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“In aller Freiheit” is an informative study by Franz Anton Cramer that traces reflections on dance in France between 1930 and 1950. In studies of the sources, commentaries, notes and previously unpublished lectures, he shows the conflict between “artistic breadth and conceptual narrowness“ that influenced the discourse on dance at that time and which continues to do so today. He maintains a clear focus on the historical and social dimensions to carefully reveal the special quality of the French debate as an appeal for the multiplicity and liberty of dance.

What is dance about? Why are certain patterns of movement accepted as dance, while others are not? These questions have occupied dance specialist and publicist Franz Anton Cramer for many years in two ways. Firstly, he is an outspoken and intrepid contender of artistic freedom in a heated debate on what dance should, must and can do and secondly, he is a researcher into the essence of dance. In his book “In aller Freiheit. Tanzkultur in Frankreich zwischen 1930 und 1950”, he addresses both the question of the essence of dance and the debate on it. In historical texts published in France between 1930 and 1950 on the subject of the body, movement and dance, Cramer examines attempts to conceive dance conceptually while at the same time allowing it to keep its artistic freedom.

Research and questions

In five sections, Cramer presents examples of individual documents in order to outline the thinking of the period, with loose interconnections between the individual subject areas. Their only constant is a line of text printed in red: e-mails exchanged with dramatist Peter Stamer on (not) knowing and knowledge. This personal voice, which functions less as a thread running through the work than as a line of thought, influences the appendix to the book. Knowledge, writes Cramer to his friend in 2006, is always subjective and is also created, defined and manipulated as such.

It is in this sense that he allows his readers to take part in his exploration of the paradoxical relationship between structural multiplicity and unifying concept formation. And he does so in a quite specific way. Cramer not only presents academically processed source analysis, but also reveals his own search movements in the way in which he compiles and structures a wide variety of text types. The reader can follow how the researcher dissects, carefully reveals and on occasion doubts. That makes the book an extremely stimulating read, in keeping with the performativity of knowledge and movement it discusses. The reader willingly accepts that it is sometimes difficult to find one’s way around the text.

Nature versus culture

Cramer introduces the first section, entitled Bücher (books) by quoting the classicist Louis Séchan, who hoped to use dance to “lead unhinged humanity back to the realm of harmony”. Séchan attempted to define dance as something elemental and natural. This clearly illustrates how the various views on stagecraft in contemporary discourse emerged. While Séchan, like Marcel Stanislas Ducout and other theorists presented by Cramer, celebrate Isadora Duncan’s dance as individual human renunciation, they are opposed by Serge Lifar’s technically cultivated school with its polemic writings in favour of classical ballet.

Beyond the aesthetic and sometimes ideological argument, Cramer shows how dance as an artistic practice always also reflects a specific human and intellectual attitude and thus always stands in the context of its time. The writings discussed derive from anthropology and ethnology, which research dance as a physically-based cultural practice, and from art scholarship and philosophy. Regardless of whether these treatises engage in archaeological historicism, formulate sociological, ethnological or media-theoretical circumscriptions or whether they attempt to trace dance ontologically, they are all led by a desire for canonisation.

Multiplicity and freedom

It is specific to that turbulent time in France before, during and after the war that the effort to do justice to the multiplicity of dance and its performative nature became apparent. Cramer clearly presents this humanistic and libertarian spirit in the last section of his work entitled Begriffe der Freiheit (concepts of freedom) in which he reflects on methodological approaches and concepts of knowledge, referring to texts by Gaston Bachelard and the Encyclopédie Française. Finally, he takes the discussion full circle, linking it with the current debate. “Perhaps,” suggests Cramer, “all concepts of freedom in dance made time and again by a society are always also concepts of the freedom a society is willing to give itself.”