Dancing to Utopia: Modernity, Community and the Movement Choir

Author(s): Colin Counsell

Source: Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research, Vol. 22, No. 2
(Winter, 2004), pp. 154-167
Published by: Edinburgh University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4147310
Accessed: 29-09-2016 07:52 UTC
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Dancing to Utopia: Modernity, Community

and the Movement Choir

COLIN COUNSELL

Established by dance and movement theorist Rudolf Laban, the Bewegungsch6

or 'movement choirs' of the 1920s and 1930s were a spectacularly visible eleme

of German national culture. A network of amateur clubs, each run by a gradu

of Laban's schools, the choirs were modern, urban phenomena, operating

cities and large towns against the backdrop of German industrial society. Thei

membership represented that society's diversity, for although choir leaders a

many dancers were drawn from the educated middle class, those tradition
concerned with cultural generation and preservation, anecdotal evidenc
suggests they also recruited from the industrial working classes. Their amateu

status was central to their aims, such that, as initially conceived, choir works w

to have no audience. Although groups quickly became involved in public

performance, taking part in community festivals and celebrations, their work

were originally envisioned as an end in themselves, an experience for tho

taking part.'

Historically, movement choirs have attracted specific forms of critical

attention, and hence been construed in particular ways. Most often they have
been addressed as a side issue in studies of Laban's life or work' - or, less
frequently, as part of the wider phenomenon of German K'drperkultur, placed
alongside the practice of Bodean3 or 'Swedish'" gymnastics,5 and contemporary

fads for health food, body building, racial 'hygene', nudism and 'wilderness'
experiences'. Rarely have choir events been addressed as acts of performance.
It is in this light that I shall consider Bewegungsch6re work in the following piece -

not as the child of Laban's authorial genius but as live cultural representation,

whose significance was a function of the socio-historical relations in which it

was enmeshed. In pursuing this project, the perspectives offered by Raymond

Williams prove particularly apt. If the aim of his cultural materialism is to

illuminate artifacts in terms of the social relations in which they are embedded

and the cultural consciousness they display, he nevertheless warns against the
dangers of seeking such consciousness solely in explicit utterance. He states:
The general tendency, within bourgeois sociology, has been a reduction of the sociology

of consciousness to the 'sociology of knowledge'... [This] has been especially weak in

relation to important kinds of art and literature. For consciousness is not only knowledge,

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DANCING

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UTOPIA

155

just as language is not only ind

context necessarily, specialised

ness

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of

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used

156

COLIN

COUNSELL

Figure 1

of behavioural uniformity that was historically unprecedented, a regime from

which community and individuality were visibly absent." The cumulative effect
of such developments was massive disruption, the displacement of those forms
of social functioning characteristic of the old world, as society moved towards
industrial work patterns, class relations, urbanisation and the nuclear family. The

social order, which had once seemed a given, was revealed as ephemeral. Equally
important, it now required reinvention.
Whatever their social effects, such developments had a profound impact on
representation. For in the absence of any agreed conception of the social whole,
symbologies of the mass became inherently speculative, each image functioning as

an implicit argument for one or other model of human communality. Reflecting

humanist distaste for modern, Fordist populism, Lang's Metropolis (1926) figured

its swarms of proletarian workers as at once pitiful and threatening, both an

oppressed poor and an anarchic mob throwing civilisation into peril. In contrast,

the 'Odessa steps' sequence of Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) posed a

crowd which is the innocent victim of history against a faceless, automaton mass
in the form of the Imperial Army: later, with its image of revolutionary sailors

arrayed in perfect, cooperative unity, it showed the workers triumphant,

transformed into history's agents. Over the following decade the filmed
choreographies of Busby Berkeley and the high-kicking dances of the Ziegfeld

Follies" and Radio City Rockettes deployed groups of women in moving,

geometrical patterns, their interchangeability suggesting their commodification,
while their pliability en masse functioned as a metaphor for sexual compliance.14
National Socialist rallies, Wall Street tickertape parades, Communist Party street

