Introduction
This essay examines several ideological roots of modern movement concepts in German gymnastics and dance. It looks at the history of ideas that directed movement practices together with two aspects that show how ideas were translated into practice: the application of specific movements such as walking (‘Gehen’) and the incorporation of formal and genre-specific concepts such as round dances (‘Reigen’). The essay argues that German dance and gymnastics in the twentieth century rested on the idea of a German body, which developed out of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn's Turnen, an early nineteenth-century movement and gymnastic practice.
Jahn was by no means the first to formulate modern physical movement guidelines. Several eighteenth-century men, whose principles he carefully studied, paved the way, among them C.G. Salzmann (1744–1811)1 or J.C.F. Gutsmuths (1759–1838).Reference Schröder2
But Jahn's Turnen began as a concrete patriotic means to liberate Germany from Napoleonic oppression and to contribute to a renewed Germanic society, whereas earlier German gymnastics focused on the restoration of health and general humanistic principles. Jahn emphasised something new and unusual: a nation created through the moving ‘German’ body. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries his model shaped the transformation of the individual into the communal body of the German people, the Volk. Later movement systems, whether those of gymnastics or modern dance, had to react to Jahn if they wished to establish national movement notions; often they incorporated and extended concepts that Turnen had already explored. The evolution from Turnen to modern practices can be traced by examining the way in which ‘traditions’ (always underpinned by ideological claims) were established. Once a specific ‘tradition’ was announced and defined, the representatives of movement schools could comfortably place themselves within that continuum of thought.
If movement is a distinct cultural expression that does not just happen, how can we track continuity of movement practices? An important source are the manuals that taught certain types of physical exercises. Gymnastics and dance manuals show us types of body movement on several levels: there is the conceptual level, which provides the ideological and political context of the movement and the descriptions of what it is supposed to achieve; there is the idealised body with its anatomical and physiological analysis as the foundation for movement; there is the artistic ambition – movement had to be meaningful, pleasing and follow rules of aesthetic harmony (according to composition in music, dance or poetry, as well as to genre analysis, etc); there is the technical and pragmatic level with carefully recorded instructions; and finally, there is also the biographical level, as the authors often inserted themselves into the texts and charted their personal goals in relation to movement. Through a selection of these manuals we can trace a genealogy of nationalist movement patterns. This essay begins with Jahn and then follows various stages in the nineteenth century to arrive at the gymnastics of the early twentieth century and Rudolf von Laban's modern German Dance.
Turnen
Friedrich Ludwig Jahn invented a system of German Turnen or German gymnastics in 1809 after he had just completed Von deutschem Volkstum – Of German Folk Essence, a booklet in which he expressed the essence of the German people (‘Volk’). As mentioned, Jahn was not the first to introduce physical education. But he was the first to make movement completely dependent on and link its realisation to the liberation of Germany. In the spring of 1810, as the French invaders still controlled German territory, he began to try out his new movement system; with a group of young men, he went to the Hasenheide near Berlin to swing, jump, run, march, play patriotic games and embark on patriotic hikes (Ref. Reference Jahn3, p. 66). At the same time he wrote down the exercises he devised and collected them in a manual called Deutsche Turnkunst – The Art of German Gymnastics, first published in 1816.
For Jahn, Turnen re-established the lost equilibrium of a unified, harmonious human education that balanced spiritual development with physical agility.Reference Jahn4 But establishing the unity of mind and body was not enough in itself. Such holistic education of mankind (Ref. Reference Jahn3, p. 63; Ref. Reference Jahn4, p. 289) had to align itself with the needs of the Volk; Turnen had to make itself a part of the interests of a patriotic people – ‘Volk und Vaterland’, Turnen as ‘Volksgut’ – belonged to the people and was to be practised ‘volksgemäss’, i.e. according to the necessities of the people (Ref. Reference Jahn4, p. 289). Jahn went even further by declaring German gymnastics the life-line of the German people: only with this movement system would German youth be strong, ripen towards German manhood, combat the impoverishment of an esoteric, alien (i.e. French) culture, and realise the German body. Turnen would lead to the militant re-conquering of German soil and liberation from French oppression. Turnen was the means to combine German interests beyond geographical, social or confessional differences and lead them towards unified communities, into ‘deutsches Gemeinleben’ (Ref. Reference Jahn3, p. 69). The German Volk had to find its corporeal ideal through Turnen and, vice versa, Turnen would embody German Volk culture. Jahn's system represented one of the earliest modern examples of a nation as a community becoming, forming or defining itself through physical movement. With a leader leading and the group following orders, Turnen established hierarchies based on physical abilities intended to replace the existing social or religious ones. It was authoritarian but relied on the voluntary submission of the members of the gymnastics groups to the demands of the leader. The leader spoke for or, more precisely, moved for the group. This active bodily submission to rules led to obedience to and through movement. Turnen was patriotic socialisation in action. Jahn's model of exercise connected physical movement to a national and patriotic spirit. He created a special physical environment for all this – exercises undertaken on gymnastics apparatuses stood within an allocated space, the Turnplatz.
