5 - Free Dance in Interwar Vienna

Summary

AS AN ARTISTIC HOTHOUSE of the fin de siècle, Vienna attracted artists, choreographers, and dancers of all persuasions not only from the lands of its own monarchy but also from overseas. Despite the loss of the monarchy, however, Vienna became even more of a crossroads uniting East and West following the First World War. The substantial transfer of knowledge and the development of a variety of cultural links between Moscow, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, and Vienna during this period should not be underestimated and still await adequate research. “Ausdruckstanz” or rather, free dance, reached its peak in Vienna in the 1920s and began to wane for both political and artistic reasons around the early 1930s. The vital impulses for this pioneering development during the interwar years can be summed up in two words: interdisciplinarity and internationalism.

Free dance in interwar Vienna refers primarily to dance forms whose creators wished, first and foremost, to distance themselves from the traditional content and aesthetics of classical ballet. However, free dance should not be considered a uniform or single phenomenon since it comprises many divergent influences that first came together at the end of the nineteenth century to create an extremely varied Viennese dance scene. This variety was symptomatic of free dance's aim of enabling new subject matter and personal forms of expression in dance. It emerged in the wake of similar trends in the various arts and in cooperation with writers, composers, costume designers, photographers, and artists, who supported dancers and worked with them in a variety of capacities.