3000 Years of Slappin' Leather

Line Dance as a Lineage of Agricultural Work

When I was a kid, my mom would squish me into a hand-embroidered dirndl, the traditional dress of the German-speaking Alps, every autumn in order to attend Oktoberfest events that she and my aunt organized in our small Connecticut town. They grew up in the Alps and were enthusiastic about creating community gatherings that shared rituals from that mountain heritage. We would pile into the station wagon and saunter up to the community hall built of dark wood and brick, looming and ominous. I always dreaded these occasions, likely because of the constricting dirndl, but would tolerate the bacchanalian scenes of suspendered men wielding grandiose beer steins and concave paper plates of sausages just for the folk dance performances at the end of the night, entrancing in their rhythms borne from wood, skin and leather.

The traditional Schuhplattler from South-Tirol.com

The schuhplattler, a folk dance originating in what is now Bavaria and Tirol, where my mom is from, dates back to 3000 BC by some accounts. Like many traditional dances, it is said to mimic the courtship rituals of regional animals, in this case the grouse. It was supposedly intended to woo village women via a fantastical display of rhythm, melody and costume, and it eventually evolved into its current form, a dance performed by women in vibrant dirndls and men in lederhosen (leather shorts), calves adorned with intricate lace socks. Dancers ferociously but elegantly use the raw sounds of skin on leather and leather on wood to create movements that mimic patterns from the natural world and that communicate how and where we fit into that world. This dance is a living story we tell ourselves about life on earth at a particular place and time.

Mostly performed now for tourists in crowded beer halls in Germany, the schuhplattler has for several centuries acted as both an anchor to and a record of everyday culture. Its endless variations demonstrate and interpret the skills and professions that were crucial for survival in each microregion of the Alps during the pre-industrial era. The holzhacker variation flaunts the work of foresters as dancers employ axes to chop wood from giant logs on the beat of the uptempo polka-style music. The mühlradl’s participants dress in kitchen aprons and chef hats, exhibiting the work of the miller, while other variations feature cow bells, scythes and rusting farm equipment to illustrate the daily work of the farmer. As a shepherd in the canyons of southern California, I see my daily work-related motions reflected in these dances, in the flourishes and shifting of weight, and in this ancient connection to life on the land.

Dancing at a transhumance (almabtrieb) festival I attended in Bad Ischl, Austria in Fall 2019

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Like folk dances across many cultures, the schuhplattler is traditionally staged around ceremonial agricultural milestones, arising like stalks of golden rye around harvest festivals, dance steps conveying a resonance with the seasons and with a timescale that bows to the creatures in our midst. Through these community celebrations, we create rhythms of movement that reflect a rhythm of the seasons and a connection to time outside of the arbitrary capitalist clock. Agricultural rituals have always been fruitful in the opportunities they offer us around congregation and community, around a collective celebration of the end of work, of a harvest reaped, of grazing completed. Folk dance traditions thus simultaneously signify an honoring of the end of work and of the work itself; a rejoicing in the coming of winter rest after seasons of toil - both a remembering and a will to forget.

Folk dance is about people and their lives. It’s about the mundane, the quotidian, about how we weave our daily work into our daily life. Folk dance is a movement record, a collective memory of passed down gestures that signal how our ancestors moved and which movements mattered enough to be recorded in choreography. We write into dance the chopping of wood, the brushing and scuffing of wood chips off our leather pants and shoes, the bending at the hip and the swaying of arms to cut grass - a miming of the actions central to agricultural jobs, work with land, animals and food. Folk dance folds the mundane into movement as much as it folds movement into the mundane, transmuting daily gesture into an expression of aesthetic beauty and novel delight. 

Though I was enchanted by these folk dances as a kid, I never learned them, opting instead to incorporate the steps of line dance into my adulthood movement practice, waist compressed by men’s Wrangler jeans instead of by a floral dirndl bodice. Contemporary global line dance culture is similar in its action as both an antidote to and a reflection of the mundane we experience under capitalism. Derived from an amalgamation of thousands of years of different cultures' movement rituals, line dance, like any folk dance, beautifully captures mundane movement while also offering a rupture in the monotony of daily work - an escape.

