Dancing to Utopia: Modernity, Community and the Movement Choir

Abstract

Established by dance and movement theorist Rudolf Laban, the Bewegungsch6ren or 'movement choirs' of the 1920s and 1930s were a spectacularly visible element of German national culture. A network of amateur clubs, each run by a graduate of Laban's schools, the choirs were modern, urban phenomena, operating in cities and large towns against the backdrop of German industrial society. Their membership represented that society's diversity, for although choir leaders and many dancers were drawn from the educated middle class, those traditionally concerned with cultural generation and preservation, anecdotal evidence suggests they also recruited from the industrial working classes. Their amateur status was central to their aims, such that, as initially conceived, choir works were to have no audience. Although groups quickly became involved in public performance, taking part in community festivals and celebrations, their works were originally envisioned as an end in themselves, an experience for those 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:

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