The Moving Body and the Will to Culture

Abstract

From the Renaissance, dance and sport formed the basis of ‘polite’ and ethical behaviour. Both offered a frame within which social norms could be taught and enacted. Scholarship has often concentrated either on the history and aesthetics of dance or on those of gymnastics but neglected the proximity of both forms to each other. This paper focuses on one particular narrative: the intertwining of dance and gymnastics as utopian projects in the arousal of nationalism and creation of a new ‘German’ body. From Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, who sketched the first national and patriotic movement system in Die deutsche Turnkunst 1816, to dance master Franz Anton Roller, gymnastics teacher Adolf Spiess, and dance gurus Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman, it will demonstrate how the distinction between dance and gymnastics was constantly re-negotiated; and it argues that twentieth-century Modern Dance developed out of nineteenth-century Turnen and gymnastics. Dance intended to revolutionise German society physically and aesthetically and incorporated spatial concepts and movement sequences that gymnastics systems had already explored. Through their conceptions of motion in time and space, dance and gymnastics created a modern and revolutionary physical practice for the German nation.

Breathing Back the History of German Modern Dance through the Horror Film Genre in Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria (2018)

“…According to dance historian Marion Kant, German Expressionist dance has its roots in the nationalist and völkisch rhetoric of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, who desired a new German body and revitalized people through gymnastics ( Turnen ). This was the first movement-based practice associated with “ Volk ” in the early nineteenth century and desired to liberate itself from Napoleonic oppression (Kant 2011, 580). These patriotic developments created a cultlike community based on physical movements in a sacred space.…”

German Gymnastics, Modern German Dance, and Nazi Aesthetics

“…This active bodily submission to rules, set out in a written pledge, to which every individual member of the community had to agree, insured obedience to and through movement. Turnen was rigorously organized and carefully managed patriotic socialization in action (Kant 2011). It soon set up its community network across Prussia and several other German states and became an institution that determined German socialization and social interaction beyond the movement clubs (Düding 1984; Goltermann 1998).…”