The Embodied Conservatism of German Modern Dance

At the turn of the twentieth century, German modern dance emerged as a cultural project to transcend national borders and unite individuals irrespective of origin. Yet by 1933 modern dance served as a powerful tool for the Nazi state and values of national essentialism. After 1945, modern dance aided the competing ideologies of the cold war East and West, offering both sides a space to articulate political identity and difference. How did this happen? This paper argues that at the heart of German modern dance’s conception of cultural inclusivity lay a social - embodied - conservatism that sought the maintenance of stable order, which was available for a range of political ends and which supported, rather than erased, differences between its members. Tracing the origins of what this paper labels as "embodied conservatism" in German dancers’ educational and performance programs from the interwar period, this paper shows how movement – from physical gestures and steps, to qualities of motion and expressive representation – was understood to model particular virtues necessary for the stabilization of collective life in an unpredictable, chaotic modern world. These virtues included the capacity for error correction, an ease or grace of motion, improvisation and spontaneity, a balance between risk taking and risk aversion, leadership, and the effective transformation of force into power. Shifting our attention from movement as a metaphor for politics to movement as a vehicle for politics, this paper considers how gestures envisioned to unite individuals also serve as the grounds for their division.