The Viennese waltz: social transformation and the shock of the new

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Viennese waltz was the first vernacular, modern dance. Modern, here, Carrie’s the meaning of modernity. Such dances have an expressive relationship with the body and this requires a specific discursive understanding of what a body is and how it can be experienced. That is, modern, vernacular dancing is a function of the modern body. The modern body evolved as part of the social transformation of society from a feudal order to one founded on capitalism and industrialisation. The modern body is understood, and experienced, as limited by the body’s physical form, distinct from its environment. The body is the site of the individual, and, at the same time, it is the expressive site of mental stimulation. Notoriously, René Descartes theorised this construction in terms of a distinction between the ‘mind’ and the ‘body’ in Meditationes de Prima Philosophia published in 1641. A problem for modern, bourgeois society then became, how to control the expressiveness of the body in dance. This problem of management pervades modernity and is central to this article. The Viennese Waltz was the first modern dance, the first manifestation of dance as individual expression and, consequently, the first time the problem of how to control expression presented itself, and what the consequences might be if the dancing body was not controlled.