Jahn defined movement as a patriotic exercise that promised national as well as individual ‘liberation’. He systematically examined the movement capabilities of bodies. Like several of his contemporaries, he refused to take bodies and movement for granted. With his training manuals and exercises he developed a compelling myth that removed intellectual engagement and replaced it with movement as ‘deed’ (Ref. Reference Jahn4, p. 37), as action. Consequently, Turnen, gymnastics and dance cultivated action and activity rather than contemplation. The motto was act, not think.
The reading of Jahn's works has always depended on the politics of a given era: the huge interest during the Nazi period focused on aspects of national liberation,Reference Wellner5 refugees from Nazism accentuated his authoritarian, anti-liberal intolerance,Reference Kohn6 whereas recent literature has explored liberal tendencies and political differentiation within the Turnen movement.Reference Eisenberg7 The complexities of politics before the 1848 Revolution in Germany certainly make it hard to put Jahn's work into a neat category. He saw himself as a liberator and a nation-builder. The post-1815 reactionary governments distrusted and condemned both. Hence, Jahn belonged on the ‘liberal’ side of politics for many in nineteenth-century Germany. By the end of that century, his doctrines and followers had moved to the right.
Gymnastics and ‘Freiübungen’ (free exercises)
From the mid-nineteenth century, Gymnastics and ‘Freiübungen’ (free exercises) developed as an offshoot of Jahn's early Turnen conceptions. Space does not permit me to follow the division of Jahn's Turnen movement into warring factions, but one striking example was the foundation in 1893 of the Arbeiter Turnerbund, the workers’ gymnastics association, a social-democratic rival of the national-conservative [deutsch-national] direction followed by the majority of Turner. Nor was Jahn's the only serious gymnastic school. The Swedish system, developed by Per Henrik Ling (1776–1839) was introduced to Germany by Hugo Rothstein (1810–1865). Gymnastics split into several branches: some adhered strictly to Jahn's legacy; others adapted the Ling-Rothstein system, which lacked the ideological burden of Jahn's doctrines. In the early twentieth century, gymnasts refined both Turnen and Swedish gymnastics and created aesthetic, rhythmic, eurhythmic gymnastics, etc. In spite of their differences, Turner and gymnasts believed that motion had to be connected to higher goals of national interest. Movement internalised ideas, which in turn made the gymnast feel the vibrations of German culture. Movement had a deeper meaning beyond mere physical exercise. It prepared the individual for a healthy lifestyle and, through the individual as social actor, it formed the healthy communal and national body. Turnen assured the union of physical and mental aspects of human life that created existential stability and envisaged a solid national future.
