The video is part of the larger body of work titled
Time Dead Time Alive. My Great Aunt Elfriede Mahler was taught by a dancer and
choreographer named Edith Segal that created a dance company in the 1930s called
the red dancers. It was the first communist dance company in America and had
the goal of creating a new form of dance that could speak to the oppression of
the working class by being presented in factories and encouraging people to
join in the performance. Aesthetically it followed the Marxist conception of
art as literal reality combining this with modernist ideas, which demanded the
viewer’s participation in the creation of meaning.
Through this company a choreography was created called Van
der Lubbes head which took up the topic of fascism in Europe presenting the
beheading of Van der Lubbe after he was blamed for the reichstag fire which
later was used to eliminate the communist party and for the Nazis to gain full
power over the state. This choreography was set to a poem written by Alfred
Hayes and was praised for transcending the typical agitprop that had
characterized the red dancers and creating a truly unique and new form of
artistic expression in political dance. This choreography also became important
as a model for the work of Elfriede Mahler when she left the USA and founded a
dance company in Guantanamo. This video work traces this choreography through
an exploration of where it is housed in the New York Public Library.
The New Dance Group performs
the collective choreography Van der Lubbe’s Head, 1934. Muriel Manings
and William Korff Collection, Music
Division, Library of Congress (021.00.00). Alfredo Valente,
photographer.
Members of the New Dance
Group in Improvisation, 1932. New Dance Group Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress
(017.00.00)
