The project is dedicated to the Soviet amateur art as a cultural practice. Amateur choreography is firstly regarded as a state-sanctioned important communicative instrument and as an institution of socialization, of collective and individual self-realization and of education and possession of a symbolic capital of prestige. It is secondly interpreted as a state-monopolized and instrumentalized effective tool for political education of the Soviet identity. This includes the production and distribution of external and self-images, ethical and aesthetic canons, socially approved emotions and ideas about the «right» physicality, masculinity and femininity. The «folk choreography» thirdly reflected and at the same time created and reformed common concepts of real Soviet «folk» aesthetics and of aesthetically unacceptable (choreographic) representations of the «bourgeois» West. Thus, research on Soviet dance amateur art in an international perspective can contribute to a more nuanced representation and a better understanding of what «Soviet» meant in a cultural sense.

At the core of the project lie explorations of the sphere between dictatorial construction of society, collective action and individual stubbornness (Eigensinn). The project is therefore to be located among the most recent studies which help to closer determine the effects of social mobilization and cultural identification through the Soviet state.