Tanzquartier Wien

Miriam Althammer
Movements of labour: On the interweaving of dance practices and work environments in modernity  

Using the example of the Loheland women’s settlement, my contribution deals with the construction of new physicality in the interweaving of gymnastics and agricultural-craft practices in German modernity. This dance-educational approach pursued a decidedly sociopolitical aim of shaping the bodies of women – mostly from bourgeois backgrounds – through labour: Dance education did not only take place in the gymnastics hall but was also situated in everyday work activities in the countryside, such as field work, basket weaving and furniture making. This gave rise to a new androgynous, muscular type of woman, which was sometimes heavily criticised as ‘Amazonian’.  In this context, modern settlement projects such as Loheland served as an escape from the big city characterised by industrialisation and urbanisation and at the same time, they brought bourgeois bodies closer to a rural body perceived as natural and primal – and thus closer to a type of working body differentiating itself from working-class bodies in factories. Following this interweaving of dance practices with work environments, the following questions arise: How did agricultural and craft activities, with their focus on physical challenge and exertion, inform women’s perceptions of their bodies and their artistic practice? To what extent did this change not only their physicality but also their attitude as women and citizens of the Weimar Republic? And can these forms of labour be understood as subversive body-based practices in the sense of shifting and questioning the social realities of the time? 

Anna Chwialkowska
Returning to words: Classist exclusions in dance practice through language 

By the age of 33, I decided to overcome my existential anxieties, leave my full-time job, and enrol in an intensive contemporary dance program that took ten months and 3.400 Euros. I now understand that the reason I hadn’t been able to take this step earlier wasn’t solely due to financial reasons. For a person with a working-class migrant background in Germany, in order to dance, the barriers seem higher than those one encounters if aspiring for an academic career. Not only does it require a distinct cultural capital (for example, the way arts are valued in one’s family), but also a different understanding of the body (beyond solely functional), as well as a specific verbal vocabulary. All of these are dispositions that people with working-class backgrounds, haunted by imposter syndrome, have to acquire laboriously. In this talk, I will focus on the subjectivation of individuals in the dance environment, which I will analyse through the lens of my own becoming in the Berlin dance scene, at the intersection of a specific concept of the body and verbal language. I will argue that these are essential to contemporary dance knowledge production. Where does specific verbal knowledge demarcate class distinctions and exclusions in dance? And how do these interfere with embodied practices? Through autoethnographic field research in workshops, dance classes as well as intensive programmes in German-speaking countries, I will highlight cases that depict class struggles appearing in situations such as workshop descriptions, instructions and conversations in the studio, and ultimately in application writing processes.

Ellen Jeffrey
The After-Hours: labour and repetition in (un)conscious bodies

A dancing body holds within itself numerous patternings of movement; sequences of motion that are choreographed, performed, improvised; sequences of motion that are also gestures of labour – serving coffee, making beds, inputting data; sequences of motion that are described as ‘stimming’ – a neurodiverse habit of tapping, rubbing, shaking. And when this body sleeps, the hours of its doing overspill into the hours of its rest, generating a night-time choreography of the body unconscious. Here, a dancing body re-encounters the repetitions of its day. Here, the movement sequences that a dancing body holds begin to seep and merge into one another, generating a blurred rhetoric of concealed mobilities and stilted gestures. There is a hierarchy to the patternings of movement that a dancing body holds: those that are shared (with a public), those that serve (a public), and those that are repressed (in/by a public). What happens when such hierarchies begin to be dismantled – how might this alter ideas of validity placed upon movement and ideas of validity placed upon a dancing body? What parallels might exist between movement performed unseen (after the hours of performance or labour) and movement performed in dream? This short performative lecture will seek to explore the entanglement of such movement patterns and the seeping that exists between them. It will investigate the ways of moving – and the ways of perceiving moving – that are made possible by drawing parallels between the movement that exists in doing and the dancing that exist in dreaming.