Das Echo der Utopien: Tanz und Politik by Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln, and: Intellectual Barbarians: The Kibbo Kift Kindred by Whitechapel Gallery (review)

Art is always political! Only dance is not!

Dance has been somewhat ignored in utopian studies as a potential transformatory and political artistic expression, though performance and drama have attracted critical attention. The exhibition Das Echo der Utopienat the Dance Archive in Cologne uses its own archival materials to prove that dance can be political by looking at archival visual material from the sixteenth century to the German dance theater of the 1990s. The underlying assumption of the exhibition is that dance as a physical, bodily form of individual andsocial expression has been and will be monitored and censored. “Social choreography,” in the words of Hewitt, highlights the interconnection between society and aesthetics, the body and the ideological, and its potential for subversion and freedom. ¹

Already in the sixteenth century, dance was seen as a devilish pastime that sexualized the encounter between men and women by ensnaring and entrapping their bodies in dangerous Dionysian rituals. This understanding of dance as a sexualized and uncontrolled activity that subverted gender decorum and social order continued to the eighteenth century, when the folkloric waltz (or its regional variations) conquered the aristocratic circles in Europe. As von LaRoche records in her novel of sensibility, Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim(1771), waltzing meant improper close physical contact, when “[the man] pressed her to his breast, cavorted with her in the shameless, indecent whirling-dance of the Germans and engaged in a familiarity that broke all the bounds of good breeding—then my silent misery turned into burning rage.” ²

The carnivalesque aspect of the waltz, the uncontained elements of whirling and spinning, whiffed of riots and social disorder. But the spontaneity and physicality of dancing, be it anarchic waltzing or expressive Dionysian dance, is what makes it transformatory and challenging. The exhibition quotes the current German chancellor as describing herself as having always been the girl who does not dance (“Ich war immer das Mädchen, dass nicht tanzt”): in other words, the girl who does not relinquish control.

The modernist dance reform movements in Germany and Britain (Laban, Duncan, Wigman, Palucca) practiced in artist colonies and reform academies (Dartington, Monte Verità, Loheland School) sought to revive a different (Hellenistic and/or natural) body culture as an expression of gender and class equality (Weidt) and aimed to further authentic musical and rhythmic expression: a form of agitprop. ³Dancers thus opposed the Nazi regime in the 1930s with pacifist performances by Kurt Joos, Jean Weidt, and Mary Wigman—and the latter managed, with problematic ideological compromises, to keep her school until after World War II.

The 1980s and 1990s revived the expressionist dance tradition with companies such as Pina Bausch. Beyond producing thought-provoking choreography, artists such as Bausch became politically active. In 1988, the company participated in a 667-hour-long cultural performance to prevent the demolition of a performance hall. Break dancing and flash mobs are only two examples of the subversive, carnivalesque dance culture of the later decades of the twentieth century that challenged race, gender, and class.

The exhibition portrays this short episodic history of utopian moments in dance with caricatures, films, photographs, posters, and public talks. It is a small exhibition but effective and convincing in its visual materials. Art is always political, and so is dance.

The fascinating exhibition in the Whitechapel Gallery, Intellectual Barbarians: The Kibbo Kift Kindred, co-curated by Dr. Annebella Pollen (principal lecturer, history of art and design, and Arts and Humanities Research Council research fellow, University of Brighton) and Dr. Nayia Yiakoumaki (curator, Archive Gallery, and project manager, NEON Curatorial Exchange and Award, Whitechapel Gallery), also explores the connection among aesthetics, creativity, and ideology. Kibbo Kift was formed in 1920 by the writer and pacifist John Hargrave as an alternative to the Boy Scouts, with...