"Hallo Freunde, wollt ihr tanzen?"
"Jaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!"
What a great concept this "dance alarm clock" is! Each week a dozen kids in orange T-shirts, accompanied by some adults with dubious hairstyles and a big garlic frogodile, bully the employees of some German concern into dancing with them. This week it's a major German railway station. Employees dance with the frog-crocodile and sing about their duties as they punch tickets and wave the train out of the station.
The message is an oddly contradictory one. Tanzalarm strips the uniformed officials of their Reichian "character armour" (not to mention their dignity) only to impose even stricter standards on them: not only must these real ticket inspectors, sales staff and platform managers go about their usual duties (selling tickets, punching them, waving trains on their way), they must also dance in tightly-choreographed sleazepop routines while they do them.
Another example of Dionysus usurping the throne of Apollo? Or a kind of musical chairs in which Apollo surreptitiously re-asserts his austere rational authority by donning Bacchic garb and grabbing a lyre (is that you in the green suit, Apollo)?
Anyway, Tanzalarm is a lot of fun, and very German. Although I could imagine something similar in Japan, where pop-culture schoolkids and superlegitimate train-drivers might very well meet up in some wholesome TV sexypop dancefest emphasizing collective values. I could imagine similar displays on North Korean morning TV shows, or propaganda films made shortly after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Even Brecht's summer camp film Kuhle Wampe has something of this sense of joyous collectivity about it: the ant scouts scuttle happily by the lakeside (a lake close to Schloss Lanke, the tumbledown house I mentioned the other day, and where it now looks likely I'll be playing a concert myself on September 11th) while Eisler's "Solidarity Song" plays.
What's striking here is the way dance is stripped of any marginal, oppositional status and becomes an expression of social legitimacy. Gone is the conflict between instinct and society (that eternal, insoluble conflict late Freud spoke so much about); here to have your ticket inspected is a joyous submission to collective energy. Rational instinct! The instinct of systems! Instinktprozess!
There's nothing humiliating about Tanzalarm's Instinktprozess, though: the inspector himself is also submitting to the choreography, which is nothing less than a metaphor for the harmoniously-performed social contract.