Not everybody accepted the idea that movement was only a means to a national end. Gustav Techow (1814–1893) tried to harmonise Turnen with Ling's ideas. He had been introduced to Jahn's principles by Ernst Eiselen (1893–1846), Jahn's assistant and co-author of Die Deutsche Turnkunst. Techow accompanied Hugo Rothstein to Sweden in 1845/1846 to study Ling's system of physical education. Ling's gymnastics, refracted through Rothstein's interpretation, rested on the premise that the body was an end in itself and that all physical instruction had to be conducted in such a way that the integrity of the human body should never be compromised by external ideological aspirations. It was functional and paid particular attention to the strengthening of the torso. Ling's system thus stood in stark contrast to Jahn's. In 1845, while travelling through Sweden with Rothstein, Techow wrote a letter to his Turner friends in Berlin in which he compared Jahn's and Ling's systems:
Ling's gymnastics like German Turnen emerged from the clearly recognized and deeply felt need for a form of body building which would keep pace with the development of the intellect – but it held this end more sharply in view and more firmly in grip than we have … The political and national ends that Jahn transplanted to the Turnplatz could not but remove his system further from that final purpose … It is completely different for Ling … [he] never asks what understanding, what caste of mind or what sort of will must I achieve through my gymnastics? – instead he says: man has a body; this body is an indispensible factor in the production of human existence; it is indeed the most important bearer of that existence. It must not be sold short or sacrificed but instead must be entitled to its own special identity and the corresponding development of its capacities.Reference Langenfeld and Ulfkotte8
Techow saw that Jahn's Turnen neglected bodily physiology; he recognised the deficiency of Turnen that made the idea and the principle more important than practice and hence distorted physical education. The controversy between these two approaches engendered bitter feuds and ended in the most famous – the ‘Barrenstreit’ (over whether parallel bars should be used or not). Rothstein, who became director of the Prussian Central-Turnanstalt in 1851, thought bars damaged the back but the Turner clung to Jahn's devotion to them as a way to demonstrate gymnastic prowess. Rothstein lost the encounter and, it is said, died lonely and of a broken heart. The ‘battle of the bars’ went to the core of a deeper set of issues. Shortly after Techow's assessment, another disciple of Jahn's Turnen, Hans Ferdinand Massmann (1797–1874), came to a completely different conclusion. In 1847, two years after Techow had advised the Berlin Turner to acquaint themselves with Swedish gymnastics, Massmann condemned Ling's method for the same reason that Techow had praised it: Ling's organisation of movement rested on anatomical insight and was thus ideologically unreliable. Ling's differentiation of aesthetic, military, health and pedagogical gymnastics had convinced Techow that, logically, gymnastics could and should support different types of body functions and therefore lead to different types of physical education. Yet that made Massmann suspicious. He reported to the Prussian Minister Eichborn on 29 August 1847 that such notions were nonsense and ‘unscientific’; worse, such distinctions dislocated meaning from movement and turned exercise into a general, ‘neutral’ and ‘mechanical’ device (Ref. Reference Langenfeld and Ulfkotte8, pp. 210–211):
Of ethical or moral or even educational applications of this pure and naked technique, there is not a trace. One cannot speak in the German sense and use of the word of any pedagogical spiritualisation of what is strictly a bodily elementary substance.
Finally, Massmann pointed out that true German spirit could never be acquired in Sweden; practitioners would have to embrace it on German soil (Ref. Reference Langenfeld and Ulfkotte8, p. 217).
This profound conflict over ideological orientation divided Turnen and gymnastics traditions. But these ‘Körperkulturen’ (cultures that focus on and around the moving body) also shared an invented past and an ideological outlook which showed a striking similarity in approach and practice over the following years. If that outlook was rejected, so was the movement system itself. Most Körperkultur systems provided practical guidelines for the creation of a new man with a new body. That such an undertaking – the creation of a new human being – should be possible was never doubted. Through such concepts ran a shared faith that by creating a new physical creature, social structures could be negotiated and renewed. Many makers of twentieth century gymnastics also believed that intellectual, political and philosophical powers would not really change social conditions but politics enacted and social structures embodied definitely would. Movement for them was the beginning and the end of socialisation and structural social coherence; it was the attempt to attain, in practical terms, a culture that rejuvenated all conditions, whether those of the early 1800s, of the mid and late nineteenth century, of the 1920s or 1930s, of the late twentieth or early twenty-first century. Movement as the will to culture was the means as well as the end of social change.
There were, of course, movement alternatives that existed to Jahn's or any other patriotic physical education: theatrical dance, social dance, riding or fencing. All these practices produced guidelines for the systematic education and formation of the human body. Fencing and riding formed part of the typical set of aristocratic accomplishments and thus had to be redefined by Jahn and his comrades as bourgeois, patriotic virtues. From the late eighteenth century the predominant performance tradition on stage was ballet, which had arisen in the Northern Italian city-states during the early Renaissance and had been exported all over Europe with the strongest centre at the French court in Versailles and Paris, but also at the English court and royal theatres in London. In the social dance sphere, the waltz craze swept across all large cities after 1800 and was immediately conceived as a threat to moral stability. Jahn perceived social dancing as dangerous to mental and physical health (Ref. Reference Jahn4, p. XVI), and many patriots seeking Germanic national revival deemed ballet with its Italian and French roots, and especially the lascivious waltz, alien to the German soul. Nothing should interfere with or weaken dedication to the patriotic cause. These kinds of movement had to be condemned and, if possible, banned. Ballet's entire codification of movement was rejected, together with its language and movement vocabulary.
