While racist eugenic programs are widely frowned upon today, they were largely popular throughout the United States and Germany from the 1920s until the late 1940s. The influence of this political ideology is found in the work of Ted Shawn, an American who presented a strong, white, male soloist as the eugenic ideal, and the work of Rudolf Laban, a German under the Third Reich who valued communal, nationalistic dance. However, I argue that its influence reaches even further into dance following World War II, when a group of Japanese dancers created a new movement practice, called butoh, to fight against the Westernization and eugenic rhetoric caused by the likes of Shawn and Laban. First, I will discuss the separate ideologies that Shawn and Laban’s works entertained in the time leading up to and during World War II; then I will turn to the aftermath of World War II and the reactionary nature of butoh.

 

Given the public support of eugenics in the United States of the 1910s and 1920s, it comes as no surprise that Ted Shawn was a product of his time. According to Paul Scolieri, when Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis married in 1914, 35 states had adopted eugenic marriage laws, and a reporter quipped that their marriage was an “interesting experiment in eugenics” (189). Scolieri expands upon this by explaining that Shawn and St. Denis were both artists and both remarkably beautiful: the public speculated that they would have genetically favorable children. However, St. Denis and Shawn had a strained marriage and Shawn was a homosexual. Scolieri states that in lieu of a eugenic child, Shawn and St. Denis “created eugenic dances and dancers” (189). Therefore, the next thing I will explore is what Shawn and Laban esteemed as the eugenic ideal, and how their ideals compared to one another.

 

These eugenic ideals are not well-defined—in the case of Rudolf Laban, this is because when Nazi Germany tasked him with defining German dance, he struggled. He eventually “defined ‘German’ as the opposite of ‘Alien’/‘Foreign’/‘un-German’—Jewish” (Kant 114). As Kant explains, this approach was problematic because “it was easy to […] justify whatever one wanted to be ‘German’” (114). In some ways, it is tempting to dismiss this poor definition as Laban’s lack of fervor for German nationalism and eugenics, as Laban “[rejected] the use of movement choirs as political vehicles” (Kew 83). However, as Lilian Karina states after detailing the interactions between the Hitler regime and popular dance figures such as Laban, “there can be no doubt: the great creative figures in German dance admired and accepted Hitler and his ideals” (29). In other words, Laban was likely fully aware of his culpability in furthering the Third Reich’s eugenic programs, despite openly frowning upon political dance.

 

In a similar manner to Laban, Shawn struggled with defining what constituted as American dance—or at least, in his opinion, desirable American dance. Though he eventually did decide which dances were worthy and which were not, his definitions were hazy and contradictory. For example, he stated that “Jazz is the scum of the great boiling now going on […],” the great boiling in question meaning ethnic integration (Scolieri 196). However, Shawn liked Burmese dancing for its “similarity to jazz” (Scolieri 197). He decided on a moment-by-moment basis what he did and did not value.

 

While Laban and Shawn both could have twisted their ill-defined eugenic theories to fit any dance they wanted to make, they took two different approaches to choreography. Shawn’s work, in true American individualist fashion, presented a male soloist—often himself, sometimes alone, sometimes against a group—as strong, virtuosic, and masculine: his eugenic ideal. Meanwhile, Laban favored the movement choir, which embodied unison movement that encouraged a strong sense of community and favored a groupthink over the individual—implicitly elevating the ideals touted by communist Germany. Both choreographers were greatly influenced by their separate cultures, despite holding similar political ideals.

 

Shawn highly valued the culture that he came from. When he spoke about the company he was going to create, he stated that his company would only have “‘American born and American trained dancers, dancing to music by American composers, with scenery and costumes designed by American artists, and under the direction and management of American business men of great vision’” (Scolieri 197). He then ensured that these students were trained in “dance forms of Spain, Japan, and East India”—or at least, his version of these dances (Scolieri 197). In other words, Shawn wanted dancers trained in every ethnic dance he could appropriate, yet wanted an all-American company; moreover, not only was it all-American, but it was also an all-white company.

 

Meanwhile, it makes sense that Laban’s concept of the movement choir was derived from the communist culture he lived in. As a German choreographer in the time leading up to and during the Third Reich, he was “concerned that modern society was losing the culture of community” and wanted to “bring divergent groups together in one communal, celebratory, cultural activity” (Partsch-Bergsohn 21). Laban achieved this by directing large masses of people to dance together in unison. Through these movement choirs, he expressed a desire for racial unity and an idealized pure German race. However, in an ironic twist of fate, his communist eugenic dances were not quite eugenic enough for Nazi Germany.

