During the left-wing dance realism of the 1930s a number of dance groups - especially in New York, but also in Europe - assembled under the umbrella artist organization Workers Dance League articulating their demands on (work place) equality and social justice through dance scores. Dance was conceived of a mechanism to form a political subject on the basis of suffering and pain, and choreography became a language to organize and affirm a collective subject based on shared aesthetic experience.
In "Rebel Bodies - The Edna Poe Club" the artist Johanna Bruckner continues her long term research on the organization of a collective body. Episode One of her ongoing video installation is the result of a pedagogy of dismissal, in which a few performers from a school of contemporary dance in Hamburg investigate the historical legacies of the Workers Dance League that is being re-articulated in a collectively written script of scores. Staged at the Hafencity in Hamburg in 2015, an emerging centre of capital in the city, Bruckner examines the organization of a social body in the age of (and in reference to) post-financial crisis.
See also Rebel Bodies, video
Rebel Bodies, installation, video
Images from the archive material of the Revolutionary Dance Movement and the Left-wing workers' dance collectives of the American 30s that assembled under Workers Dance League. These documents that I brought from the Library of Congress in Washington DC were actualised and updated with performers in temporary social settings on questions of actual performance - and dissolved labour. The video Rebel Bodies shows the performance and its process of communal knowledge production. A small selection of images from the archive. A few documents were also shown as posters in my exhibition REBEL BODIES, Kunstraum Zürich, station 21. The publication will be out soon.