The differences between gymnastics/modern dance on the one hand and ballet/social dance on the other are much greater than between gymnastics and early modern dance. The emergence of a truly modern German dance at the turn to the twentieth century was more dependent on gymnastics than on ballet. Ballet and social dance provide us with comparative contemporary counter-systems, as they too demarcate an ideal body in movement and characterise physical man (and woman) as part of a larger social scheme within a designated space. Gymnastics and dance manuals of the nineteenth century show this clearly. They offer more than merely a collection of exercises. They contain historical summaries, technical descriptions, introductions to manners and social conventions, practices of techniques and pragmatic suggestions with justifications. Jahn's Deutsche Turnkunst (1816) was the first manual that went beyond general health concerns to preach a specifically Germanic culture and national vision. It specified everything in relation to movement: space – the Turnplatz, time, physical and mental environment, food, clothing, comradeship, language and speech patterns, greeting rituals and the making of a community of like-minded converts. This whole way of life was necessary to turn Turnen into the means to create a patriotic German people.
What happened to Jahn's ideas? How did his ideas persist as practice? The precondition for a continued practice of Turnen rested on the acceptance of its meaningfulness. Only after this vital assumption was acknowledged could the actual exercises be tackled. Jahn emphasised simple, ‘natural’ forms of movement such as walking and running in his booklet Deutsche Turnkunst: Gehen and Laufen Reference Jahn9 and classified them ‘Vor-, Grund-, Hauptübungen’ (Ref. Reference Jahn4, p. XII) – essential exercises that supply the basis for everything else. It is hard to grasp how revolutionary his emphasis on walking was in the early nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century, a gentleman rode his own horse; a gentlewoman had her carriage. After 1800, romantic, independent, young ladies spurned the carriage to the horror of their correct mothers, young men took to the woods to connect with nature and their deepest inner self. Jahn went further. He promoted walking or running as patriotic acts, ways to explore German lands – he called it wandern (the German includes both the idea of ‘wandering’ but also the more purposeful ‘hiking’). He gave the romantic cult of nature a practical twist. Franz Anton Roller (1775–1844), a teacher at Schulpforta, one of three elite schools in Prussia in 1843 wrote one manual through which we can trace both the continuation and modification of Jahn's suggestions.Reference Roller10 Roller looked at Jahn's Turnen system, and examined the lessons to be learnt from dance for Turnen and vice versa. Roller saw in the ballet master a teacher of physical education (Ref. Reference Roller10, p. VIf) rather than an instructor of fashionable steps or polite manners. He declared Turnen the basis of any good physical and national-ethical education. Dance could contribute but not in itself fulfil the demands of a truly nationally orientated art. Dance and gymnastics needed to complement each other (Ref. Reference Roller10, p. 7):
The grotesque [dance] can be an excellent preparation for Turnen … Nowadays, one stresses the profitability of gymnastics exercises and quite rightly so. But the exercises alone achieve only physical prowess without any gain of ethics and beauty. If a good dance instruction … accompanies gymnastics then the male body is presented in a more complete state of education and manners. When I lead the Turnen exercises both were brought into harmony.
This view separated him from his fellow ballet masters, the majority of whom worked within the French and Italian aesthetic traditions. German ballet barely existed; it remained an imported art form: ballet in Germany. Roller's great ambition was to complete what Jahn had left incomplete in his Deutsches Volkstum and the Turnkunst manual, his remarks merely sketching a function for dance. Jahn might have given it a place, but it was a vague one: ‘dance belongs to family festivals and popular high holidays’ (Ref. Reference Jahn4, p. 36). Since Jahn had not managed to devise a viable system that integrated dance instruction and practice, Roller aspired to prove that dance could fulfil what Jahn had envisaged and could, like Turnen, become an art form with recognisable national roots. He thought he could make dance a celebratory form of physical representation of the people. In this spirit, he choreographed dance events for specific occasions at Schulpforta – dances as means of celebration from 1816 onwards. For the annual school examinations he also staged danced impressions of the ancient Greek Pentathlon with running, discus throwing, wrestling, fencing, spear dances, etc; indeed, he wished to replace the decadent French style of dancing with a more Turnen-like modernised dance. In 1817, Roller, the dancing master, applied for permission to erect a Turnplatz to instruct his dancing pupils in another aspect of physical education and complement dancing lessons with a stronger physical instruction. In 1833, Roller managed to insert dancing lessons together with Turnen into the curriculum of Schulpforta as compulsory elements of physical education.
