Anna Sokolov

Anna Sokolow, 1961

Anna Sokolow (born February 9, 1910 in Hartford , Connecticut , † March 29, 2000 in New York ) was an American dancer and choreographer .

biography

The daughter of Jewish immigrants from Pinsk grew up in New York. She had her first dance lessons as a child and learned from 1925 with Blanche Talmud and Bird Larson at the Neighborhood Playhouse , where she also attended classes in pantomime and speech and voice education. When the professional theater school opened in 1928, she became a member of the Junior Festival Players , where she was trained by the dancer Martha Graham and the composer and choreographer Louis Horst .

From 1929 to 1938 she was a member of the Graham Dance Company , where she was involved in works such as Primitive Mysteries (1931) and Celebration (1934) as well as the group's first tour. She also worked as Horst's assistant at the Neighborhood Playhouse .

Since the early 1930s, Sokolow was also working on their own projects, while the grouping of the Radical Dance Movement ( radicals dance movement ) joined, a group that felt committed to the political and social commitment. In 1933, her first choreography, the Anti-War Trilogy , on the occasion of the First Congress of antiwar American League Against War and Fascism ( American League Against War and Fascism listed). Further works dealt with fascism ( Inquisition '36 , Excerpts from a War Poem , Slaughter of the Innocents ), the situation of industrial workers ( Strange American Funeral ) and juvenile delinquency ( Case History No .-- ); Romantic Dances and Histrionics emerged as social satires .

In 1936 she appeared as the youngest American choreographer in a professional dance group, the Dance Unit , for the first time in a full-length program. In 1939 she came to Mexico at the invitation of the painter Carlos Mérida . Here she trained the Ballet de Bellas Artes ( Ballet of Fine Arts ), which debuted in 1940, and founded the group La Paloma Azul . She is considered the founder of modern dance in Mexico, and her students were called "Las Sokolovas" for decades.

Her first work that explicitly dealt with Jewish religion, history and culture was The Exile (1939). Kaddish was created in 1945 , and Dreams , which premiered in 1965, explored the Holocaust . Other choreographies focus on Jewish women from biblical history (Ruth, Miriam, Deborah) or important women of the present day ( Hannah Senesh , Golda Meir ).

In 1953 she went to Israel to train the Inbal Dance Theater , an ensemble of Yemeni Jews, and in three years led the group to a successful European debut. She returned regularly to Israel in the following years, where she founded the Lyric Theater group in the early 1960s , with the aim of combining theater, music and dance.

Sokolow also worked as a choreographer for various theater productions, for example in the 1930s for André Obeys Noah and the revue Sing for Your Supper , in 1947 for Elmer Rices Street Scene (by Kurt Weill and Langston Hughes ), for Leonard Bernstein's Candide , her own Dramatization of Kafka's The Metamorphosis and 1967 for the musical Hair .

In the dance theater production of Salomon An-skis Der Dybbuk 1951 Sokolow first combined dance, acting and the spoken word. Lyric Suite from 1953 was her first choreography of an atonal piece of music. She made further choreographic experiments with Act Without Words (1969), Magritte, Magritte (1970) and From the Diaries of Franz Kafka (1980). For these performances she founded a group in 1969 which, like her Israeli ensemble, was called Lyric Theater . As one of the first ballet choreographers, she worked with jazz musicians such as Teo Macero and Kenyon Hopkins ; the work Opus '65 is considered the prototype of the later rock ballet .

After Sokolow had been teaching dance classes in the 1930s, she worked with Elia Kazan at the Actors Studio in the 1940s and 1950s . From 1958 she taught actors and dancers at the Juilliard Dance Division for several decades . In 1961 she received the Dance Magazine Prize , in 1967 a Prize from the National Council on the Arts and in 1995 the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award . In 1998 she was inducted into the Hall of Fame at the National Museum of Dance .

In 1993 she was accepted as an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

repertoire

• Histrionics (1933)
• Speaker (1935)
• Strange American Funeral (1935)
• Inquisition '36 (1936)
• Four Little Salon Pieces (1936)
• Case No .-- (1937)
• Excerpts From a War Poem (FT Marinetti) (1937)
• Slaughter of the Innocents ( 1937)
• “Filibuster” from The Bourbons Got the Blues (1938)
• Dance of All Nations , Lenin Memorial Meeting (1938)
• Sing for Your Supper (1939)
• The Exile (A Dance Poem) (1939)
• Don Lindo de Almería (1940)
• El Renacuajo Paseador (1940)
• Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter (1941)
• Kaddish (1945)
• The Bride (1946)
• Mexican Retablo (1946)
• Lyric Suite (1953)
• Rooms (1955)
• Bullfight (1955)
• Sesion for Six (1958)
• Opus '58 (1958)
• Opus Jazz 1958 (1958)
• Opus '60 (1960)
• Dreams (1961)
• Opus '62 (1962)
• Opus '63 (1963)
• Forms (1964)
• Odes (1964)
• Opus '65 (1965)
• Time + (1966)
• Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical (1967)
• Los Conversos [ The Converts ] (1981)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Honorary Members: Anna Sokolow. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 3, 2019 . 

Web links

• Biography of Sokolov at the Jewish Women's Archive (English)