 

The Nazis disliked Laban because his political statements did not embody the full opinion of the Party. Kew details that in Laban’s 1936 work, Of the Spring Wind and the New Joy, he showcases German men and women overcoming the past hardships of war and building a better country. He ends the piece by visually joining the audience and the dancers with a lighting effect shaped as the German sunwheel—clearly implying the joy to be found in community amongst other ethnically-pure Germans (Kew 81). However, Kew asserts that Laban’s work “was intellectual in that it could be read in different ways and therefore could encourage independent thought which was negated by the Nazi state” (82). Due to the lack of a blatantly obvious reference celebrating the Nazi Party or Adolf Hitler, the political message of his dances did not fully appease the Nazis. They forced Laban to leave Germany in 1937.

 

While Ted Shawn was not ousted in the same manner, he eventually stopped creating dances that engaged with his eugenic ideals, sometime before or around the creation of his company of male dancers in 1933. Despite this, his dances continued to showcase traits that he considered strong eugenic qualities, such as “virility, athleticism, beauty, piousness, and industriousness” (Scolieri 204). These qualities are visible in his solo, Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen. While this solo certainly plays into the piousness that Shawn viewed as a strong quality, it also evokes a sense of African-American gospel music and dance; notably, this solo is to the piano accompaniment of a negro spiritual song by the same name.

 

From the opening moment of this solo, the African-American diaspora peeks through Shawn’s movement: he kneels on the ground, rolling sequentially through his spine—a tenet of the Africanist aesthetic. He then clasps his hands together, sweeping them back and forth before bowing his head, as if begging—perhaps for mercy. Haltingly, he forces himself to his feet, as if the weight of his sin is holding him down. When he opens his arms, showcasing his bare chest—his athleticism and beauty—his upper body is taut and arms tense, like he is fighting the very air to move. The image of a man trying to discard his chains comes to mind, evoking the history of slavery. His upper body loosens as he bends his spine from side to side, his arms curving.

 

This new, gentle quality seems to insinuate a man freed from his chains. He steps forward, lifting his gaze and opening his palms, as if asking, “Why did you allow this to happen to me?” He then makes a motion as if he were gathering something toward him before hanging his head and grasping at his wrists. He brings his clenched fists to his head, sinking to the ground as if he has discovered that his enslavement is inescapable. He then jerks upright, yanking his fists down in front of his neck, calling up the image of a noose and/or a lynching. He throws his arms open, staring up at the sky—a final cry for divine intervention—before falling in defeat.

 

The evocation of enslavement and hangings is disquieting upon the realization that Shawn was very vocal in his renouncement of African-American dance. He even goes so far as to say that it is “disgusting to see white people doing black dances” (Scolieri 197). Shawn’s blatant racism while borrowing from “ethnic” dances is only one of the many contradictions in his ideology. Though Laban remained relatively consistent within his goal of engineering German dance through communist expression, Shawn’s works appear to be an ethnic free-for-all with little regard or value placed on context. Shawn and Ruth St. Denis were also notorious for performing in blackface, as well as performing dances that they choreographed but calling them “genuine Asian works.”

 

Turning to dances created by Asian practitioners—especially those following World War II—it becomes painfully clear how they, particularly the practitioners of butoh, would feel were they to review Shawn and Laban’s works. Tatsumi Hijikata, one of the first major figures in the development of butoh, likely detested eugenic social movements: he was “motivated by anger at how bodies had been controlled historically” (Gökçe 17). Not only that, but as explored in the documentary Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis, in the time following World War II many Japanese people detested the Westernization of their country occurring under the Mutual Security Treaty between the United States and Japan.

 

Due to this dislike of Westernization, one of the main goals of creating butoh was to push back against Western beauty standards. I would like to place this in conversation with Laban and Shawn’s eugenic practices. The preferred aesthetic of the “Aryan master race” is well known today—blonde hair, blue eyes, a certain skull size—and Laban supported it, although he is often falsely painted as an unaware bystander of the Hitler regime. Meanwhile, Shawn “[shaped] the American male dancer into a near nude Greek idea of an athlete artist,” drawing upon the preferred Hellenic aesthetic as inspiration (Vertinsky 168). While Shawn was known for appropriating dances from other ethnicities, it is easy to imagine that he would find butoh distasteful due to the new definition of beauty that it created.