Roller's main work, the 1843 Systematic Manual of the Art of Dance and Physical Education,Reference Roller10 summarised and laid out the way in which children and teenagers should be introduced to, and consistently instructed in, physical exercises. He insisted that dancing and Turnen should complement each other; both had to be part of a modern and comprehensive education – for boys as well as girls.
A second example of the adaptation of Jahn's principles can be found in the late writings of Adolf Spiess (1810–1858), which have been largely ignored by scholars. Christiane Eisenberg described Spiess as someone who:
throughout his life … tried to upgrade gymnastics as part of the curriculum … For that reason, he left the Riegenturnen [gymnastic formations as suggested by Jahn] and demanded that the teacher engage with all the pupils in the class. He lined the pupils up and disciplined them in an orderly fashion and made them go through a catalogue of gymnastics exercises, but without apparatus.Reference Eisenberg11
Spiess's last written work (that has not been included in analyses of the Turnen tradition) was a collection of songs and dances for the physical education of girls in Schulturnen. It was published posthumously by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Wassmannsdorff (1821–1906) as Reigen und Liederreigen für das Schulturnen aus dem Nachlasse von Adolf Spiess (Frankfurt/M: J.D. Sauerländer's Verlag 1869, Round Dances and Songs for Gymnastics in Schools from the Literary Estate of Adolf Spiess). There are several interesting aspects in this collection that cast light on the legacy and further development of Jahn's system: a dance genre – Reigen or round dance – as a tool for formal organisation entering gymnastics and the concept of sung and instrumental music re-introduced into gymnastics instruction. Both dance and music insert levels of aesthetic meaning and structure into methodical physical exercises. Spiess freely expanded principles and means that Jahn had also employed. Jahn had wished to see Turnen accompanied by patriotic songs; one of his publications in 1813 was devoted to a collection of ‘Wehrlieder’ – militant patriotic songs of defence, songs of male combat. He derived Wehr, like Turnen from old German, in which, according to him, it had meant the manly man who carries and uses arms for his own and his nation's honour. But Reigen too had caught his attention in 1815; they were ancient dances or exercises, in which the participants walked together. Jahn dedicated an entire chapter to the Reigen in his second, revised and expanded edition of Deutsche Turnkunst of 1847.Reference Jahn12
The Reigen, the round dance ‘is not a form, in the conventional sense of that word, but rather a conceptual mould for performance – a model for oral realization’.Reference Petzsch13 A romantic rediscovery, Reigen helped to establish a canon of aesthetic means that traced itself back to ancient German folk custom; it was ‘invented tradition’, as Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger defined it,Reference Hobsbawm and Ranger14 because it took a loose form and re-imagined it within a modern, nineteenth-century context. Reigen therefore fitted perfectly into a movement practice that began as the restoration of old German customs. The myth of permanence could be transported within this music and dance form that was as strict or as open as the creator wished.
Into the round dances Spiess inserted exercises that focused on or evolved out of Gehen and Laufen – walking and running.15 Here again, Jahn's legacy was reflected, and here again, we find a direct link to the gymnastics and dance schools of the twentieth century, to Rudolf Bode, Jutta Klamt, Doreothee Günther, Gret Palucca and others. They all centred their systems on natural movement and made walking and running the foundation on which healthy muscular development and aesthetically meaningful compositions should be built. The propaganda film Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit, commissioned in 1925 by the UFA cultural department and directed by Nicholas Kaufmann and Wilhelm Prager, advocated exactly such gymnastics education. ‘Natural’ movement drew on everyday movement, as opposed to artificial manipulations of ballet with its five positions of the feet and formal advancement of movement out of plié (bending the knees) and developé (developing a movement out of a bent or straight position). Naturalness thus connected to such movements that were accessible to everyone, at all times. It was not the exceptional but the seemingly normal that was cultivated. Together with ‘breathing’, an existential necessity of all living creatures, walking and running became the pillars on which twentieth century gymnastics and dance rested. They represented essential movement elements that contained meter and rhythm and thus principles of organisation that were declared inherent and not externally imposed; they also guaranteed the organic formation of the body.