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DANCING

TO

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tha

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158

COLIN

COUNSELL

founded
in
perceived
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worlds.
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it
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II

Consequently, some responses to this consciousness, this perception of degraded

sociality, were very concrete, including direct proposals to rebuild the community, a 'social engineering' could take quite literal forms. In 1904 brothers
Wolf and Harald Dohrn, under the auspices of the Deutsche Werkbund, initiated
the construction of the new town of Helerau, near Dresden. Conceived whole as
a utopian community, Helerau was planned and built with housing suitable for
the different social classes in place, central, communal facilities for education

and recreation designed to 'enrich' the individual," and access to health-giving

nature in the form of the surrounding countryside. Even more than Morris's
Hampstead Garden Suburb (by which it was almost certainly influenced),
Helerau was an attempt to give physical form to a kind of society deemed to have

been lost, a supremely organic community in which diverse social levels and
dimensions of existence, fractured in modern life, would exist in holistic union.

This ethos, written on the scale of urban planning, is equally evident on

the micro-scale of interpersonal relations, with fin de siicle and early twentieth-

century German social life displaying what has been termed a 'passion for
association',22 blossoming with a cornucopia of leagues, clubs and bunds. If this
wealth of voluntary, recreational organisations constitutes evidence of income

newly available for pleasure - paradoxically, a material excess produced by

modernisation itself"23 - it is significant that this was expended on what were in
effect forms of communal activity, pastimes which exceeded the narrow, modern

limits of work, family and commodified, passively-experienced entertainment:

the profits of the new world were employed to 'reconstruct' the old. Clearly the
Bewegungschdre was a part of this phenomenon, a recreational institution no less
expressive of a widespread urge to sociality. Most important, however, is that like

those other initiatives, it entailed or presumed actual behaviours. Rather than

represent the 'idea' of a pre-modern communitas, as painting or literature might,

Germany's proliferating bunds and leagues enacted it, tracing the shape of a
hypothetical society via real social interactions. This is true even of the
construction of Helerau, for as a built environment it predicted very specific

forms of use from its occupants - the cooperation between, and happy
acceptance of distinct classes, the implicitly premodern melding of work, art
and social exchange, the interpenetration of human life and nature - a set of
group processes which sketched in cameo a projected social whole. Rather than

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DANCING

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159

Figure 2

acknowledge and lament the loss of a world retrospectively construed as a utopia,

these cultural phenomena instead sought to be socially active, to rebuild it.

This active, constructive quality is perhaps best exemplified in one of

the most successful recreational networks of the period, the Wandervogel. An
organisation of pacifist 'walking clubs' for young people, the Wandervogel was
founded on the belief that a combination of group activity, physical exercise and

exposure to nature would promote spiritual wellbeing. Like Helerau, it thus

invoked nostalgia for a past, pastoral mode of existence, one in which such
experiences were supposedly the norm. But the full social significance of the
Wandervogel derives from its relation to the much-debated 'Jugend question':

whereas some could remember a life graced by genuine communitas, it was

argued, the young in today's Germany had experienced only the brute
instrumentalism of modernity, and so had not assimilated those values necessary
for truly collective living.24 If the creation of a generation of delinquents was to
be avoided, it was necessary to provide for young people group activities founded
on different principles, a taste of the communality of the club and the friendly

league.
No less than Helerau, then, organisations like the Wandervogel explicitly or

implicitly had at their core a social project, key to which was their character
as essentially performative. While such as Tonnes and Klages gave abstract,
theoretical recognition to the perception of social decline, in their very rationale
these activities embodied an alternative to it. It is in this socially active light that

we can view movement choirs, for like Helerau, the Wandervogel and Germany's

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160

COLIN

COUNSELL

blooming

recreational

modernity

lost

by
reshaping
communal
experi

III

This remodeling of experience is key to the principles shaping movement choirs'

initial aims. We have noted that, as originally envisioned, choirs were not to give
public shows, the pleasure of their 'dances' being reserved for those taking part.
While this affirms their status as recreational organisations, it also constitutes a
denial of the usual, modern commodification of performance - as something to
be produced by one class of participant, and purchased and passively consumed
by the other. Such denial evokes more than a preference for the communal logic
of the Gemeinschaft, it is a refutation of the inherently contractual principle

underpinning commodification, a rejection of the orthodox social relation

between spectator and performer.

