Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

by Anna Funder

I wind the tape back. I want to pinpoint, in all these movements, what it is that makes the dance so curious. ‘Lipsi’ is colloquial for ‘Leipzig’ but it wasn’t just the regime’s overt attempt to manufacture a trend for the masses, as if it had come from that hip city. I watch the stiff couple closely. The woman seems to be missing an incisor—an odd choice for a dance model. Then I concentrate on their movements, and I get it: in not one of this panoply of gestures do the dancers’ hips move. Their torsos remain straight—neither bending towards one another, nor swivelling from side to side. The makers of this dance had plundered every tradition they could find and painstakingly extracted only the sexless moves. Just as ‘The Black Channel’ was the antidote for western television, the Lipsi step was the East’s answer to Elvis and decadent foreign rock’n’roll. And here it was: a dance invented by a committee, a bizarre hipless camel of a thing.