The Tiller Girls: Mass Ornament and Modern Girl

Abstract

The British Tiller Girls originated the precision kick line in 1910 when John Tiller directed his dancers to link their arms around each other’s waists, thus enabling precise co-ordination.¹ The mass spectacle of the chorus line of between eight and sixteen identically dressed dancers with uniform bodies kicking their perfectly synchronized legs up in the air erased the audience’s visual awareness of each individual dancer; instead, the Tiller Girls morphed into an uncanny mass object moving in perfect unison. A critic coined a catch phrase for the Tiller Girls: ‘They dance as one woman and what a woman!’² Their actual dancing has been described in rich detail by Ramsay Burt:

In the 1920s they generally wore short skirts that allowed their whole leg to be seen, since this was the primary focus of their performance. The steps consisted of precisely co-ordinated kicks in various directions with or without bending the knee, either with all the dancers performing in unison or with a ripple effect where a movement starts at one end and moves along the line like a wave. Arms may also be co-ordinated in a similar way. The line of dancers may break up into segments which then move into sequences of simple, symmetrical geometric floor patterns. The main feature of this kind of dancing is the effect that is achieved through precise co-ordination.³