Sacre du printemps” of November 1913 is the second
installment of a review whose first, shorter version had already appeared in
August that year . Rivière thus waited some time before fully responding to
a spectacular performance, perhaps because he developed in the longer essay
next to his clear-​ sighted observations on dance a specific, anti-​
symbolist
9

Prologue: Inaugurating Gestures 9

literary agenda, whose conservatism stands in a curiously jarring relationship

with the author’s appreciation of a movement aesthetic that was radically avant-​
garde.25 Yet even if the gap between the performance in spring and the account
in autumn indicates a number of months during which impressions must have
worked within the author’s mind, the result still shows the impact of sponta-
neous reaction. Its recollection of detail is remarkably precise. In contrast to
Adorno’s exclusive focus on the musical score, Rivière offers us an eyewitness
account of the performance, at the center of which is this performance’s inno-
vative gesturality.
Clarity of image and recollection, however, are not only proof of Rivière’s
acute observational skills. He detects this clarity in the choreographic work it-
self, and considers it one of its great merits. It is a spirit of aesthetic enlight-
enment that he finds in the movement language of the Ballets Russes, and in
Nijinsky’s choreography in particular. In contrast to Sacre’s unenlightened con-
tent, its choreographic form betrays utmost novelty; it gives the body over to
the sense of sight. What emerges is a non-​normative language of gesture—​a
gestural coming out, as it were—​that allowed dance to arise from “the shadow,
[. . .] let all [its] gestures be seen, write them all out without mystery, and nev-
ertheless be deep and pathetic” (SP, 134).26 Far more than Stravinsky’s music,
which he discusses at the beginning of the essay, Rivière considers the chore-
ography to be a radical contribution to post-​symbolist aesthetics, one to which
the public needs to be “acclimatiz[ed].” Rivière’s impetus—​unlike Adorno’s—​is
not to dismantle ideological charge, but simply to “define” this “novelty a little
more precisely” (SP, 133). On Nijinsky’s dancing during the first Paris evenings
of the Ballets Russes, pre-​Sacre, he writes:

At each whirl of Nijinsky, when he knelt, crossed his hands, and closed the
figure he had begun when he leaped into space, my whole pleasure was
to see again in thought the entire sweep of his movement—​alive, pure,
severe, rising up as if one blow had torn it away from the vague mass of
the possible in a single piece. No doubt, no smudges, nothing appealing to
my hesitation; I was strong and content like a man who, in a glance, sees
a system of propositions scrupulously isolated from error in all its points.
(SP, 134)

Yet even though the combination of a new choreographic and performative

style with outstanding dancerly skill brings about revelation, it still disguises a
body that Rivière desires to see “without sauce” (SP, 125). What prevents him
from doing so is too much movement, especially the elegant, flowing, flying type
of Mikhail Fokine’s choreography, for instance in Le Spectre de la rose, where “the
body of Nijinsky literally disappears in its own dance” (SP, 135–​36).27 Dance’s
10

10 P rologue : I naugurating G estures

alliance with artifice, idealization, and dissimulation ceases in the performer’s