The rejection of orthodox spectatorship bore a particular ideological

charge in Germany at the time, one rooted in the architecture of the modern,
Cartesian subject. Founded on the splitting of mind from body, Descartes' self

necessarily posited a distance between them, enabling mind to assume ascendancy as the true site of selfhood. Such notional distance formed the basis for the
subject's supposed capacity for rational and scientific objectivity, the validity of
the Newtonian scientist's explanation of phenomena deriving from his position
of disinterestedness, not compromised by involvement with the world he sought

to understand. The same logic underpinned the development of the modern

stage. Whereas premodern theatre typically required the coexistence of locus and

platea,2" modern performance was distinguished by increasingly profound

'illusion', a firm interpretive distinction between performer and character, social

space and the hypothetical space of the fiction. The spectator was thereby
separated from the notional world he or she viewed, the edge of the playing
space marking a symbolic boundary between the worlds of viewer and viewed,

subject and object, social world and its fictional counterpart. No less than
science, then, the stage's design came to reproduce the epistemological arrangements of the Cartesian individual, that relation between self and other that was
the foundation of modern subjectivity.2'

Demanding interpretive assumptions analogous to those on which the

bourgeois self rested, the position offered the spectator was thus redolent of
modernity - but a modernity which, in Germany, had profoundly negative
connotations. If 'the modern' would frequently evoke images of a degraded
sociality, the analogue of this at the level of the subject was not the Gesellschaft's

economic individualism but its threat of alienation, that isolation of the self
resulting from its separation from community, and emblematised in images of
the factory floor. It is not incidental that so much of the performance theory
emanating from Germany in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
took as its model an archaic, ritual-like form," for ritual's insistence on a unified

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DANCING

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161

Figure 3

experience promises the reengagement of the onlooker as part of the event, not

its distanced observer, making it an apt model for those seeking to disavow
modern spectatorship.28

By the 1920s, when the movement choir network developed, such disavowal was no longer restricted to theories of a reactionary or nostalgic kind.

Left rationalists in Germany such as Brecht and Piscator welcomed the new
world of mass production and technology for its promise of surplus capacity and
a montage-based, critical aesthetic. Nevertheless, in seeking an alternative to the
cognitive arrangements of bourgeois representation, they too redrew relations

between the auditorium and stage, rejecting a model of spectatorship which,

they felt, reinscribed the 'passivity' of the ideologically integrated subject.29 Of
course, the Bewegungschore too offered an alternative, but one very different to

Brecht's. Not originally envisaged as being for public performance, movement

choirs were to eschew the auditorium-stage division of modern theatre and

dance in the most literal way. They were in effect to deny the identification
of their participants with the bourgeois self - and hence deny the baggage of
alienation such identification was deemed to carry with it. With all involved
committed to the same task, there was to be no separation of viewer from viewed,
individual from community, worker from the fruits of his labour.

In this, movement choirs were by no means unique, for they were part of a
contemporary trend, a tendency towards radical nostalgia quite at odds with the
work of such as Brecht. Nuremberg rallies, Thingspeil,30 clubs dedicated to staging

medieval passion plays, and the theatres proposed by Wagner and Fuchs - all in
their different ways sought 'premodern' alternatives to modern spectatorship.