In the introduction to the book, Wassmannsdorf, who was Spiess's student and executor of his literary testament, explained what the master meant by ‘round dance’ and ‘round song’:
In the olden times the German rounds were circular dances of several people who sang the songs while dancing; following Spiess, though, today we understand that a round dance in gymnastics is a dance of several people that can take place with or without singing. … If an individual conveys in his dance the exhilarated mood that has driven him to dance in the first place as an expression of an immediate beneficial goal, then the round dances executed by several people with their [inherent] organisational relationships and the movements that create order not only satisfy the demand for agility of the dancers but also prove that free play animates the dancers to realise increasing communal interaction.
Spiess seemed conscious of the fact that in dance one could either emphasise technical ability or structural regularity. He likened dancing to gymnastic free-standing exercises (‘Freiübungen’). Spiess made music, sung or instrumental, the defining feature in physical education and differentiated between the education of girls and boys. But his distinctions were made not according to the physical engagement with props or devices, on apparatus or without, but rather they concerned the integration of musical accompaniment suited for girls and young boys. Spiess did not follow the pattern that Jahn had established with militant songs and poems; he turned to more open and free (less rigorously defined) Germanic forms of musical structure – the round song and dance that were being rediscovered by romantic artists. The round dance as a ‘conceptual mould’ offered the advantage that it had no concise boundary and could be defined in female as well as male terms.
Spiess's gymnastics book offers detailed explanations and descriptions of dances; it proceeds in the same way as contemporary technical dance manuals (for instance Roller's manual of 1843) – introduction, historical justification and sets of formal figures, floor patterns, movement sequences together with songs. The movement arrangements follow the musical structures of the songs; these arrangements eventually establish a standard or normative collection of movements in relation to music. A similar system was designed by Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865–1950), the Swiss inventor of Eurhythmics, a powerful and influential musical-gymnastics system of the early twentieth century. Spiess spent several years in Switzerland where Jaques-Dalcroze must have come across his writings while developing his own eurhythmics approach.
The emphasis on expressiveness as an educational potential in this manual brought it even closer to the dance practices that Roller had outlined. Spiess wrote of an excited or exhilarated mood that could be generated, of the options to be animated by movement and driven to dance, of the spiritual and formal freedom offered in this arrangement, and of the increase in communal activities achieved through aesthetic movement. Spiess saw that with the same set of exercises, he could direct pupils either to dance or to gymnastics, since both represented different aspects of a similar physical education – they were both free exercises (‘Freiübung’). Both also defined the structural and methodological relationships among those who moved. He wrote of these movements as connected to order (‘Ordnungsbeziehungen’), because they established and authorised order and were rehearsals for later social orientation.
Whereas Franz Anton Roller approached a unification of gymnastics and dance in the early decades of the nineteenth century from the experience of ballet, Adolf Spiess’ collection of ‘Reigen’ and ‘Reigenlieder’ – round dances and songs – united Turnen principles with dance forms from the gymnastics side. Like Roller, Spiess modernised and adjusted Jahn's principles to contemporary needs. Both Roller and Spiess anticipated modern gymnastics and modern dance of the twentieth century. The criticism voiced at Spiess's interpretation and renewal of Jahn's Turnen harked back to the Techow-Massmann controversy: how systematic or methodical should gymnastics be? How much discipline should they instil and how much military precision should be displayed? How much freedom of individual expression should be granted, in short: should gymnastics be technical/mechanical or spiritual/meaningful?
Modern German dance
From the 1910s onwards, modern German dance – an aesthetic invented to establish a modern movement culture and combat French and Russian (international) ballet – considered itself the driving force in the making of a new kind of community and social order. Amateur and professional dancers believed that their exercise and performance regime embodied national culture – just as their Turnen predecessors. Modern dance, once it had emerged as an independent aesthetic activity, tried to rid itself of any association with gymnastics or sport. Throughout its early – that is pre- and post-First World War – existence it sought, strenuously but in vain, to get beyond the notion of yet another empty physical exercise. Even in 2003, the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, collecting evidence on the state of modern dance in Britain, asked: ‘ARE THE BENEFITS OF DANCE AS A SPORTING ACTIVITY RECOGNISED AND BUILT UPON EFFECTIVELY?’Reference Brown16 Modern dance and gymnastics have consistently crossed paths; dancers have time and again attempted to portray their art form as a higher aesthetic achievement and so much more than simple physical skill. Gymnastic methods, for modern dancers, overemphasised mechanical technique and plain physical effort. Real meaning, according to modern dance theorists, had to be found in dance, not gymnastics. Modern dance transcended mere exercise because dance movements achieve the ‘spiritual heightening of the soul’.Reference Wigman17 Gymnastics by contrast lacked ‘soul’.
