Gertrud Kraus

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Gertrud Kraus «Das Biest / Grotesk Tanz» by Martin Imboden 1929

Gertrud Kraus ( Hebrew גרטרוד קראוס; born May 5, 1901 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary ; died November 23, 1977 in Tel Aviv ) was a dancer and choreographer . Together with Grete Wiesenthal and Gertrud Bodenwieser, she was one of the reformers of free dance in Vienna in the twenties and thirties and later one of the founders of modern Israeli dance culture.

Life

Gertrud Kraus grew up as the second of four children in a Jewish family in Vienna. Her father, Leopold Kraus, born in the then Kingdom of Bohemia in 1870 , and her mother, Olga Neubauer, born around 1876, married in Prague in 1899.

Kraus grew up in Vienna. She studied piano at the Academy for Music and Performing Arts . As a pianist, she accompanied silent films and the dance lessons of Ellinor Tordis (1895–1973), a well-known figure on the Viennese independent dance scene, who had a background in educational reform in Munich a. a. trained with Alexander Sacharoff . Through Tordis she recognized the expressive potential of dancing. After graduating in music in 1922, Kraus studied modern dance with Gertrud Bodenwieser for two years . After a few months as a dancer in the Bodenwieser dance group, she left her teacher to work independently.

Act

In 1924 Gertrud Kraus began to choreograph solos. She showed her first solo creations as early as 1924, and she brought out her first dance evening of her own in front of an audience at the end of 1925 in a hall she rented herself in the Hofburg ; it was a great success. In 1927 she opened a dance studio on Mariahilfer Straße and founded her own dance group. She choreographed in the style of expressionist or free dance, which is based on feelings and her own experience, and established herself as one of the leading expressive dancers in Vienna. Some of her "comically grotesque" solo creations such as vodka or guignol became the basis of her repertoire, which she performed in guest appearances all over Europe and Palestine until the mid-1930s .

Kraus was interested in social and political questions. She became a Zionist and at the same time represented progressive socialist views. In their opinion, both of these would bring society closer to the ideals of freedom and justice. She combined her choreographies with sociopolitical statements and traditional Jewish culture.

At the Wiener Festwochen 1929 she was, together with Gisa Geert, chief assistant to Rudolf von Laban for the staging of the monumental pageant of the trade . And she performed her solo The Jewish Boy , about which Fred Hildenbrandt wrote in the Berliner Tageblatt that it was precisely the foundations of traditional Jewish cultural assets that gave Gertrud Kraus' dance a depth and weight that other choreographers who are too focused on their ego miss let. In 1930 she took part in an international dance congress in Munich, at which the great artists of modern dance were also represented, including Laban and Mary Wigman , and performed the cycle ghetto songs to music by Joseph Achron with her dancers . On the evening of March 5, 1933, when the National Socialists won the majority in Germany in the Reichstag, Gertrud Kraus and her dancers performed the world premiere of the dance drama The city waits after a story by Maxim Gorki and to music by Marcel Rubin on the stage of the adult education center Stöbergasse. In the work Kraus presented a modern metropolis as a fascinating but dangerous place and foresaw the Holocaust. The Viennese dancer Fritz Berger (1911–1980) created an Egyptian pharaoh as a tyrant, alluding to Hitler. It was probably the last major world premiere that Kraus brought out in Vienna.

Memorial plaque for Gertrud Kraus on the house where she lived and worked in Tel Aviv

During a Zionist congress in Prague in 1933 , she applied to the Jewish Agency for Israel to immigrate to Palestine. After the Nazi coup attempt in Austria in 1934, she emigrated and came to Tel Aviv in 1935.

She soon opened her own studio and founded the GK Dance Group , which became the permanent modern dance company of the Tel Aviv Volksoper during World War II . With her keen understanding of music, Gertrud Kraus also created group choreographies based on scores of classical music such as The Poet's Dream for the first movement from Franz Schubert's Unfinished Symphony , originally as an 'insert' in a performance at the Tel Aviv Volkstheater in 1940. During the 1940s she created works for the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra under the title Tune and Dance . Between 1941 and 1947 she worked at the Habimah and the Ohel Theater . In 1948 she spent a year of training in the USA. Her meeting with Agnes de Mille , Martha Graham and Antony Tudor influenced her: If her style was previously experimental and abstract and emphasized personal movement and body language, she now became aware of the importance of technology. Under this impression, she founded the Israel Ballet Theater in 1950, with which she introduced a modern American dance style. In 1962 she became the first director of the dance department of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance . She had retired as an active dancer since the 1950s, focusing on teaching and turning to sculpture and painting.

Gertrud Kraus also regularly traveled to kibbutzim and contributed to the integration of expressive dance into their everyday life. Since 1953 it has belonged to the artist village En Hod at the invitation of Marcel Janco .

Award

Choreographies (selection)

Solos

  • Dance to Bach's aria in G major (1927)
  • The Jewish Boy (performance at the Wiener Festwochen 1929)
  • Guignol
  • vodka
  • Shulamit (1946)

Group choreographies

supporting documents

personal data
SURNAME Kraus, Gertrud
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-Israeli expressive dancer, choreographer and dance teacher
DATE OF BIRTH May 5, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH November 23, 1977
Place of death Tel Aviv