Tiller Girls
The Tiller Girls were one of the most successful dance groups at the beginning of the 20th century . There were two competing groups of these girls: the John Tiller Girls and the Lawrence Tiller Girls . Both were from Great Britain . Both struggled to establish themselves in Europe and initially presented their dance formations in the USA , from where they returned to Europe much more successfully.
Siegfried Kracauer described them as "the products of the American distraction factories [and] no longer individual girls, but indissoluble girl complexes whose movements are mathematical demonstrations".
Revue theater in the Weimar Republic
The performance highlight of the revue theater in the Weimar Republic was the economically prosperous period from 1924 to 1928. It is the time between inflation and the global economic crisis. The revue was an expression of the times, it shaped the idea of a modern lifestyle of certain middle-class classes. Topics such as consumption and the economy, exchange of goods and internationalized trade shaped the themes of the revues.
At times over three hundred performers worked in the revue theaters, 85 percent of them female. The revues presented the female body in all its facets. They were a sequence of constantly changing attractions, surprises and innovations. In connection with magnificent costumes, the actresses' bodies became exhibits. This connection between body and material was characteristic of the revues. The body itself acquired its own aura of the precious and unapproachable through the connection with expensive goods and materials - a stage vision.
The Revue and the Tiller Girls
In the twenties there was a change in physical culture. For Siegfried Kracauer it started with the Tiller Girls. The Tiller Girls were not recognizable as individual women, as their names were not in the program and each one of them was interchangeable. Because the girls were only part of the whole. The costumes and the uniform dance movements underlined the representation of an automaton-like, faceless crowd. According to Kracauer, the girls had no erotic charisma, but only represented the place of eroticism . The reification of the body de-sexualized them, since they had become the ornaments of the revues. The girls in the revue theaters had lost their erotic aura through their nudity or light clothing and their bodies became an object-like mass. The revue dance became the show's capital thanks to the erotic meaning of half-naked bodies and bared legs. The synchronized leg movements of the girls were comparable to the production processes in a factory, thanks to assembly line work.
The people had to adapt their rhythm to that of the machines, due to the Americanization of production and thus also of assembly line work. This dynamization required a dynamization of perceptions, especially that of vision. The Tiller Girls expressed this in their rehearsed dances.
Furthermore, the perfectly functioning bodies moved in unison by the Tiller Girls stood in contrast to the people who were wounded and mutilated by the First World War . The women's bodies should represent the future-oriented side of the machines, upgrade them and separate them from the experiences of the war.
The precise and synchronous movements of the girls were a fitting expression and implementation of current time characteristics. The movements embody a form of dance and movement in which the new pace of life, the economic increase in production and the rationalization of labor in large factories through assembly line work could be interpreted as an aesthetic-artistic image.
The precise movements of the Tiller Girls can not only be interpreted as images of machines, but at the same time also as embodiment of the light and playfulness of existence, as a sign of the dynamism of life and as an entertaining, eventful way of life. The embodiment of the American way of life consisted primarily in a positive attitude towards life, in the awareness of the possibility of a happy and carefree future. In the Weimar Republic, the Tiller Girls were understood as the expression and embodiment of a modern approach to life and their dance was seen as the expression of this new and easy philosophy of life. They embodied a positive attitude towards life.
The girl's body
In the 1920s a new understanding of femininity emerged. The dance girls served as role models for other young women. A special attitude to the body was the focus and highlighted a new form of femininity.
The popular femininity design of the girl, the girlish type of woman, was characterized by youthfulness and sportiness as well as by the obligatory bob haircut . The Tiller Girls embodied this type of woman. If they wanted to adopt a professional attitude, they had to develop an awareness of marketing their own body. Because this enabled professional success, financial independence and an independent life. However, this required appropriate physical training. The Tiller Girls looked more boyish, had less pronounced curves, long legs and narrow hips. For the viewer of the revues, the girl embodied a modern lifestyle. Precise body control was seen as an ability corresponding to the time to face current, aggravated social situations and to cope with them successfully. The dynamic body, which corresponded to the requirements of the time, had a standard figure from which the bodies of the Tiller Girls were not allowed to deviate. Certain dimensions were set so that the bodies could be reproduced on a large scale. The phenotypical appearance of the girl could be understood as a mass phenomenon. Both age limits and social differences blurred. These could hardly be identified in pictures, for example. Due to their appearance, the women appeared on the one hand very modern in their demeanor and their new ideas of femininity, on the other hand they appeared very adapted and conforming.
There was a process of visual change in women. The Tiller Girls are the trigger for this change. The appearance of the girl became the norm that hardly any woman could escape. It was very difficult to recognize emancipatory contents of the external appearance. People are mass members or fractions of a figure; there was no room for individuality.
Individual evidence
literature
- Anne Fleig: dance machines. Girls in the revue theater of the Weimar Republic. In: Sabine Meine, Katharina Hottmann (Ed.): Dolls, whores, robots. Body of modernity in music between 1900 and 1930. Edition Argus, Schliengen 2005, pp. 102–117, ISBN 3-931264-26-2 .
- Gesa Kessemeier: Sporty, businesslike, masculine. The image of the “new woman” in the twenties; for the construction of gender-specific body images in the fashion of 1920 to 1929. Ebersbach, Dortmund 2000, ISBN 3-934703-04-6 (also dissertation, University of Münster 2000).
- Siegfried Kracauer : The ornament of the mass. Essays Suhrkamp, Frankfurt / M. 1977, ISBN 3-518-36871-0 .
- Jost Lehne: mass-produced bodies. Aspects of the representation of the body in the furnishing reviews of the twenties. In: Michael Cowan, Kai Marcel Sicks (Eds.) Bodily Modernism. Bodies in Art and Mass Media 1918 to 1933. transcript, Bielefeld 2005, ISBN 3-89942-288-0 .