own choreographic contributions. Valuing Nijinsky’s choreographies higher
than any of his previous virtuosic feats, Rivière considers them a caesura in
the history of theater dance.28 Fokine’s choreography, he thinks, is based on
the body’s potential of engaging in multiple kinds of movement; Nijinsky’s is
based on “the body in repose” (SP, 136). If Fokine stretches the technique of
the danse d’école, Nijinsky fractures it; if a good part of classical technique is
about extending the body’s possibilities for movement outward and upward,
Nijinsky’s vocabulary turns them inward and downward; if ballet was seen to
be about elaborate arrangements, Nijinsky is about simplicity.29 Rivière claims
that the novelty of Sacre consists in having returned to the body’s “most imme-
diate, basic, etymological signs: [. . .] movement is [. . .] continually drawn back
to the body, reattached, recaptured, pulled back by it” (SP, 136). Both Adorno
and Rivière detect subjection in Sacre’s gestural language; but while Adorno’s
gestures obey rhythmical orders, Rivière’s obey a body that is dismantled, as it
were, to revisit its most fundamental anatomical structures, using them to build
up a new aesthetic idiom.30
Both authors, that is, are highly aware of a disciplinary dynamic that runs
through the spectacle. In Rivière, however, this disciplinary dynamic is at the
service of analytical attentiveness, exploration, and choreographic construc-
tion.31 Discussing Stravinsky’s music, he associates its attacks less with violence
than with directness. The score removes obstacles between sound and lis-
tener and thus enables understanding: Stravinsky’s compositional peculiarities
are there to “put us into direct contact” with the score’s content, “strip it for
our benefit,” and allow us to “penetrate it along the line of its axis” (SP, 131).
Discussing movement, Rivière detects an even more incisive analytical interest,
whose operations lead him to a pre-​Brechtian aesthetic of gestural interruption.
Nijinsky’s movement, he argues, perpetually stalls itself, as if to inquire into its
conditions, thereby gaining a dissecting, experimental quality:

each time the body feels possible starting points in itself, the dancer again
springs into movement. He is constantly taking possession of himself again,
like a bubbling spring whose energy surge must be successively drained
off; he goes back into himself, and the dance becomes the analysis, the
enumeration of all those urges to move that he discovers within himself.
[. . .] Whatever interval there might be among the inclinations of the body,
Nijinsky wants to follow straight along them and to break into movement
only if it is theirs. But as he cannot accompany them all at the same time,
as soon as he has followed one of them for a moment, he suddenly leaves
it, breaks with it, goes back, and picks up another. His dance is both faithful
and truncated! (SP, 136–​37)32
11

Prologue: Inaugurating Gestures 11

Intervening into movement flow, this decompositional acumen makes the

dancer’s body visible: “instead of disappearing behind his gestures, he appears
very distinctly in the midst of their multitude” (SP, 137). It gives rise to a type of
bodily gesture that is an expressive tool instead of somatic reflex: “By breaking
the movement and bringing it back to the simple gesture, Nijinsky has put ex-
pression back into the dance” (SP, 139).33
For Rivière, this radical type of gestural expression constitutes yet another
departure from Fokine. In the works of the latter, the outer body becomes
transparent for inner meaning to articulate itself, literally to “flee” this body; in
Nijinsky, body and soul merge.34 The critic sees a dense quality whereby gesture
and emotion become one; feeling is located entirely and exclusively in the body,
so that facial expression of emotion is no longer needed:

The dance of Fokine was so inexpressive that in order to make the spectators
understand the changes taking place in the actors’ souls, the latter had to
have recourse to visual mimicry: frowning eyebrows or a smile. This, added
to their gestures, superimposed, showed how powerless their gestures were.
[. . .] But in Nijinsky’s dance, the visage no longer plays an independent role.
It is a prolongation of the body [. . .]. The body itself speaks first. It moves only
as a whole; it is united, and its speech consists in leaping suddenly, spreading
the arms and legs, or in moving sideways, with knees bent, the head leaning
toward the shoulder. At first sight it seems less adroit, less diverse, less intel-
ligent. However, with its compact movements, its sudden volte-​face, its way
of coming to a pause, then shaking itself frantically without changing place,
it says a thousand things more than the eloquent, rapid, elegant speaker an-
imated by Fokine. (SP, 140)

Where Adorno locates gestural shocks in a musical score that deprives the body
of expressive potential, this potential is restored by a more differentiated analyt-
ical brutality with which Nijinsky handles his dancers:

He takes his dancers, arranges their arms, turns them about, would break
them in two if he dared; with pitiless cruelty, he works with these bodies as
if they were things; he imposes impossible movements upon them, attitudes
which seem deformed. But he does so in order to get out of them all the ex-
pression they can give. And at last, in fact, they do speak. (SP, 141)

