Retro comedy “Dessau Dancers”: Breakdance in the GDR – tagesspiegel

11:18 clock Martin Schwickert

Only the beat music of the sixties then the punk scene of the eighties and now: breakdance. “Dessau Dancers” looks at a quirky detail of the GDR culture – and how the subculture times mixed up again by the Stasi.

“It was just a normal Tuesday,” says the young East Germans Frank (Gordon Chamberlain), “and there was no indication that Thomas Gottschalk would change my life.” But in “Well, something like that!”, which is to be watched on the TV in Dessau in 1985, only slightly fuzzy, “Mr. occurs Robot “on – and the shaft that goes through the body of Breakdancers, for Frank and his friends is a spark. As yet to penetrate the hip-hop film “Beat Street” by the Iron Curtain in the cinemas of the Republic, who is also in the socialist part of Germany, the birth of a new youth culture.

“Dessau Dancers” looks Jan Martin Scharf back to this unusual detail of the GDR culture.

Frank and his friend Alex (Oliver Konietzny) they are just like their US models on the road. It does not take long until the men in gray the Stasi to march with their telephoto lenses. The party leadership has always had a close eye on youth subcultures, whether the young people on the beat music in the sixties, the punk scene in the eighties or the first breakdancer.

So, when they compete in dance battles against each other, regularly shaken up by the German police. But the culture squad try not only with the whip, but also with carrot. You get the breakdancers from the street to the gym, let by the experienced Olympic coach Hartmann (Rainer Bock) train, equip the troops with an artist B category ID card and sell the whole thing as “acrobatic show dance.”

Between Mutiny and party discipline

“Dessau Dancers” works as a classical dance film with historical time bonus. In the narrow rules of the socialist system can the conflict between liberation and collection, which is inherent in any youth subculture that represent particular plasticity. Against a backdrop ostalgischen Studio issuing the insignia of the GDR everyday strikingly, the struggle between adolescent rebellion and party discipline plays carefully buffered onto Comedy terrain. All this is quite nice to look at – mainly because of the dance scenes, even though the courage to shrill DDR Musical missing. Strange contradiction: Is it possible to celebrate the rebellion against social conventions, when the conventions of standardized TV formats delivering to himself helpless? Remains of the brave retro comedy above all, a somewhat bad.

Cinemax, Colosseum