Two final examples illustrate this point. For modern dancers, gymnastics practitioners became useful collaborators in the fight against the arch-enemy ballet. At the same time, modern dance feared too close an affiliation with gymnastics. Many representatives of modern dance in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, but also in Britain, had been trained in Jaques-Dalcroze's Eurhythmics, had been part of the emergence of Rudolf Steiner's Eurythmy or were educated in one of the many gymnastics schools that had sprouted from the late nineteenth century onwards. Mary Wigman and Marie Rambert (highly influential in the making of British ballet), for instance, had been graduates of Jaques-Dalcroze's rhythmic gymnastics; Wigman then offered her services to Rudolf von Laban as an assistant, who in turn was highly affected by Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy. Modern dancers regarded gymnasts as poor relations with lesser aspirations; if those aspirations went too high, they had to be curtailed. Only modern dance could satisfy the philosophical, ideological and aesthetic needs of an independent movement culture. Gymnasts were allowed to represent the first vital stage towards a rejuvenation – the ultimate realisation, though, could only be achieved by the German modern expressive dance.
Gymnasts had ambivalent relations to modern dancers. They were a force in numbers, which modern dancers were not: by 1930 the Deutsche Gymnastik Bund (the German Gymnastics Association) counted 90,000 members (85,000 female), most of them aspiring or practising PE teachers and completely and fanatically devoted to a new educational system with gymnastic movement at its centre.Reference Wedemeyer-Kolwe18 Often gymnasts were also dancers; they had begun in gymnastics and advanced to expressionist dance, just like Mary Wigman. They taught both approaches and often seamlessly progressed from gymnastics training to dance expression. Rudolf Bode (1881–1971), a Jaques-Dalroze student and founder of a school himself, considered gymnastics the groundwork of any modern artistic expression. The dynamic encounter with dance might have placed gymnastics at the bottom, but without that foundation no further development was possible. The totality of the body as a natural and organic entity, the rhythmic basis of all living representations, the ideological connectedness of movements, the unity of psychological, physiological, anatomical and existential elements could only, concluded Bode, have been unlocked in gymnastics.Reference Bode19 Bode's theory was also one of the first to align itself with the politically most radical wing of the national-conservatives/national socialists – with Alfred Rosenberg and his Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur. Bode integrated eugenic and racial theory from the 1920s into his expressionist gymnastics (‘Ausdrucksgymnastik’). In 1925 he asserted that all rhythm was an expression of the living human organism, which was explored and experienced in the cultic community (‘Kultgemeinschaft’), and the cultic community was the fulfilment of gymnastics.Reference Bode20
In 1921, Mary Wigman, the priestess of German Dance, summarised the debate between gymnastics and modern dance in an essay that presented the first coherent definition of her new dance aesthetics: ‘absolute dance’. Gymnastics, she argued, was not yet dance; it was a preliminary stage and merely supported the higher art form. If ethical or social tendencies stood in the foreground, then a work could be considered neither art nor dance, but should be labelled gymnastics. In gymnastics, the body, although an expressive instrument as in art-dance, lacked the will to dance. It was moved, as it were, by an external political will. ‘Absolute dance’, on the other hand, relied only upon itself, it was pure cultural will, pure form. Ballet was dying, declared Wigman, it was artificial, life-denying and outdated.Reference Wigman21 The grand plan, in which gymnastics played a helpful but inferior part, aimed at annihilating ballet and replacing it with the revolutionary culture of modern dance.
Rudolf von Laban, the founder of German modern dance and its most important theorist, wrote extensively on every aspect of movement as cultural enterprise. He also examined the relationship between dance and gymnastics in his booklet Gymnastik und Tanz.Reference Laban22 The first sentence reads: ‘The foundations of all gymnastics are the free-standing exercises [‘Freiübungen’]. All other forms of gymnastics – Turnen – that employ some sort of apparatus are variations of the free exercises …’ (Ref. Reference Laban22, p. 7). Without ever mentioning Spiess's name, Laban conceded that gymnastics and modern dance were so similar that one could be mistaken for the other. Yet one profound difference separated them: dance was high art and expressed something that gymnastics could not. Gymnastics encouraged an exploration of the physical limits of the body, whereas dance as an art form went beyond such physical boundaries towards a new spirituality. For Laban, there existed links between gymnastics and dance, the most important could be found in the ‘round dance’ – the Reigen. Here, the first stage of rhythmic spatial exploration occurred that was born out of and led back to communal celebration. In Laban's understanding, dance evolved out of gymnastics and an awakening of spatial and rhythmic sensibilities. But gymnastics, Laban predicted, would never be able to leave its subordinate position; it provided a necessary reference point for the beginning of dance within the continuum of movement cultures. Gymnastics were also needed to maintain a hierarchy within which modern dance could occupy loftier heights. That Laban never acknowledged either Jahn, Roller or Spiess lay in his personality. None of his books include broad bibliographies and, if any further reading was included, then this served only to confirm his own views. Laban ruthlessly exploited his contemporaries as well as his predecessors; as the great genius inventor he needed no frame of reference.
