Stasiland_ Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Funder [57]
‘Record sellers have been getting strange requests from customers lately,’ she says, ‘for “Lipsi” music. I have a question: just what is “Lipsi”? Brockhaus [the music encyclopaedist] would say, “I have no idea and if it isn’t in any of my twenty volumes, it doesn’t exist.” But the record seller would tell you, “Lipsi—that’s all my customers are asking for! It’s an epidemic!” A young couple might say, “Lipsi—it’s the simplest thing. The dance itself is in 6/4 time and you just take her in your left arm like this”’—she extends her arm—‘well…it’s easy, look.’ She pretends to get stuck for words, and then finds her slogan:
If you really want to know, simply dance away,
All the young people dance the Lipsi today!
I’m curious and stop packing. The screen shows a couple in a dance hall: he clean-cut in a suit, and she in a dress and stilettos. And, together, they do the strangest dance that I have ever seen.
At first the man and the woman face the same way like Greek dancers, he behind her, her hand in his. They move from side to side with one another, then raise their forearms and bend apart, alarmingly, like teapots. The camera cuts to their feet, which, without warning, break into the complex footsies of an Irish jig. Then the pair turn to one another in a waltz grip before separating again and giving a little jump in the air. This is followed by a Russian-type movement with hands on hips. All the while they smile huge fixed smiles as if they needn’t give a single thought to what their feet are doing. Then they start with the Greek teapot manoeuvre again. Over the top a Doris Day voice sings to a bossa nova beat:
Today, all young people dance
The Lipsi step, only in lipsistep,
Today, all young people like to learn
The Lipsistep: it is modern!
Rhumba, boogie and Cha cha cha
These dances are all passé
Now out of nowhere and overnight
This new beat is here to stay!
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.
I throw my things together and hightail it out of the room down the corridor. The fluorescent is still on, but there’s no light coming from the counter. I’m halfway there when I remember I’ve left the video in the machine. I run back to the room and pull it out so I can return it to Frau Anderson, if she’s still here. If anyone’s still here. Running down the corridor for the second time, I wonder if I need to know a code to get out.
My watch says 4.27 and the Cardigans are gone. I stand in front of the counter, my bag in one hand, the tape in the other. To each side of me the corridor stretches to infinity, its doors all shut. I turn and face the exit, and see, to the left of it, an old keypad security system. How many attempts at getting the combination before I’m trapped? Or an alarm goes off? I don’t want a scene. But I don’t want to spend the night here either.
I need to find a phone. As I turn back, I hear a sound.