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162

COLIN

Such
for

COUNSELL

strategies

interpretive

relations

action,

demanded

they

Williams'
Cartesian
modern

is

is

in

activities

to
carry
out
(appropriate)

It

imply

spectatorship

by

the
activ
spectator

neverthele

sense,
for
the
remove,
with

subjectivity.

in

similar

light

modern
spectatorship
beyond
the
mere
refu
different

unity,
which
the

choir

gestalt,
As

each

cognitive

that
each

arra

spectacular
piece
depen

member's

every

expe

individua

gesture

is

carrie

every
moment
is
perm
with
others,
part
of
a
status,
as
both
individu
coherency

The

that

cannot

experience,

self-conception

In

carrying

surrogate

reshape
with

out

their

community,

remarkable
unison.
Eac
community
me

modern'

performance,

you

IV

Movement choirs ultimately did perform in public, showing their wares by

participating in festivals etc, but far from negating their denial of Cartesian
spectatorship, from the performers' point of view this enhanced it. Distinct
from those taking part, the real and separate audience can function as witness
to group coherence: performing, we are aware that others will observe our
coordination, note the union implied in our kinesic unity. The performers'
notional 'perspective' on what takes place is thus given a concrete locus, albeit
a hypothetical one, in the gaze of onlookers - or, more accurately, in the
performers' imagining of the gaze of onlookers. Not only are performers seen, they

can see that they are seen, spectators' eyes acting as the vantage from which
individual actions possess group significance.
But the greatest paradox of the Bewegungschire performances is that despite

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are

DANCING

the

TO

UTOPIA

palpable

expression
provide

suspicion

of

for

163

this

of

social

spectators.

Th

notably
their
refusal
to
no
characters
and
told
no
the
formation
of
patterns
decodable
meanings,
and
what
occurred
as
'repres
works'
elements
into
the
Interpretive
focus
therefo
for
but
on
the
occurrence
was
to
be
treated
to
a
visi
fashion
that
was
spectacul
This

is

at

the

core

of

the

in
viewing
a
Bewegungsch
orchestration
itself.
It
is
a

tation,

remains

fictional
are
on

always
the

for

do

realm

if

choir

not

and

object

at

visibly
as

aw

precision

members

functioning
so

and

form,

remain

remain

emphatically

unity

aesthetic

emphatic

but

the
all.

built

an

do

perf

Com

of

organise

spectacularly
presents
it
an
'image'
of
Gemei

simply
of

social

instead

interaction

the

While

this

spectators

choirs

is

idea

to

the
legs

and

new

of

coalesce

the

in

fo

is

continual

realigned

for

spatial

anxiety,

periodic

do
but

object

torsos

an

perfor

they

consequences

trace

the

live

fragile,

position

of

perhaps

record

aesthetic

direct

to

that

photographic

spatially

which

relations

in

th

for

saturat

spectator's

endangerment

and
successful
reaffirma
formance
unique.
Metrop
modern

society:
Oberammergau

the
Wand
supposedl

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164

COLIN

COUNSELL

movement
choirs
first
down,
only
then
to
re
triumph

This

of

Gemeinschaf

presents

notionally

us

with

premodern

c
modern
loss,
doing
so
spectators
are
require
continual
threat
of
its
of
the
persistence
of
c
onlooker's
endlessly
mo
ness
of
the
group.
Th
consciousness
of
the
s
consciousness,
a
'struc

Williams,
is
embedded.
T
and
find
again
the
enda

defer

to

prelapsarian

effectively
dance

is

While

the

matter

own

of

in

that

political
-

al

the

with

socio-ideologica

movement

Germany

choirs

the

reactions

to

trade

union

Nazi

rallies.

and

reactionary,

it

percepti

festivals,

plays

reaffir

record

relations

itself
ing

dance

utopia's

arguably

pa

proto-fasc

Teutonic
past
and
the
function
to
critique
so
opposed
the
status
quo
For

all

that,

movement

there

choir

communality.
was

face

widely

of

peril,

In

is

proje

showin

recognised
they

impli

In
their
original
cultu
Fritz
Lang
proposed
con
ship,
while
German
Com
unfettered
both

interaction

sought

finding

to

solace

change

in

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worl

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165

NOTES
1. Here and throughout this essay I have benefitted greatly from information and advice
given by my friend and colleague, dance scholar Thomas Kampe, whose experience of
movement choirs is practical as well as academic. Working with choreographer Annett
Walter, Thomas created Was Macht die Masse? (How do the Masses Move?), a movement
choir piece developed as part of Hamburg's 2003 Tanzinitiative, entitled Urbane Rituale. The

piece was performed on 6 September 2003 at the St Pauli Stadium, Hamburg, and

broadcast on national television.

