ABSTRACT
Introduction Writing in the 1920s at the height of the Weimar Republic, the social critic Siegfried Kracauer saw the rise of mass industrial society replicated in the mechanistic forms of entertainment that were being offered to the public. In a society where everything appeared increasingly standardized and systematized, Kracauer saw that art and entertainment were also becoming formulaic, mechanical and predictable. The example he chose to illustrate this came not from music or film, but from popular dance, and in the form of The Tiller Girls, the most famous dancing troupe of the early twentieth century. In his 1927 essay ‘The Mass Ornament’, Kracauer polemically argued that:
These products of Amer ican distraction factories are no longer individual girls, but indissoluble girl clusters whose movements are demonstrations of mathematics [. . .]. The hands in the factory correspond to the legs of the Tiller Girls. The mass ornament is the aesthetic reflex of the rationality to which the prevailing economic system aspires.