Line dance is a community activity that brings people together to perform specific choreography in unison, offering jubilation after a grueling work week. It has typically been associated with country music and culture, but more recently has shifted to focus more on pop and hip hop music, perhaps engaging a wider audience of practitioners in the process. It is commonly understood as a form of social dance, of utilitarian “low art,” as opposed to more exclusive and elite dances like ballet or ballroom, which accentuate graceful, sinuous and lengthening bodies. Line dance posture instead can be a hunched swagger that encapsulates the challenges of life on the land and centuries of hands and feet deep in soil. 

photo from The Daily Echo

Line dance, like folk dance, is the people's dance. Folk comes from the Old English folc, or common people. A dance of and for the common people, it’s about access and comradery, about coming together to move in unison as we let out a collective sigh. Why does it feel so good to be aligned, to be in alignment with others, to experience the same expression of emotion together on the dance floor? Perhaps because this is lineage, a direct line to a past ancestry that revolved around moving in alignment, in choreography, for the sake of celebration, connection and ritual. It is the gesture that leaps across generations, landing inexplicably in our boots, mooring us and guiding us across the dance floor centuries later. It’s the gesture that sculpts our muscles, that beckons us to remember how we once lived. I remember feeling immediately at home in my body the first time I line danced, surrendering to the gesticulations that felt so familiar to me on a cellular level, as if I knew those steps already not only because of my work as a shepherd but also because of my lineage of life intertwined with land-based work. 

The last time I witnessed German folk dance in person was in 2016 on a trip to my mom’s sheep-studded hometown in the Alps. She was visiting me while I attended grad school in London for gender studies, a career that I fully planned to pursue then (but quickly abandoned in order to herd sheep across sweltering California canyon terrain - clearly the wiser choice). As I watched brawny men chop wood, ring bells and perform their choreographed patterns of steps, I had no idea that several years later, instead of spending my nights tapping away at my computer, scribbling theories about gender, I would be on the dance floor, slappin’ leather of my own, and that I would also come to work in agriculture, performing the same steps that inspired the dances that so mesmerized me as a kid. I also didn’t realize then that witnessing the tangible dance histories of my ancestors is an immense privilege to which many cultures whose lifeways have been destroyed and erased by colonialism do not have access. I no longer take for granted this access to intact ancestral traditions that haven’t been altered by colonial violence and/or by a drive to assimilate. 

photo by Liam Pickhardt

I’ve been working as a shepherd in southern California for two years, and while my coworkers and I herd hundreds of sheep and goats across the canyons and rolling hills just north of Los Angeles for fire mitigation, I think about our collective motions, wavelike and undulating. We practice the principles of low-stress livestock handling, which requires communicating with the herd via highly specific body language and body positioning. If the goal is to herd animals forward, we dance behind them in a zigzag of wizard steps or we walk directly down their sideline in the opposite direction of traffic in a series of lock steps. We waver with rocking chairs, always aware of the shoulder point on an animal’s body that will tip their instinctual movement either forward or back. We are ever aware of their language, their corporeal cues, their signals and movements as they move across the landscape. We work together and we dance together, performing the same steps and movements to complete the work of caring for sheep. We hitch legs over corral railings, we scuff dung from the bottoms of our boots, we slap leather releasing plumes of brittle, earthen dust into the parched air. We shuffle together in a choreographed dance to encourage ovine stragglers to keep up with the herd.

As a line dancer, I cannot help but conceptualize the patchwork of steps I take each day as being part of a larger pattern of ancestral movement celebrating the mundane, the rhythms of the seasons, the rhythms of life. Line dance is the expressive embodiment of centuries of living on and with the land, and the steps I take across rolling hills in my work as a shepherd are a physical monument to this lineage. Dance is a portal to the past and to the future - it’s a living, moving story that roots us in place, and as I’ve become less connected to German folk dance over the years, line dance has become my schuhplattler, my method of staying engaged in the traditions that came long before me while I step always forward into a future founded in a weekly ritual of collective joy.

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Come slap leather with me and some fellow shepherds every Tuesday (except the 2nd Tuesday of the month) at Topa Topa Brewing Co, 104 E. Thompson Ave, Ventura, 6:30-9. I teach beginner and improver line dance lessons at 7 & 8.