Liebe Hanya: Mary Wigman's Letters to Hanya Holm

These vividly written letters document the lives of two remarkable women artists who were at the center of twentieth-century dance modernism. Mary Wigmans groundbreaking choreography and inspired performing in Germany during the 1910s and 1920s brought the emerging art of modern dance into dialogue with modern painting, theater, and film. Her disciple Hanya Holm took Wigmans aesthetic philosophy to the United States in 1931, effectively adapting it to the American temperament, and ultimately became a celebrated choreographer of Broadway musicals such as Kiss Me, Kate and My Fair Lady. Written between 1920 and 1971, Wigmans letters are a treasury of fascinating detail about artistry, friendships of women, and the stamina of two artists who refused to capitulate to personal, political, and cultural forces that confronted them. They inject immediacy into discussions of Wigmans work within the Third Reich and cast light on Holms construction of an American identity. With her extensive annotation Gitelman contributes context to the domestic and social spheres within which the women worked on two continents. Never before published in any language, these letters are untapped resources for historians of twentieth-century culture, German-American relations, as well as dance.

andldquo;A stunning work that opens the door to East German dance, a surprisingly little-known area of study.andrdquo;andmdash;Gay Morris, author of A Game for Dancers: Performing Modernism in the Post-War Years

andldquo;At last, more than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jens Richard Giersdorf gives us a compelling account of dance in the German Democratic Republic, the Communist state that supplanted the Soviet zone of occupation in 1949 and collapsed forty years later.andrdquo;andmdash;Susan Manning, Northwestern University

andldquo;Giersdorf provides a spectacular, theoretical recounting of East German dance after WWII.andrdquo;andmdash;Choiceand#160;

Mary Wigman and Hanya Holm had a crucial impact on the development of modern dance both in Germany and in the U.S.  Friends for more than five decades, the choreographers were dedicated correspondants, and the letters from Wigman to Holm offer a telling history, one that encompasses everything from conditions for artists under the Nazi regime in Germany, where Wigman remained, to Holm's experiences on Broadway.  

The Body of the People is the first comprehensive study of dance and choreography in East Germany. More than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jens Richard Giersdorf investigates a national dance history in the German Democratic Republic, from its founding as a Communist state that supplanted the Soviet zone of occupation in 1949 through the aftermath of its collapse forty years later, examining complex themes of nationhood, ideology, resistance, and diaspora through an innovative mix of archival research, critical theory, personal narrative, and performance analysis.

and#160;and#160;and#160; Giersdorf looks closely at uniquely East German dance formsandmdash;including mass exercise events, national folk dances, Marxist-Leninist visions staged by the dance ensemble of the armed forces, the vast amateur dance culture, East Germanyandrsquo;s version of Tanztheater, and socialist alternatives to rock andlsquo;nandrsquo; rollandmdash;to demonstrate how dance was used both as a form of corporeal utopia and of embodied socialist propaganda and indoctrination. The Body of the People also explores the artists working in the shadow of official culture who used dance and movement to critique and resist state power, notably Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, Arila Siegert, and Fine Kwiatkowski. Giersdorf considers a myriad of embodied responses to the Communist state even after reunification, analyzing the embodiment of the fall of the Berlin Wall in the works of Jo Fabian and Sasha Waltz, and the diasporic traces of East German culture abroad, exemplified by the Chilean choreographer Patricio Bunster.

Claudia Gitelman is professor emerita of dance in the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. A dancer and choreographer trained in the Wigman/Holm tradition, she appeared on Broadway and the concert stage and taught with the Nikolais/Louis Dance Theatre Lab in New York City. She is the author of Dancing with Principle: Hanya Holm in Colorado, 1941-1983.

Introduction: Spectacles between Utopia and Ostalgie1 Dancing National Identity in Daily Life: A New German Folk (1945andndash;1961)2 Dancing National Identity in the Theatre: Realism and Tanztheater (1961andndash;1970s)3 Resistive Motions in the East (1980s)4 Border Crossings and the Fall of the Wall (1989andndash;2009)5 Toward a Transnational History of East German Dance: The Case of Patricio Bunsterand#160;NotesBibliographyIndex