The “Dancing Esch” research project (2021-2024) studies the festive sociabilities of the Luxembourgish mining basin during the 1920-1980. It focuses on popular balls in Esch-sur-Alzette, a town shaped by the mining and steel industry. These took place in cafés and were organised by café owners or by local associations. People danced to orchestras composed of mine or factory workers.
The archives of these balls are fragmented and partial. Photos and films are rare, especially for the earlier decades, and are generally only found in private archives. It remains difficult to archive sensory, motor, and emotional experiences. Some dimensions of the sensible past emerge during oral history interviews but others continue to escape the “sayable”.
This research project, borrowing its methodology from history and anthropology, therefore included an experimental dimension: performative and participatory experiences in the form of balls created from archival and oral history elements. These creative reenactments covered two historical periods: the interwar period and the Trente Glorieuses.
The first events were organised in collaboration with the association Swing Dance Luxembourg and hosted by the Kufa (April, June and July 2022), the second in collaboration with the FerroForum and professional musician Luciano Pagliarini (July and September 2023 and September 2024). The objective of these events was threefold: to share elements of the research with the local public (public history), to raise questions about the past (experimental methodology), to collect and produce documentation of the balls as they were transmitted in collective memory (music recordings, photo and video documentation).
The collaboration with the FerroForum continues in 2025 with the production of a book-object entitled Feieren. Fester, Musek an Danz am Minett. The sound recording of Feierôwend!, an event co-imagined with FerroForum, will appear on the LP which accompanies the special edition of the book as well as on a dedicated website. The transmedia extensions of the book promote a sensible and not just intellectual apprehension of the past.
This research project has benefited from the generous support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Luxembourgish National Research Fund (FNR) (Popkult60 “Transnational popular culture – Europe in the long 1960s”, 2021-2024) as well as the C²DH (Thinkering Grant 2022, PHO funding 2024).
