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Article Excerpt
An item in the playbill for Herman Haller's 1928 revue Schon und Schick at the Berlin Admiralspalast promised "The Tiller Girls of 1898, portrayed by the Original Lawrence Tiller-Girls of 1928." (1) Positing misleading allusions through a careful double act, this line encapsulates a family battle and an overdetermined, generalizing public interest in precision-dancing groups that overlooked the policing of differentiation. Although the Lawrence Tiller Girls referenced in the souvenir program were advertised using the slogan "often copied, never achieved," they were themselves copies, organized by the estranged son of John Tiller, whose famous Tiller Girls were referenced in the first five words of the item. Both the word "original" and even sometimes the slogan tended to appear in advertising as well as each of the many times the troupes were listed as performing their short numbers during a single revue's evening. In Haller's playbill, the Original Lawrence Tiller-Girls implicitly laid claim to the extended legacy of John Tillers Tiller Girls, both in ubiquitous references to originality and in the 1928 routine's explicit claim to embody the other dancers, conspicuously doing so three years after John's death. But there was something about lines of young women moving in unison that dissolved into the rising German mass culture in such a way that the specific genealogies of what happened on stage seemed not to matter.
I had been researching the Tiller Girls for an embarrassingly long time before I figured out that there were actually two Tiller schools, both based in England, each of which sent out multiple troupes under variable names. Much of the material I encountered in my research on early twentieth-century German dance that claimed to discuss one was, in fact, about the other. Aided by Siegfried Kracauer's multiple essays, most notably "The Mass Ornament," which used the troupes' popular precision dancing as the basis for what has been called "a founding text of critical theory," the British Tiller Girls have become an extraordinarily potent image of Weimar visual culture, a spectacular image that has eclipsed the synchronized performances themselves. (2) As a dance scholar, I'm interested in leaning into that emblematic image to investigate what else it might contain. I begin with the myths through which the Tiller Girls were inscribed by often contradictory meanings, both in their time and in historical reflection. Taking these misnomers as themselves transacting access, I attend to the transformative activity of apprehension. Walter Benjamin's famous theorization of the aura set forward a paradigm for the reception of objects associated, as the Tiller Girls were, with technologically enhanced fabrication. At the same time, Benjamin's essay also offers a provisional means to separate the live performances of unison dancing by the Tiller Girls from the industrial metaphors into which they were inscribed. Rather than either acquiescing to the dominant image of the troupes as dispersed into an undifferentiated mass or reading against the grain to post their individuated physical productivity, I am interested in framing them as both auraless but also auratic in Benjamin's sense. Preserving the tension between these two positions can tease out a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between the Tiller Girls and their audiences.
These all-female dance troupes offered physical spectacles of prowess and precision that culminated in a set of kicks done in perfect unison and formation, facilitated by John's 1910 innovation of having the girls link arms behind their backs. Whereas the John Tiller Girls had already been performing off and on in Germany since 1895, Lawrence Tiller's group became official around 1914, eventually touring to New York, where its appearance alongside the John Tiller Girls in the Ziegfeld Follies led Haller to invite them to Berlin's Admiralspalast in August 1924 for a revenue called Noch und Noch. By October 1924, John Tiller's troupe was engaged again in Berlin, by Erik Charell at the GroBes Schauspielhaus for a revenue called An Alle ...!. Although these famous shows used only sixteen Tiller dancers each, a 1924 newspaper reported that nearly two hundred Tiller Girls were performing in Germany. (3)
When the two troupes first performed simultaneously in different revues in Berlin, one reviewer observed that, though the Lawrence Tiller-Girls were more wonderfully exact in their movements, the John Tiller Girls used richer motifs, while another claimed the John Tiller Girls were "just as precise and taut as their sisters at the Admiralspalast, who are students of Lawrence Tiller." (4) For the most part, however, the troupes were publicly known as a single and interchangeable entity--the Tiller Girls--whose numbers swelled with the various replicas they inspired, notably the American Hoffman Girls, the British Jackson Girls, and the German Hiller Girls. (5)
The most potent generalization of all rested in that final word, "girls," where it (inadvertently) elided with an already-existent set of ideas that had been used to negotiate modern ideologies of gender and mass culture since before the First World War.(6) Combined, these formed an entire "Girl-o-mania" in which the Tiller name came to stand both particularly for the two British troupes and synecdochically for the phenomenon of female revue precision dancing as a whole. (7) This phenomenon also stood, in turn, for a broader set of cultural performances of modernity intimately tied to the mechanisms of mass production and available for all women to purchase. (8) Both in their time and in more recent scholarship, the Tiller Girls and the other troupes that followed were seen to embody this monolithic image in its totality, from their status as young working women, to the images that could be purchased on the pages of fashion magazines and replicated in the form of bob haircuts, athleticism, and sleek figures, all of which updated more traditional gendered imagery to suggest a "New Woman."
Further misconceptions surrounded the Tiller Girls at the time and also persist in much current scholarship. One myth was that John Tiller was an ex--army sergeant, which explained the precision with which the girls moved in unison. More plausible and potent than the military metaphors were those of the factory, with the...
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