2. See for example Valerie Preston-Dunlop, Rudolf Laban: An Extraordinary Life (London:
Dance Books, 1998) or Isa Partsch-Bergsohn, Modern Dance in Germany and the United States:
Crosscurrents and Influences (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic, 1994).

3. Ardent National Socialist Rudolf Bode was Laban's chief competitor in terms of
movement theory in Germany during the Hitler years, until Laban's work for the 1936
Berlin Olympics, Vom Tauwind und der neuen Freude (Of the Warm Wind and the New Joy) was

branded staatsfeindlich, 'hostile to the state', and he was effectively forced to flee the
country.

4. 'Swedish gymnastics' is the generic term for the group gymnastic system of Nils Bukh,
widely employed in Germany at the time.
5. The opening sequences of Leni Riefenstahl's Olympiad (Olympische Spiele) (1938) offer
examples of group spectacle of this kind.
6. See for example Harold Segel, Body Ascendent: Modernism and the Physical Imperative
(Baltimore:John Hopkins University Press, 1998) or Karl Toepfer, Empire ofEcstacy: Nudity
and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1997).
7. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977),
p. 139.
8. I use the term in the sense established by Pierre Bourdieu. See his Outline of a Theory of
Practice (1972), trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
9. The scarcity of evidence is due in large part, of course, to the massive erasure of dance
and movement culture that took place under National Socialism.
10. Writing on Baudelaire, whose response to the city was often positive and optimistic,
Paul Valery asserted that 'The inhabitant of the great urban centres reverts to a state of
savagery - that is, of isolation. The feeling of being dependent on others, which used to

be kept alive by need, is gradually blunted in the smooth functioning of the social
mechanism. Any improvement of this mechanism eliminates certain modes of behaviour

and emotions,' (quoted in Walter Benjamin, 'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire', in

Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), p. 70. The
fifty years that separated the births of Baudelaire and Valkry had changed the city
spectacle from an intriguing novelty to a symbol of sterility and dehumanisation.

11. See Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', in
Benjamin op. cit. For all his general optimism regarding the new, Benjamin's discussion
of 'aura' already suggests a nostalgia for the work of the artisan.
12. See Bernard Doray, From Taylorism to Fordism: A Rational Madness (1981), trans. David

Macey (London: Free Association Books, 1988)

13. In fact the Follies were formed in 1907 and continued as a working troop until 1938.
14. The choreographing of women on the commercial stage during this period has produced
some of the best critical analysis of the phenomenon of live mass images. See for example
Mark Franko, The Work of Dance: Labour, Movement and Identity in the 1930s (Middleton, CT:

Wesleyan University Press, 2002); Linda Mizejewski, Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture

and Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Martin Rubin, 'The Crown, the
Collective and the Chorus: Busby Berkeley and the New Deal', Movies and Mass Culture,
ed. John Belton (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), all of whom relate the
image of the 'dancing legs' to processes of commodification.
15. Although some indicators were visible as early as the 1840s, it was not until the 1850s and
later that Germany saw those developments in the coal, iron and steel industries usually

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166

COLIN

COUNSELL

considered

indicative

of

Blackbourn,
The
Fontana
Hi
16.
While
the
Dresden
riots
(and
a
testament
to
its
ultim
'Prussianization' of German states.

