Alexander von Swaine

Alexander von Swaine , completely Alexander Denis Robert Freiherr von Swaine (born December 28, 1905 in Munich , † February 21, 1990 in Cuernavaca ) was a German dancer , choreographer and dance teacher .

Live and act

His parents were Baron Carl Alexander von Swaine and his wife, Countess Alice Laurence de Rougemont of Neuchâtel, Thun, Bern, Grandson and Burton. In 1908, at the age of just under four, Alexander inherited Schadau Castle , which his father managed for him and had to sell in 1917, when he got into financial difficulties during the First World War . After the early death of his mother, von Swaine grew up in a boarding school in Potsdam. He has been interested in dancing and the theater world since childhood. After graduating from high school, he studied modern dance with Laban's student Botjo Markoff in Potsdam and classical dance with Eugenia Eduardowa in Berlin for four years . He first appeared in performances at the Eduardowa School. He celebrated his first solo success in 1930 with Max Reinhardt in Midsummer Night's Dream , worked with him in dance and choreography in The Servant of Two Lords and Hoffmann's Tales and began his career as a podium dancer in 1931. In the following year he deepened his training in classical dance with Cecchetti -Teacher Margaret Craske in London. He had permanent theater engagements as a solo dancer in 1933 at the Städtische Oper Berlin and in 1935 at the State Opera Berlin. In the 1930s he made many very successful guest tours, also abroad, mostly with dance partners such as Alice Uhlen, Darja Collin and Rosalia Chladek and occasionally appeared in films (including with Marika Rökk ) as a dancer. In 1939 he opened a ballet school in Batavia , was imprisoned as an enemy foreigner in 1940 after the invasion of German troops in the Netherlands and lived for years in various internment camps , most recently in Dehradun .

Released from captivity in 1947 and returned to Germany, he found an engagement as a solo dancer with Karl Bergeest, who had also just returned from captivity and was starting out as a ballet master at the Heidelberg Theater. The first soloist was the dancer Lisa Czóbel , who returned from the USA, and a soloist with the Ballets Jooss . With her, von Swaine went on world tours from 1949 to 1965, both of which cemented their reputation as one of the most important representatives of European modern dance at the time. At the same time, both appeared in Karl Bergeest's choreographies at the city theaters where he was engaged one after the other as ballet master: from 1949 in Heidelberg, from 1951 to 1956 in Cologne and until 1958 in Freiburg.

After the end of the joint tour with Lisa Czobel in 1965, Alexander von Swaine lived in the city of Cuernavaca in Mexico until his death and earned his living as a dance teacher. Alexander von Swaines estate is kept in the German Dance Archive in Cologne .

Appreciations

• "As one of the most prominent and expressive German dancers of his time, he was not only an excellent technician, but also extremely versatile." Reclams Ballet Lexicon ( Horst Koegler )
• "Swaine was one of the most versatile and technically brilliant dancers of his time. The peaks of his artistic career in Europe were in the 1930s and the 1950s. The most striking feature of his dance style was his ability to fascinate with his expressive power in both classical and modern dance. " International Encyclopedia of Dance (Hedwig Müller)
• "'The critics outdid each other in superlatives, compared him to Harald Kreutzberg or Vaslav Nijinsky - and mostly preferred von Swaine." Alexander von Swaine, dancing fire soul (Ralf Stabel)

Honors

• 1961 Dance Prize of the Association of German Critics (together with Lisa Czobel)

literature

Monograph about him:

• Ralf Stabel: Alexander von Swaine. Dancing fire soul. Biography. Henschel, Leipzig 2015. ISBN 978-3-89487-757-6

Lexicon entries, articles:

• Arnold L. Haskell: Balletomane's log book: the art of Alexander von Swaine. In: The dancing times , January 1938, pp. 508-509, 520.
• Kurt Peters : Alexander von Swaine, Vulkan in the dance scene . In: Das Tanzarchiv , Vol. 28, December 1980, H. 12, P. 717–720.
• Horst Koegler, Helmut Günther (ed.): Reclams Ballettlexikon . Philipp Reclam jun., Stuttgart 1984, p. 434.
• Kurt Peters: Unity of sound and gesture: Alexander von Swaine, Lisa Czobel, Karl Bergeest. In: Ballett-Journal / Das Tanzarchiv. Vol. 38, No. 3, June 1990, p. 36-39
• Patricia Stockemann: Alexander von Swaine . In: Tanzdrama , No. 11, 1990, p. 7.
• Hedwig Müller : Swaine, Alexander von . In: Selma Jeanne Cohen (Ed.): International Encyclopedia of Dance . New York, Oxford 1998, vol 6, p. 29.
• Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller , Klaus Sator : Swaine, Alexander von - dancer, choreographer and dance teacher . In: Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller (Hrsg.): Mann für Mann : Biographical lexicon on the history of love for friends and male-male sexuality in the German-speaking area . Lit Verlag, Berlin and Münster 2010, ISBN 978-3-643-10693-3 , pp. 1157f.

Web links

• Alexander von Swaine at filmportal.de
• Literature by and about Alexander von Swaine in the catalog of the German National Library
• Obituary, photos and documents on the website of the German Dance Archive Cologne

Individual evidence

1. ↑ List of bequests in the German Dance Archive Cologne .