Dore Hoyer

Dore Hoyer

Dore Hoyer (born December 12, 1911 in Dresden , † December 31, 1967 in West Berlin ) was a German expressive dancer and choreographer .

Life

youth

At the suggestion of a teacher, Hoyer received gymnastics lessons from the age of twelve. She received a scholarship for this because her father could not have paid for the lessons.

In 1927, she again received a scholarship to train as a gymnastics teacher with a student of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze at the branch school of the Hellerau-Laxenburg-Schule in Dresden. “Creative self-creation” was part of the school program. With her teacher Ilse Homilius she developed choreographies for their first joint stage appearances.

In 1930 Dore Hoyer passed the examination to become a gymnastics teacher and registered for further dance training in the Palucca School founded by Gret Palucca in 1924 , where Irma Steinberg was her teacher.

The thirties

After graduating in 1931, she accepted an engagement in Plauen , where she only had to dance in operettas , which in no way suited her. In 1933 she was offered a ballet master position at the Oldenburg State Theater , where she could choreograph a few things herself, but again it was all about dance performances in operas and operettas.

In 1932 she met the eighteen-year-old musician and composer Peter Cieslak. Cieslak, with whom she lived until his suicide on April 5, 1935, composed the music for Ernste Gesänge for her in 1932 . In 1933 she gave her first own dance evening in Dresden. After that she mainly designed her own solo programs, briefly took up theater engagements again in Dresden and then in Graz and from 1935 danced occasionally in Mary Wigman's group .

In 1936 she began working with the pianist and drummer Dimitri Wiatowitsch, who remained her companion for thirty years until her death and from the end of the war was also her composer for music for her dances.

War and Post War

In 1940 she became a soloist at the Deutsche Tanzbühne in Berlin. After the end of the Second World War, she first lived in Dresden and founded her own studio in the former Wigman School, to which many dancers came to work with her. This is how the cycle dances for Käthe Kollwitz came about, with which she and her dancers, like Ursula Cain , went on tour.

In September 1948, however, Dore Hoyer left Dresden forever and went to Hamburg . She was one of the founding members of the Free Academy of the Arts . In 1949 she was called to the Hamburg State Opera by the artistic director Günter Rennert , where she worked as a solo dancer and ballet master .

During her time in Hamburg she created several choreographic works. Her piece The Stranger , a kind of dance of death , was compared in the reviews with the famous ballet The Green Table by Kurt Jooss . She herself considered it one of her most important group choreographies. The play has clear biographical references and shows the relationship between the individual and society. After that, her life consisted of productions on various stages, for example in Mannheim and Ulm . She undertook several tours to South America in the 1950s, where she was particularly successful in Buenos Aires .

In 1957, Mary Wigman arranged for her to be invited to the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College in New London (Connecticut) (USA). There Dore Hoyer performed with several American modern dance dancers. Her dances were received with enthusiasm, with the exception of some that the Americans found "too sentimental", while in the American dances she lacked emotion, intimacy and silence. She experienced them as "only motoric, dramatic and grotesque". Only José Limon and his group were the exception. She experienced New York as “the stronghold of modern dance that no longer exists in Germany”. ( Lit: Müller / Peter / Schuldt, p. 59. ). In the same year she danced the chosen one (the victim) in Wigman's Berlin production of Igor Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps .

Late period

Grave of Dore Hoyer in the Frankfurt main cemetery

She continued to perform at dance evenings in Germany, Europe and overseas. In 1959 she worked as a choreographer for the German premiere of Arnold Schönberg's Moses und Aron in West Berlin.

Interest in solo expressive dance declined in the Federal Republic in the 1960s. Hoyer's dance evenings were often no longer noticed by large audiences, while in South America 2500 seats were sold out well in advance every time she appeared. However, the hope of setting up a subsidized dance group there was dashed. In addition, she had an accident in 1954 in which one knee was seriously injured, so that she could often only dance with pain. However, she ignored it and continued to demand the utmost from her body. In 1966 she made a trip through East Asia with The Great Song , was warmly welcomed everywhere, but had the impression that her art was not understood.