In Rivière’s reading, Sacre’s non-​normative gestures are matched by irreg-

ular choreographic group settings. When he reports on Nijinsky’s treatment
of groups, Rivière zooms in on a choreographic principle that Adorno was
never able to witness. As opposed to Adorno’s emphasis on collective drive,
12

12 P rologue : I naugurating G estures

the critic celebrates the multiplicity of Nijinsky’s choreographic designs, where

in “profound asymmetry” the “movements that made the dance of one group”
are “distinct from that of all the others” (SP, 138).35 As Nijinska observes in her
Early Memoirs with regard to her brother’s choreography: “[T]‌he symmetrical
arrangements and repeated patterns of the corps de ballet no longer existed.”36
This is clearly different from the musical group-​ settings, which Rivière
perceives in much the same way as Adorno. He retains “only a sort of rumble of
rhythm, a completely pure animation, an abstract whirlwind, maintained and
prolonged by the monotony of terror” when thinking of the circular dance of
the adolescents at the end of the first act (SP, 130). Such impressions are coupled
with a receptive position “before the arrival of language.” Despite its physical
nature, the receptive attitude Rivière has in mind is different from Adorno’s
electrification, however, as it does not imply that the subject renounces its
faculties of judgment. The critic does not speak of a mass of non-​distinct bodies
in thrall to music; he speaks of a communication with “our body” that is a form
of contemplation and “recognition” (SP, 141), thus invoking a somatic capacity
for intercorporeal apprehension.
Rivière’s somatic recognition is of course not far away from the collectively
experienced type of regressive rapture that forms one of the targets of Adorno’s
criticism. In Rivière, too, unease arises, at least at the end of his essay. He admits
that the new gestural language he so admires is uniquely suited to display con-
tent to which he reacts with discomfort; despite its aesthetic innovation, he
considers Sacre a “terrible work” (SP, 144).37 The spectator who is delighted
about witnessing formal newness does not enjoy finding himself mixed up in
the reversion to pre-​humanism that is presented by such stimulating means.
His aesthetic assessment thus turns into critique. Like Adorno, Rivière locates
regression both at the phylogenetic and the ontogenetic levels; he calls Sacre a
“sociological” (SP, 144) and a “biological” (SP, 145) ballet. As such, he compares
it to the “doctrines of evolution” (SP, 306), closely echoing Adorno, who links
Sacre’s staged primitivism to “Sir James Frazer, Lucien Lévy-​Bruhl, and Freud’s
Totem and Taboo” (PM, 111).38
Some reviewers, by contrast, wholeheartedly embraced Sacre’s reactionary
aspects. Ricciotto Canudo, at the time editor of Montjoie!, the journal for
“French artistic imperialism,” saw his own Darwinist theories of music con-
firmed in the spectacle and instrumentalized its avant-​garde status for right-​
wing politics. He was keen on promoting an account of Sacre that remained
unfazed about the anti-​humanism of the sacrifice, to demonstrate “primitive
man’s” subservience to the materialist laws of Darwinism.39 Rivière was less ex-
cited about “the horror that transpires on the stage” (PM, 111). Adorno’s as-
sumption of mindless thrill, initiated by Stravinsky’s music and embraced by
the public, does not affect Rivière’s account. Instead, he remembers feelings of
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Fig. 43
Fig. 44
Fig. 45
 Fig. 46

