Abstract
This chapter looks at modern dancers’ writings in the turbulent period 1933–1936. It examines therein the differences between modern dance in Germany and the United States of America at this time. These are constitutional in both the institutional and bodily senses. The dancing of this time, and how dancers wrote about it, marks a growing gulf between the dance of the new German Nazi state and that of democratic America. Dancers’ writings examined include those of Leslie Burrowes, Jane Dudley, Blanche Evan, Martha Graham, Hanya Holm, Doris Humphrey, Harald Kreutzberg, Rudolf Laban, Gret Palucca, Elizabeth Selden and Mary Wigman.
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Notes
Hanya Holm, ‘The German Dance in the American Scene’, In Virginia Stewart and Merle Armitage, eds, The Modern Dance, 79–86 (New York: Dance Horizons, 1935; repr. Dance Horizons, 1970), 79.
See, in particular, Larraine Nicholas, Dancing in Utopia: Dartington Hall and Its Dancers (Alton: Dance Books, 2007).
Susan Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon: The Dances of Mary Wigman, new ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 173;
Lilian Karina and Marion Kant, Hitler’s Dancers: German Modern Dance and the Third Reich (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 104–108.
See, especially, Lynn Garafola, ed., Of, by, and for the People: Dancing on the Left in the 1930s (Madison, WI: Society of Dance History Scholars at A-R Editions, 1994);
Ellen Graff, Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928–1942 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
The first such examination was made by Horst Koegler, ‘In the Shadow of the Swastika: Dance in Germany 1917–1936’ (Dance Perspectives, no. 57 (1974)). See, particularly, Karina and Kant, Hitler’s Dancers; Laure Guilbert, Danser Avec Le IIIe Reich. Les Danseurs Modernes Sous Le Nazism (Paris: Éditions Complexe, 2000); 2011 André Versaille éditeur;
Marion Kant, ‘Practical Imperative: German Dance, Dancers, and Nazi Politics’, In Naomi M. Jackson and Toni Shapiro-Phim, ed., Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice, 5–19 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008); Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon;
Müller, Mary Wigman: Leben Und Werk Der Grossen Tänzerin (Berlin: Quadriga, 1986);
Hedwig Müller, ‘Mary Wigman and the Third Reich’, Ballett International 9, no. 11 (1986): 18–23.
Hedwig Müller, ‘Wigman and National Socialism’, Ballet Review 15, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 65–73.
Die Deutsche Tanzbühne, Deutsche Tanzfestspiele 1934 (Dresden: Carl Reissner, 1934).
Volk translates as ‘people’ or ‘folk’ but the term had much further reaching connotations in the 1930s, being appropriated by the Nazis and used explicitly as a term to denote a German people who were ‘pure’ in their lineage. See Wilfried Van Der Will, ‘“Volkskultur” and Alternative Culture’, In Eva Kolinsky and Wilfried Van Der Will, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Modern German Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Karina and Kant, Hitler’s Dancers; Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon.
The Dresden Wigman School brochures included a number in English. See Heide Lazarus, Die Akte Wigman: Ein Dokumentation Der Mary Wigman Schule Dresden (1920–1942) Edition Tanzdokumente Digital 3 (Hildeshelm: Georg Olms Verlag, 2007).
It is noteworthy because, in many ways, it complements Martin’s The Modern Dance, except that it is written by an American dancer/teacher with roots in Europe. Selden attempted to characterise the new modern dance, writing as a practitioner, but also writing of her contemporaries as practitioners — Wigman, Humphrey, Graham, Benjamin Zemach, Maja Lex and Margaret Gage. Gage was an American Duncan dancer who also trained at the Dresden Wigman School and with Selden at the Bennett School where she subsequently taught. Gitelman emphasises the key role that she played financially, supporting first the New York School and Holm and then Wigman herself. See Claudia Gitelman, ed., Liebe Hanya: Mary Wigman’s Letters to Hanya Holm (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 26.
Elizabeth Selden, The Dancer’s Quest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1935), xiii.
R.G. Collingwood. The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938). Judith Alter has given an interesting comparison of Selden with Collingwood and others, although their writing cannot be said to be of the same order.
See Judith B. Alter, Dance-based Dance Theory: From Borrowed Models to Dancebased Experience (New York: Peter Lang, 1991).
See Ellen Graff, Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928–1942 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997) and Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon.
