How should socialist youth dance? How can social dance be more socialist? These questions may not be keeping YOU up at night, but things might look differently if you were an East German cultural functionary!

In this episode, we go into the story of the Lipsi, a new dance East Germans created in 1958 to compete with Western trends. We also talk about how the Second World Music project came about, the process of reconstructing dances from archival materials, and how people have reacted to the Lipsi - both back then and at present.

In Playing the Archive, ethnomusicologists Sydney Hutchinson and Hannah Judd dive into experimental archival research with interviews, radio plays, & more. This podcast is a part of the Second World Music project. To learn more, visit http://secondworldmusic.wordpress.com.

Playing the Archive © 2025 by Sydney Hutchinson/Second World Music is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International