She gave her last performance on December 18, 1967 in Berlin, 56 years old, only able to get through the evening with the help of painkillers. She had rented the large hall personally and had done the advertising herself. The program also contained time criticism, for example in Vietnam . However, only a little more than a hundred spectators came. She was left with a mountain of debt. And she knew that with her injured knee she could no longer dance. On December 31, 1967, she took her own life using poison brought from South America.

Selection of their dances

monologue

Breathe space

Feel pleasure

Experience suffering

Fight fear

find silence

Affectos humanos (human passions)

Honor / vanity

desire

Hate

fear

love

History of our time

so far - so far

inevitable

drawn

motorized

Her longing and her power for ecstasy were particularly clearly expressed in:

Boléro to the music of Maurice Ravel . Then she spun in one place for twenty minutes, only with a new shape and an unheard of increasing intensity.

The great song

Dance of Divine Obsession

Dance of pure simplicity

Dance of Brute Violence

Dance of sublime sorrow

Dance of clarifying reflection

Dance of the two faces

Dance of Human Obsession

Some of her dances had something very feminine about them, not just as a theme, but also in their movement and Dore Hoyer's appearance and effect, e.g. B. the cycle Mothers or the dance Ruth from the cycle Biblical Figures .

Very few were cheerful and playful, especially the dance result of their trips to Brazil: South American trip . In the last years of her life, Hoyer worked mainly in South America.

Most of the time, however, it worked right into the body and the costume and the hair was hidden under a tight-fitting cap androgynous , i.e. almost abstract, neither male nor female, very bizarre in posture, steps and gestures, with high jumps and from the feet into the Rhythms that are tumbled rapidly on the ground, like whipped rhythms ( e.g .: Affectos humanos ), on the other hand in a flowing, gold-shimmering robe in far circles around the stage as if flying through eternity ( The great song ).

In 1951 Dore Hoyer was awarded the German Critics' Prize. Among other things, the reasoning states:

“Of all the German dancers of the post-war period, Dore Hoyer is the strongest personality, and with her five-part suite The Great Song as a soloist she created the most important and most complete work of art on the dance stage. What Dore Hoyer represents in her art is modern. ... In the field of German dance after the war it has become what other areas can hardly show, a phenomenon of European format and today in the whole world in importance in modern dance can only be compared with the American Martha Graham . " ( Lit: Müller / Peter / Schuldt, p. 45. )

Aftermath

Dore Hoyer's estate is in the German Dance Archive in Cologne .

A detailed biography and work analysis on Dore Hoyer was published at the end of the 20th century. At the beginning of the 21st century, Frank-Manuel Peter wrote his dissertation on them.

The choreographer and solo dancer Susanne Linke describes Dore Hoyer as the great role model. She worked out the choreography of Affectos humanos from memory, after the film recording of the HR , the existing written records and under the guidance of Dore Hoyer's friend and assistant Waltraud Luley . Arila Siegert reconstructed the dances in Dresden in 1989 after the film was recorded. Waltraud Luley lent her the original costumes for rework. Betsy Fisher, Martin Nachbar and Michaela Fünfhausen also studied the dances of this cycle after the film and with Waltraud Luley in order to perform them. Anja Hirvikallio ( University of Music and Dance Cologne ) recorded the cycle in Labanotation .

In Dresden, Dore-Hoyer-Strasse is a reminder of the dancer.

literature

• Hedwig Müller, Frank-Manuel Peter , Garnet Schuldt: Dore Hoyer. Dancer. Hentrich, Berlin 1992. ISBN 3-89468-012-1 .
• Alexander Rudin:  Hoyer, Dore. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 9, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1972, ISBN 3-428-00190-7 , p. 667 ( digitized version ).
• Garnet Schuldt-Hiddemann: Totally or not at all - Dore Hoyer. In: Amelie Soyka (Ed.): Dancing and dancing and nothing but dancing. Modern dancers from Josephine Baker to Mary Wigman. Aviva, Berlin 2004. ISBN 3-932338-22-7 .

Web links

• Dissertation on Dore Hoyer by Frank-Manuel Peter
• Biography, pictures and estate finding aid, from the German Dance Archive Cologne