In another volume, Der Laientanz in kultureller und pädagogischer Bedeutung of 1930, Laban took the next step: he described how to institutionalise modern dance as the movement culture that best prepared the people for a folkish rejuvenation of Germany. He aimed at initiating a mass movement culture that would reform a ‘rotten and degenerate’ society according to the rules of gymnastics and dance. The masses would dance in ‘movement choirs’ (‘Bewegungschöre’) and commune in round dances. Laban claimed:
Dance is complete culture, is sociability. … Dance is all knowledge, all seeing and all making and fills the explorer and the man of deed. But the purest representation of dance, the dance of dance and of all world events is the round dance.Reference Laban23
Like Jahn, Laban believed in action as ultimate deed and cultural expression of will – the rhythm of idea and deed constituted cultural will for Laban (Ref. Reference Laban23, p. 126). Movement choirs (like Turner groups) formed the nucleus of a new folkish community that would replace social and cultural degeneracy with meaningful values.
Laban, Wigman and the advocates of a new movement culture eventually fulfilled the historical mission, which began with Friedrich Ludwig Jahn and Turnen. As Gustav Fischer-Klamt, a Laban disciple, who also ran a gymnastics school, declared: ‘Now [in 1937] dance can implement what 125 years ago Jahn began with his idea of physical education …’Reference Fischer-Klamt24 But modernising Jahn meanwhile meant acknowledging the importance of race. Gymnastics, as Bode also stated, was a means of expressing inherited racial information.
Laban's legacy, as well as that of German gymnastics, was distributed across Europe through a vast network of dance schools and ensembles. His teachings reached the shores beyond the Atlantic and Pacific as the refugees, fleeing Nazi Germany, carried their precious cultural goods with them. But not only through the émigrés were the ideas of gymnastics and modern dance spread; Hitler's administration also embraced Laban's theories and built its entire physical education on an amalgam of modern dance and gymnastics.
Britain had received and accepted German modern dance, first, through the disciples who had studied with Rudolf von Laban in Germany in the 1920s and second, by students encountering Laban when he sought exile in Britain in 1938 (Ann Hutchinson-Guest, Warren Lamb, Jean Newlove, Geraldine Stephenson, Valerie Preston-Dunlop and many more). He became a teacher at Dartford Hall and then devised the foundation of a movement educational system for British schools from his Manchester Art of Movement Studio, which was founded in 1946 and moved to Addleston in 1953. Today, Laban's movement and educational theories in particular reside in British and American PE college departments, in dance studies and dance therapy (which relies almost exclusively on Laban's concepts of the moving body). London's important conservatory for dance and music, known as ‘Trinity-Laban’, considers itself one of the finest centres of the world, where performers, choreographers, teachers, health advocates, massage and physiotherapists, behavioural analysts, speech counsellors, etc, are introduced to the moving body. But the heritage of that body, its development out of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn's Turnen and gymnastics, its political implications have been buried and forgotten.
Marion Kant gained a PhD in musicology at the Humboldt University, Berlin, and taught courses in modernism, German culture, and dance history at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. She currently teaches at the University of Cambridge. Her main research and publications focus on the rise of Nazi ideology in the arts, problems of exile, music, dance history and aesthetics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In collaboration with musicians Marshall Taylor and Samuel Hsu, she organised and presented a series of concerts commemorating music outlawed by the Nazis (Entartete Musik). Her publications include Giselle, commissioned by the State Opera, Berlin (Inselverlag 2001) and Hitler's Dancers: German Modern Dance and the Third Reich (Berghahn 2003). She is editor of the Cambridge Companion to Ballet (Cambridge University Press 2007).
