You have full access to this open access article. The tour of the Indian Ballet Menaka through hundreds of German cities between and left a large footprint in the form of theatre reviews. This article focuses on the role of these performances in actualizing a specific knowledge about India that was, firstly, based on the assumption of the consanguinity of Indo-German peoples and, secondly, on a vision of history as a realization of the utopian ideal of cultural regeneration through art.
Between and mid, the choreographer and dancer Leila Roy Sokhey β , also known as Madame Menaka, led her dance troupe, consisting of three female and two male dancers, accompanied by a musical ensemble, through a large-scale European tour with approximately to performances Joshi : They danced and played almost every evening on different stages in urban centres and in provincial towns, in theatres and cinemas, festival halls, and sanatoria.
The press response was enthusiastic. Most theatre critics were delighted and cheered the unique, colourful, and sensual programme of previously unknown music and graceful dances. There were also other reasons for the enthusiasm of the spectators. She danced a distant period of strong ethnic character from a land that received its oldest and richest cultural impregnations through the Aryan bloodstream W. Again and again, journalists referred to the Aryan race of the Indians or their allegedly Indo-Germanic origins.
Firstly, this article examines how the press echo related to the cultural-political discourses of the time and how it presupposed a knowledge of India that both philological and non-academic publications in Germany had already created much earlier. The sources presented here are part of the Menaka Archive, an artistic collection project by Markus Schlaffke Schlaffke They come from a homogeneous corpus of theatre reviews published between and around texts, mostly consisting of a two-column text of about words in the elaborate language of the culturally informed, full of references to contemporary cultural debates.
All articles refer to the same programme performed with only minor variations in each theatre. All the more surprising is the variety of impressions that the critics recorded. Only a limited number of texts mention an authorβpossibly guest contributors. An initial investigation revealed that these individuals were often representatives of the local middle class, that is, directors of music schools, musicologists, and editors-in-chief of various feuilletons.
