Schuhplattler

Schuhplattler

Schuhplattler group in Munich
Genre	Social dance, folk dance
Time signature	3 4
Origin	Bavaria and Tyrol

The Schuhplattler is a traditional style of folk dance popular in the Alpine regions of Bavaria and Tyrol (southern Germany, Austria and the German speaking regions of northern Italy). In this dance, the performers stomp, clap and strike the soles of their shoes (Schuhe), thighs and knees with their hands held flat (platt). There are more than 150 basic Schuhplattlers, as well as marches and acrobatic feats that are often interspersed with the basic dance in performance. They may be seen today in Europe and in German immigrant communities around the world. While the Schuhplattler is still largely performed by adults, it has become increasingly popular with youngsters, who love its colorful costumes and its bouncing, leaping, kicking and choreographed horseplay.

The Schuhplattler is thought to date from Neolithic times, about 3000 BC, but it is first of record in 1030 AD, when a monk in the Tegernsee Abbey of Bavaria described a village dance containing leaps and hand gestures. Over the centuries, the form gradually evolved as farmers, hunters, and woodsmen practiced it in the isolated towns and villages of the Bavarian and Tyrolean Alps. Sometimes it was performed as a partner dance, with couples doing a Ländler and then splitting up so the girls could twirl in their colorful dirndls as the boys showed off their "platteln." At other times it was just the boys onstage, arranged in a circle, a square or a line, plattling wildly for the audience. These two approaches are sometimes distinguished as the Schuhplattlertanz and Schuhplattler proper, but it is the "boys' dance" that is at the core of both forms and is most often described.

The immediate precursors of today's Schuhplatter were the 18th century Minuet, Quadrille and Française, but unlike these courtly and highly stylized dances, the early plattlers of the common folk were free of rules. The young men improvised their leaps, stomps, and acrobatic figures "as it struck their fancy." Acrobatics were an important part of the dance at least by the 1820s, when boys began balancing on the shoulders of their partners and stamping their feet rhythmically on the ceiling!

Early Schuhplattlers often highlighted the towns where they were invented or imitated the various professions of the performers, such as the Mühlradl (Miller's Dance), the Holzhacker (wood cutter), and the Glockenplattler (Bell Dance). The music was generally in three-quarter time, like the Ländler, and was performed on the zither or the guitar, and by 1830s, the accordion or concertina.