 

Indeed, butoh can be very jarring to the unfamiliar Western eye. In Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis, Sanai Hiruta, the principal dancer of the company Byakusha, performs a solo (1:03:57). Her face is painted white and her eyes roll back in her head. She runs her tongue along her upper lip, her eyes moving with her tongue from side-to-side, nearly going cross-eyed in the middle, with a mischievous smile as if she knows something the audience does not. She moves her hand along her face, tugging at her nose and her eyes, before hooking her fingers inside her bottom lip. She opens her mouth as if screaming, her eyes rolling back in her head, her body tense, limbs flailing. Hiruta’s odd character and painted face call up the choreography of Laban’s student Mary Wigman and her utilization of masks and clawing hands.

 

This German influence is still ironically evident in butoh, despite the practice developing to retaliate against the dances of the West and define a new, wholly Japanese dance. Moreover, Gökçe writes, “Many features of butoh dance [...] makes [sic] it visible that its land could never have been Western. Butohdancers [are like] ‘the root of a pine tree’ filled with much energy, not [like] the Western dances which are tall and straight trees going upward and upward, trying to reach Heaven” (17). However, Gökçe comments earlier in the article, “Although [butoh] is known through out [sic] Europe and America today, it is still relatively unknown in Japan and many other countries” (16). Despite its development in Japan and its rejection of Western norms, the Western audience is exactly the audience that seems to enjoy butoh the most. Perhaps this says something about the West’s love of the “exotic,” though what it says, I am not quite sure. Maybe Ted Shawn would have appropriated butoh if he had gotten to see it, after all.

 

In conclusion, while Shawn and Laban both engaged with eugenic practices in their work, they did so in different ways. Laban’s movement choirs grew from the communist emphasis of the Third Reich, while Shawn highlighted a soloist against a group, in line with the individualist culture of the United States. Though Laban tried to orchestrate within his work a perfect Aryan ideal, Shawn decided for himself which dances were American and un-American, appropriating any culture he felt like taking from. In the post-war period, butoh was created as a protest statement by Japanese dance practitioners who were tired of being Westernized. However, traces of German dance are still visible in butoh, and the audience that favors butoh the most is its Western audience—therefore, in the end, this paper highlights the complex web that is woven between cultures, dance lineages, and political ideologies. These things do not exist in a vacuum, and we cannot escape our history or the world around us—no matter how hard we try.

 

Works Cited

Blackwood, Michael, director. Butoh: Body on the Edge of Crisis. Kanopy, 2005, osu.kanopy.com/video/butoh-body-edge-crisis. Accessed 21 March 2019.

Gökçe, Nurdan Karasu. “A Unique Dance Form: Butoh.” The International Journal of the Humanities: Annual Review, vol. 5, no. 6, 2007, pp. 15–18.

Kant, Marion. “German Dance and Modernity: Don’t Mention the Nazis.” Rethinking Dance History: A Reader, by Alexandra Carter, Routledge,               2004, pp. 107–118.

Karina, Lilian. “Art and Culture under National Socialism.” Hitler’s Dancers: German Modern Dance and the Third Reich, by Lilian Karina et al.,               Berghahn, 2004, pp. 22–29.

Kew, Carole. “From Weimar Movement Choir to Nazi Community Dance: The Rise and Fall of Rudolf Laban’s Festkultur.” Dance Research, vol. 17,          no. 2, 1999, pp. 73–96.

Partsch-Bergsohn, Isa, and Harold Bergsohn. The Makers of Modern Dance in Germany: Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, Kurt Jooss. Princeton Book        Co., 2003.

Scolieri, Paul A. “‘An Interesting Experiment in Eugenics’: Ted Shawn, American Dance, and the Discourses of Sex, Race, and Ethnicity.” The                Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 185–209.

Shawn, Ted. “Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen” from Four Dances Based on American Folk Music. Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive,                         danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org/ted-shawn/nobody-knows-the-trouble-ive-seen/. Accessed 22 March 2019.

Vertinsky, Patricia. “‘This Dancing Business Is More Hazardous Than Any “He-Man” Sport’: Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers.” Sociology of Sport          Journal, vol. 35, no. 2, June 2018, pp. 168–177.