Ladder scaffolds.—A light scaffold of ladders braced, and

connected by rails, which also serve the purpose of guard rails, is
shown in fig. 43. The ladders, which have parallel sides, are placed
about 2 feet away from the building. The boards forming the platform
can be laid on the ladder rungs, or if necessary on brackets as
shown in fig. 44. The ladders are prevented from falling away from
the building by ties which are connected to the ladder as shown in
fig. 45, and fastened to the window openings by extension rods as
shown in fig. 46. The same figure illustrates the method of tying in
the scaffold when the ladders are not opposite to the windows, the
rail a being connected to at least two ladders. The braces and guard
rails are bored for thumb screws at one end, the other being slotted
so that they can be adjusted as required. This form of scaffold is only
suitable for repairing purposes, and no weight of material can be
stored upon it.
A light repairing scaffold lately put on the market has a platform
which is supported and not suspended, but otherwise affords about
the same scope to the workmen as the painters’ boats. It consists of
one pole and a platform, the latter being levered up and down the
pole as required by a man standing on the platform itself. The whole
apparatus can be moved by one man standing at the bottom. It is an
arrangement comparatively new to the English trade, but is in
considerable use in Denmark, Germany, and Sweden.
 CHAPTER III

SHORING AND UNDERPINNING

Shoring is the term given to a method of temporarily supporting
buildings by a framing of timber acting against the walls of the
structure. If the frame consists of more than one shore, it is called a
system; if of two or more systems, it becomes a series.
The forces that tend to render a building unstable are due primarily
to gravity, but owing to the various resistances set up by the tying
together of the building, the force does not always exert itself
vertically downwards.
This instability may arise from various causes, the most common
being the unequal settlement of materials in new buildings, the
pulling down of adjoining buildings, structural alterations and defects,
and alterations or disturbances of the adjacent ground which affect
the foundations. The pulling down of an adjoining building would, by
removing the corresponding resistance, allow the weight of the
internal structure of the building to set up forces which at first would
act in a horizontal direction outwards. Structural defects, such as an
insufficiently tied roof truss, would have the same effect. Structural
alterations, such as the removal of the lower portion of a wall in order
to insert a shop front would allow a force due to gravity to act
vertically downwards.
To resist these forces, three different methods of shoring are in
general use, and they are known as flying or horizontal shores,
raking shores, and underpinning.
Flying Shores.—Where the thrusts acting upon the wall are in a
horizontal direction, flying or raking shores are used to give
temporary support. The most direct resistance is gained by the first-
named, the flying or horizontal shore. There are, however, limits to
its application, as, owing to the difficulty of obtaining sound timber of
more than 50 to 60 feet in length, a solid body is necessary within
that distance, from which the required purchase can be obtained.
 It is a method of shoring generally used where one house in a row
is to be taken down, the timbers being erected as demolition
proceeds, and taken down again as the new work takes its place.
Fig. 47 shows a half-elevation of two general systems of
construction.
The framing, as at a, may be used alone where the wall to be
supported is of moderate height and the opening narrow, but larger
frames should be combined, as at b.
The framework c is for wide openings and walls of considerable
height.
The wall plates, 9 in. by 2 in. or 9 in. by 3 in., are first fixed
vertically on the walls by wall hooks. Then, in a line with the floors,
rectangular holes 4 in. by 3 in. are cut in the centre of wall plates.
Into these holes, and at least 41⁄2 inches into the brickwork, needles
(also known as tossles and joggles) of the same size are fitted,
leaving a projection out from the wall plate of 5 in. or 6 in., sufficient
to carry the shore of about 7 in. by 7 in.
The shore, prior to being fixed, has nailed on its top and under
sides straining pieces 2 inches thick, and of the same width as the
shore. To tighten, oak folding wedges are driven at one end between
the shore and wall plate.
 Fig. 47
To stiffen the shore, and to further equalise the given resistance
over the defective wall, raking struts are fixed between the straining
pieces, and cleats are nailed above and below the shore. These
raking struts are tightened by driving wedges between their ends and
the straining pieces.
The cleats previous to, and in addition to being nailed, should be
slightly mortised into the wall plate. This lessens the likelihood of the
nails drawing under the pressure.

