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Migration and Memory:
The Dances of Gertrud Bodenwieser
Ready the space, make it possible, make it real. Mark/sign/imprint/trace/seal. Step together, stop, wind, unwind, step turn schlinger, breathe. And speak to me in this silence. (1) In the reaches of my memory a figure is held in language and gesture. She is re-membered in certain movements and habits of style. She is distant and close, inside and outside, part omnipotent presence and part invisible trace; a “dancemother” whose image was interiorized through the process of learning how to dance. Composed of fragments of memory, mythology, and history, her story is less biography than biomythography, for I never knew her, yet I know her still. My earliest knowledge of dance as an art form was inscribed through a series of “quotes” from the past, for it was the Viennese Ausdruckstanz choreographer Gertrud Bodenwieser (1890-1959) whose words and ideas animated my dancing. I came to know Bodenwieser through the teachings of her former dancer Shona Dunlop-MacTavish, with whom I trained in New Zealand from 1972-85. When I moved to the UK in the late 1980s, curiosity and a hunger for the familiar led me to meet with other former Bodenwieser dancers now residing there: Hilde Holger, the late Bettina Vernon, Evelyn Ippen, and Hilary Napier. All of these women, including Dunlop-MacTavish, received their primary dance training with Bodenwieser, danced in the Tanzgruppe Bodenwieser in Vienna (1923-38), and, with the exception of Hilde Holger, danced in Australia with the Bodenwieser Viennese Ballet (1939-58). (2) Significantly, they also all developed independent careers as dancer-choreographers and teachers in various parts of the world, including Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, China, India, and England. (3) I have listened to their stories, studied their personal archival collections of photographs, programmes, and writings, and learned some of their dances. More recently, and with the assistance of a Lisa Ullman Scholarship, I traveled to Canberra, Australia to visit the Gertrud Bodenwieser Archives in the Australian National Library. Alongside this activity and over a period of 15 years, I have been involved as a dancer in a series of reconstructions of Bodenwieser’s dances, The Demon Machine (1924), Slavonic Dance (1939), and Joan of Arc (1946). Now listen, I want the feeling of listening, of listening and leaping, of leaping into listening. Put rhythm, pulse, and humming space into movement and remember, you must lift your chin and take your gaze outward in order to be seen. The armkreis. (4) |
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