Dancer or Doll?

Some Thoughts on Grace and Sport in Continuation of Schiller and Kleist.]

Abstract

The concept of grace (German: Anmut) has for better or worse disappeared from our daily experience and aesthetic as well as educational vocabulary. This paper presents briefly Friedrich Schiller’s analysis in Über Anmut und Würde (On Grace and Dignity) of grace as an expression of an internal morality, i.e. the notion of a beautiful soul found in classical bourgeois Bildung. We then turn to Heinrich von Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater (On the Marionette Theatre), which challenges Schiller’s humanism by a provocative presentation of grace as mechanical perfection. The second part of the paper examines the bearing and actuality of Kleist’s text from examples pertaining to athletics/sports, drawing critically on Simon Chritchly’s What We Think about When We Think about Football. The aim is a consideration of where and how grace manifests itself and seems to be something inexplicable and ‘extra’, a gift of the gods or of nature, as it still exists even if it is not easily put into words.