A Raking Shore consists of a triangulated system of timber

framing, and is used to support defective walls where the resistance
to the threatened rupture has to be derived from the ground
surrounding the building.
 In its simplest form a raking shore is a balk of timber of varying
scantlings, but as a rule of square section, inclined from the ground
to the defective wall. The angle of inclination is taken from the
horizon, and should vary between 60 and 75 degrees. In settling this
the space available at the foot of the wall has to be taken into
consideration, especially in urban districts where the wall abuts on
the footpath.
Fig. 48
 Fig. 48 shows a raking shore in its simplest form, but usually two
or more shores are used (see fig. 49).
The following table from Mr. Stock’s book1 shows the general rule
and also the scantlings to be used:
2 shores are necessary in each
For walls from 15 to 30 feet high
system
3 shores are necessary in each
For walls from 30 to 40 feet high
system
For walls from 40 feet high and 4 shores are necessary in each
upwards system
 Fig. 49.—Example of Raking Shore
Taking the angle of the shore at from 60 to 75 degrees:
For walls from 15 to 20 feet high 5 in. by 5 in. may be the scantling for each shore
For walls from 20 to 30 feet high 6 in. by 6 in. may be the scantling for each shore
For walls from 30 to 35 feet high 7 in. by 7 in. may be the scantling for each shore
For walls from 35 to 40 feet high 8 in. by 8 in. may be the scantling for each shore
For walls from 40 to 50 feet high 9 in. by 9 in. may be the scantling for each shore
For walls from 50 feet and upwards 12 in. by 9 in. may be the scantling for each
shore
In the greatest length, the beams are 12 in. by 9 in. to give
increased rigidity, which prevents any likelihood of sagging.
The wall plate is the first timber put into position. It is placed
vertically down the face of the wall, and held in its position by wall
hooks. Note should then be taken of the position of floors. If the floor
joists run at right angles to the wall, the shore should abut on the
wall in such position that it points directly below the wall plate
carrying the floor joist. If the joists run parallel to the wall, the shore
should act directly on a point representing the meeting of lines drawn
down the centre of the wall and across the centre of the floor (see
fig. 50).
 Fig. 50
To enable the shore to fulfil this condition, the needle (of 4 in. by 3
in.) should be let through the plate 41⁄2 inches into the wall below the
point in question. To strengthen the needle cleats are nailed, and
slightly let into the plate immediately above.
The footing, or sole piece, has next to be laid. It consists of a
timber 11 in. by 3 in., and long enough to take the bottom ends of the
required number of shores. Attention should be paid to the ground in
which it is to be bedded, and if this is at all soft, additional timbers
should be laid under, and at right angles with it, to give greater
bearing.
The sole piece should not be laid at right angles to the shore, but
its face should form, with the outside line of the top shore, an angle
somewhat wider, say of 93 degrees. The advantage of this will be
seen presently.
The shore itself has now to be prepared. Its top end should be
grooved sufficiently (fig. 51) to receive the needle. This will prevent
lateral motion when under pressure.

Fig. 51
The bottom end should be slightly slotted, in order to receive the
end of a crowbar (see fig. 52).
It is now placed in position, and gently tightened up by the
leverage of a crowbar acting in the slot, and using the sole piece as
a fulcrum.
The advantage of the sole piece not being at right angles to the
shore can now be seen, as if it were so laid no tightening could be
gained by the leverage. This system is an improvement upon the
tightening up by wedges, as the structure is not jarred in any
manner. If the frame is to have more than one shore, they are
erected in the same manner, the bottom shore being the first put up,
the others succeeding in their turn. When in position the shores are
dogged to the sole piece and a cleat is nailed down on the outer side
of the system. The bottom ends are then bound together by hoop
iron just above the ground level. To prevent the shores sagging,
struts are fixed as shown on fig. 49.

