Andrei Jerschik

Andrei Jerschik (born June 25, 1902 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary , † October 31, 1997 in Linz ) was an Austrian dancer , choreographer and ballet master .

Life

Andrei Jerschik, born in 1902, was a pupil of the Ellen Tels School in his native Vienna, and in particular of Mila Cirul. He also took private lessons with the former prima ballerina of the Vienna Court Opera , Cäcilie Cerri. He continued this dual track in Berlin, where he received further training from Max Terpis on the one hand and Eugenia Eduardowa and Catherine Devillier on the other. A formative experience during his apprenticeship years was the visit of Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste's guest performance in 1922 . He himself had all the prerequisites to draw attention to himself: technology, comprehension, versatility and appearance. He was discovered by Erik Charell and began his career in Vienna in the Revue division . As early as 1924 he danced in the famous Vienna Furnishing Revue, pay attention! with Vala Moro an own number. The dance scene created for the occasion, The Vampire , soon became the piece that was associated with the name Andrei Jerschik.

In the same year he switched to podium dance as a member of the Bodenwieser Ensemble and designed the figure of the idol in Gertrud Bodenwieser's dance around the golden calf to the music of Felix Petyrek . He also danced as a partner of Vala Moro in the Vienna Konzerthaus in the Burning Girl based on Tchaikovsky's Pathétique . Maria Ley brought him in 1925 for the Max Reinhardt production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Vienna Theater in the Josefstadt . Now also celebrated as an expressive dancer, he joined Marion Herrmann's ensemble as the first solo dancer in Königsberg . In 1929 he achieved another classic of his own with the four-minute expressionistic solo dance Mensch im Wahn (initially called the House of Insane ) on music by Sergei Rachmaninov ( Prelude in G minor, opus 23 ), premiered at the Königsberg Opera House.

Returning to Berlin in 1929 and often seen in the stage hall of the Wigman School with Margarete Wallmann , he became a highly valued soloist in the city - ennobled by the press as “a kind of male Valeska Gert ”. In addition to the dance episodes already mentioned, he performed, among other things, the dance of the miller , the dance of Petrutschka and the Hungarian dances . He also showed grotesques and parodies with descriptive (e.g. Very unhappy ) or more abstract titles (e.g. Chopinads of yesterday and tomorrow ). Jerschik took part in Lizzie Maudrik's choreography of the Josefslegende at the Städtische Oper , was a member of the “Arbeitsgemeinschaft Junge Dänzer ”, which also included Lisa Ney and Jo Mihaly , and taught and trained acrobatics at the schools of Max Terpis, Berthe Trümpy and Jutta Klamt in this capacity dancers like Ruth Abramowitsch and Georg Groke.

In 1931 he began working with Margarete Wallmann for around seven years. Milestones of this collaboration were, for example, the play Orpheus Dionysos at the Volksbühne , in which Jerschik performed the demon, including the solo performance called Dance of Death , and the annual commitment at the Salzburg Festival with Wallmann's movement drama The Last Judgment (music: Georg Friedrich Handel ) , in which Jerschik designed the role of Gog.

From 1931 to 1933 he was a solo dancer and second ballet master at the Nationaltheater Mannheim . In 1934 he went on a European tour with the Trudi Schoop Ballet . From 1935 he worked as a ballet master, choreographer and director ( opera , operetta , musical as required ) in various cities. In 1935/36 he was in Innsbruck, then in Cairo. In 1938 he took over the ballet of the Vienna Volksoper . He was expelled from Vienna for doing “anti-war propaganda”. For some time he appeared mainly in hospitals , most recently in Königsberg. His next stations were in the Bohemian Aussig from 1939 to 1941 , Halle from 1941 to 1943, Karlsbad from 1943/44 and Graz from 1946 to 1949. A “youth ban” was imposed on the dance performance The Seven Deadly Sins given in the local opera house , for which Jerschik had created the libretto and choreography and Rudolf Weishappel composed the music, which may have contributed to the end of the contractual relationship. From 1949 to 1951 he worked at the Volksoper Vienna, from 1951 to 1953 in Basel, from 1953 to 1955 in Karlsruhe, from 1955 to 1963 in Linz and then in Klagenfurt.

Linz was considered his adopted home. There he created ballets as a ballet master and choreographer for the Landestheater . From the beginning of the 1970s he taught ballet and theater dance at the Erika Gangl dance studio, a private school with public rights. He was also a dance critic for the Upper Austrian News and a speaker on dance topics.

In 1950 he gave one last performance of Mensch im Wahn on the occasion of the International Dance Festival in the Wiener Konzerthaus . Mensch im Wahn was reconstructed in 1995, revised and transferred to the dancer and educator Harmen Tromp. Andrei Jerschik died in 1997.

2008 re-staged the choreographer Georg Blaschke, in cooperation with the festival touches the Vienna Odeon with Harmen Tromp and Petr Ochvat the solo man in delusion , entitled Your turn . This production was also shown at the Posthof Linz (2009), at Impulstanz Wien (2009), at the Bytom International Dance Conference (2010) and as part of the Austrian Dance Evening in the Tmu-na-Theater in Tel Aviv (2011).

style

Andrea Amort described Jerschik's style in Tanz Affiche as a “successful symbiosis of expression and theater dance ”. Jerschik was " a singular phenomenon from the very beginning because of his unusual ability to express himself ( the vampire , dance of death , dance of Petrushka ) and his extraordinary talent for dancing (" the Jerschik battement ").

In Tanzdrama , Gunhild Oberzaucher-Schüller paid tribute to the dancer as follows: “ Never breaking with his own past as an expressive dancer even after the Second World War , Jerschik understood how to incorporate the balanced program policy that he now pursued [...], the artistic achievements of Between the wars, the personality-bound dance style, the ability to work with a group in a spatially sensible way and to include the interweaving of music and choreography and the taste security in the choice of equipment [...]. "

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i} Gunhild Oberzaucher-Schüller: revue dancer - theater dancer - ballet master. Andrei Jerschik on his 90th birthday . In: dance drama . No. 19 , 1992.
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h} Andrea Amort: Homage to Andrei Jerschik. The expressive dancer, theater dancer and ballet master is 95 . In: Tanz Affiche . No. 70 , June 1997, p. 7 .
3. ↑ Gunhild Oberzaucher-Schüller: Graz interlude - six times sex. In: tanz.at. Edith M. Wolf Perez, September 20, 2015, accessed January 27, 2020 . 
4. ↑ ^{a b} Andrei Jerschik has died . In: Tanz Affiche . No. 75 , December 1997, Affichage Express. In short, p. 4 .
5. ↑ Now it's your turn. In: Program of the Festival Touches. Dance before 1938 - dance today. October 18, 2008, Theater Odeon Vienna. Curator: Andrea Amort. Exile library of the Literaturhaus Wien and dance archive MUK Wien.

Web links

• Literature by and about Andrei Jerschik in the bibliographic database WorldCat