17. For key modern explorations of the question of a German Sonderweg, see Geoff Eley, From
Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (London and New York: Routledge, 1986)

and David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society
and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

18. Just a few years later Durkheim would reverse the implicit value-loading of these terms,
describing modern democracies in terms of their 'organic solidarity' as opposed to the
merely 'mechanical solidarity' of pre-industrial social forms, a move which is at least
partly a product of the inherent optimism of the French rationalist tradition. See Emile
Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society (1893), trans. George Simpson (New York:

Macmillan, 1933).
19. This probably takes its most interesting form in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy,

where the opposition between the 'Dionysian' and the 'Apollonian' effectively images a
distinction between the kind of communal art he deems representative of the archaic
world and those individual, contemplative forms arising as complement to the modern
subject's alienation.
20. See August Wiedmann, The German Quest for Primal Origins in Art, Culture, and Politics

1900-1933 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1995).

21. Significantly, this included an Education Institute for Rhythm and Music (Bildingsanstalt
fur Musik und Rhythms), for which the prestigious Swiss professor of music and movement,

Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, was made first Director in 1910. The principle of synthesis
underlying Dalcroze's somewhat idiosyncratic theory of movement harmony, involving
the unification of different rhythms in bodily gesture, is not incidental, given the town's
social aim of reuniting a fractured community. See Irwin Spector, Rhythm and Life: The
Work ofEmileJaques-Dalcroze (New York: Pendragon Press, 1990).

22. The German 'passion for association' actually began earlier in the nineteenth century,
when it was a largely bourgeois phenomenon, presumed a necessary counterpart to the
free market. It is only later that it was enjoyed on a wider social basis. See Blackbourn and
Eley op. cit.

23. AsJames Retallack notes, 'Popular culture took on a new character around the turn of the
century due to higher disposable incomes, shorter working hours, and the emergence of
a distinct urban lifestyle attuned to the desires of German youth.' See his Germany in the
Age ofKaiser Wilhelm II (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 88.
24. This was by no means restricted to the beginning of the century but continued up until
the outbreak of World War II. See John Willett, The New Sobriety (London: Thames and

Hudson, 1978).

25. An excellent exploration of the premodern formation of performance spaces is provided

in Robert Weimann Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre: Studies in the Social
Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978),
particularly chapter three.

26. This model of spectatorship perhaps achieves its most profound realisation not in
performance but in cinema. While theatre and dance present the spectator with a live
performer, inevitably inviting comparison between the two notionally different spaces, the
filmed image has the advantage of being self-evidently of the past and of another place, at
a geographical and temporal remove. The crucial separation of subject from object is thus

inherent to the medium. It is perhaps in this light that we should view Laura Mulvey's
classic analysis, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', Screen 16/3, Autumn (1975), the

'passivity' underpinning her descriptions of both scopophilia and ego-identification

arguably being a function of this theoretical distance.
27. Proposals for ritual-like forms most famously included Richard Wagner's Die Kunst und die
Revolution (1849) and Georg Fuchs's Die Schaubiihne der Zukunft (c. 1904-5, undated), both of
which are quite evangelical in their call for a new theatre modeled on the ancient.

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DANCING

TO

UTOPIA

167

28. In The Savage Mind (Londo

'Ritual ... conjoins, for it bring
context) or in any case an org
ideally merging with the pers
the faithful' (p. 32). Ritual-b
'conjoining', seeking to establis

by ritual proper of affirming com

29. See Bertolt Brecht, 'Alienation

of an Aesthetic, trans. John Wi

30. The Thingspeil is significant
the Thing, the forum or court o
for National Socialism, it shou
gesture towards a premodern G
mode. For good introductions

see Henning Eichberg, 'The N

Proletarian Culture', New Ger

and Das Frankenburger Wiirfels

Birth of Nazi Drama: Thing Pla

Manchester University Press,

31. This has been documented
Dancers:

York

German

and

The author has

in the figures;
prove

Modern

Oxford:

possible

dance

Berghahn

endeavoured, wi
he will, of cours

to

identify

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the

ow