Fig. 52
Besides preventing the sagging these struts serve the purpose of
keeping the shores in position. They may be fixed as nearly at right
angles to the shores as possible, or at right angles to the wall; in any
case they should reach to the wall plate at a point just below the
needle. The struts should be nailed to the shores and wall plate. If
the latter is wider than the shores, it should be cut to receive the
struts.
It sometimes occurs that the timbers are of insufficient length to
reach from the sole piece to wall plate. To overcome this difficulty, a
short timber is laid on the sole piece against and parallel to the next
middle raker, and on this short timber a rider shore stands reaching
to its position on the wall plate (see fig. 49).
When this is done the top middle raker should be stiffer to resist
the increased cross strain. Stiffness is gained by increasing the
depth. A rider shore is tightened by oak folding wedges driven
between the foot of the shore and the short timber which supports it.
Note must be taken that the outer raker is not carried too near the
top of the building, or else the upward thrust of the shores, which
always exists with raking shores, might force the bond or joints.
Fir is the best wood for shoring owing to the ease with which it can
be obtained in good length. Another advantage is its straightness of
fibre; although, as it is more easily crushed by pressure across the
grain, it does not answer so well as oak for wedges, sole pieces, &c.
In erecting flying or raking shores, notice should be taken of the
following points.
The systems should be placed from 12 to 15 feet apart if on a wall
without openings, otherwise on the piers between the openings.
In very defective walls it is an advantage to use lighter scantlings,
the systems being placed closer together. Heavy timbers handled
carelessly may precipitate the collapse which it is the intention to
avoid.
Wedge driving and tightening should be done as gently as
possible. It should be remembered that support only is to be given,
and not new thrusts set up, which may result in more harm than
good.

Underpinning.—Underpinning is necessary to carry the upper

part of a wall, while the lower part is removed; for instance, the
insertion of a shop front, or the repairing of a foundation. It is only
kept in position until a permanent resistance to the load is effected.
Underpinning is, as a rule, unnecessary when the opening to be
made is of less width than five feet. This method of shoring is a
simple operation, but yet requires great care in its execution.
The first thing to be done is to remove from the wall all its
attendant loads. This is accomplished by strutting from the
foundation floor upwards from floor to floor until the roof is reached
(see fig. 53).
Header and sole plates 9 in. by 2 in. are put in at right angles to
the joists in order to give bearing to the struts.
The portion of the wall to be taken down having been marked out,
small openings are made, slightly above the proposed removal, at
from 5 to 7 feet apart, and through these, at right angles to the face
of the wall itself, steel joists or balk timbers 13 in. by 13 in., called
needles, are placed. These are supported at each end by vertical
timbers 13 in. by 13 in., called dead shores, which again rest upon
sleepers.
The sleepers serve as a bed to the dead shores to which they are
dogged, and by distributing the weight over a larger area, they
prevent the dead shores sinking under the pressure. The dead
shores, if well braced, may be of smaller scantling.
Where it is impossible to arrange for the dead shores to be in one
length, the lower pieces are first fixed. They must be of uniform
length, and across their top end a transom is carried to support the
upper pieces, the bottom ends of which must stand directly over the
top ends of the lower pieces (see fig. 53).
Having placed all the timbers in position, and before the tightening
up takes place, the windows or other openings in the wall are
strutted to prevent any twisting which may take place. This is done
as shown on fig. 54, but small windows do not require the centering.
 Fig. 53.—Example of Underpinning
The tightening up is caused by the driving home of oak folding
wedges placed in the joints between the needles and the dead
shores. This position is better than between the shore and sleeper,
as any inequality of driving here would have the tendency to throw
the shore out of the perpendicular. For a similar reason the wedges
should be driven in the same line as the run of the needle, as cross
driving, if unequal, would cause the needle to present an inclined
surface to the wall to be carried.

Fig. 54
In carrying out these operations note should be taken of the
following points:—
1. That the dead shores should not stand over cellars or such
places. It is better to continue the needle to such a length that solid
ground is reached, and the needle can then be strutted from the
dead shore.