There was an open criticism of Stewart in print. See Edna Ocko, ‘Letters: Anti-fascism’, Dance Observer 2, no. 8 (1935): 93, 95. Susan Manning gives a detailed account of the controversy. See Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon, 275–277.
Holm, reflecting on this period some 40 years later, continued to have concerns about dancers whose technical accomplishments had nothing to underpin them. Jane Dudley, who was a student and dancer with Holm from 1931 to 1935, touches on the sort of comparisons that Holm herself made: ‘Looking back at it, I think I was not as well trained at the Wigman School as I would have been by Martha Graham, but the range of movement and the idea of moving from quality, which is the way Hanya taught, rather than from set technical sequences, was an important experience for me as a young dancer’, See Jane Dudley, ‘The Early Life of an American Modern Dancer’, Dance Research 10, no. 1 (1992): 3–20, 10. Dudley suggests that whilst the classes at Holm’s School could be ‘exhilarating, joyous and inspiring, developing fluidity and fullness of movement, with grace and harmony in the body’ they did not give her the technical proficiency that she was later to find with Graham. See Dudley, ‘The Early Life’, 13. Tresa Randall, in her essay on Holm’s American Tanzgemeinschaft, draws attention to how Holm’s dancers compelled her to change her practice to give greater emphasis to technique but how Holm did so whilst maintaining a sense of community of purpose.
See Tresa Randall, ‘Hanya Holm and an American Tanzgemeinschaft’, In Susan Manning and Lucia Ruprecht, eds, New German Dance Studies, 79–98 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 94.
Blanche Evan, ‘From a Dancer’s Notebook’, New Theatre 3, no. 3 (March 1936): 16–17, 28–29, 17.
Leslie Burrowes, ‘Modern Dance’, The Ling Association Leaflet (July 1936): 331–332, 331 (NRCD: LB/E/3/7).
Edna Ocko, ‘World of the Dance: Outstanding Program by Dance League’, In Lynn Garafola, ed., Of, by, and for the People: Dancing on the Left in the 1930s (Ocko selected by Stacey Prickett), 79–80 (Madison, WI: Society of Dance History Scholars at A-R Editions, 1994) (originally published in Daily Worker, 20 February 1935, 5 under the pseudonym Elizabeth Skrip), 80. In 1935, the main socialist country was the USSR, a country which had just suffered the first, 1933–1934, mass famine as a result of Stalin’s first Five Year Plan.
Nadia Chilkovsky (writing under the pseudonym Nell Anyon), ‘The Tasks of the Revolutionary Dance’, In Mark Franko, ed., Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics, 113–115 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1933, 1995) (first published in New Theatre September/October 1933), 113.
Jane Dudley, ‘The Mass Dance’, In Franko, ed., Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics, 119–122 (originally published in New Theatre December 1934), 119.
See the exceptional view of Martin Gleisner, in particular. The orthodox view, under Nazism, is well illustrated in ‘Wir Tanzen’. See Martin Gleisner, Tanz Für Alle: Von Der Gymnastik Zum Gemeinschaftstanz (Leipzig: Hesse und Becker 1928); Reichsbund für Gemeinschaftstanz in der Reichstheaterkammer, ‘Wir Tanzen’ (Berlin: Reichsbund für Gemeinschaftstanz in der Reichstheaterkammer, 1936). Laban’s view, from 1936, in English, can be found in Rudolf Laban, ‘Extract from an Address Held by Mr. Laban on a Meeting for Community-Dance in 1936’, Laban Art of Movement Guild Magazine no. 43 (November 1936, 1974): 6–11.
Edna Ocko, ‘Humphrey-Weidman’, In Lynn Garafola, ed., Of, by, and for the People: Dancing on the Left in the 1930s (Ocko selected by Stacey Prickett), 78 (Madison, WI: Society of Dance History Scholars at A-R Editions, 1994) (first published in New Theatre 2, no. 2 (February 1935): 28 under the pseudonym Elizabeth Skrip), 78.
For instance, Wigman published just a couple of articles in the next two decades before the publication of her reminiscences in German in 1963 in Mary Wigman, Die Sprache Des Tanzes (Stuttgart: Ernst Battenberg, 1963).
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Huxley, M. (2015). German and American Modern Dance: Constitutional Differences. In: The Dancer’s World, 1920–1945: Modern Dancers and Their Practices Reconsidered. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137439215_4
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