Hanya Holm

Hanya Holm (born March 3, 1893 in Worms , † November 3, 1992 in New York City ; born Johanna Josepha Eckert ) was a German-American dancer , choreographer and dance teacher of modern dance .

Live and act

Hanya Holm was born in March 1893 under the name Johanna Josepha Eckert as the daughter of the restaurateur Valentin Eckert and his wife Marie Eckert, née Mörschell, in Worms. From 1914 she studied piano with Dr. Hoch's Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main . Then she went to the New School in Hellerau , which had emerged in 1919 from the Educational Institute for Music and Rhythm founded by Émile Jaques-Dalcroze in 1911 . In 1921 she joined Mary Wigman , who had owned a school in Dresden since 1920 .

As a dancer and teacher, Holm became one of her most important collaborators. She was involved in Wigman's works Feier (1928) and Totenmal (1930). In 1931 she went to New York and opened the Mary Wigman School there. In 1936 her Hanya Holm Studio emerged, which became one of the leading institutes for modern dance in the USA.

Also in 1936 she founded her own dance group, with which she first appeared in Denver and moved to the United States in the following years. She created the choreographies Trend (1937, Bennington College), Metropolitan Daily (1938, Bennington College) and Tragic Exodus (1939, Vivian Fine, New York). These were pieces that were critical of the times and society.

In 1941 she founded the Center of the Dance in the West in Colorado Springs . Until 1983 she held annual summer courses there. Holm now turned increasingly to the musical . As part of the Ballet Ballads , she choreographed her first musical ballet The Eccentricities of Davey Crockett in 1948 . This was followed by choreographies for the musicals Kiss me, Kate (1948), My Darlin 'Aida (1952), My Fair Lady (1956), Where's Charley (1957) and Camelot (1960).

In 1961 she became the director of the dance department at the New York Musical Theater Academy. She also taught at the prestigious Juilliard School in New York. In 1967 she closed her Hanya Holm studio. Her students included Valerie Bettis , Lillian Moore, Glen Tetley , Alwin Nikolais, and Jeff Duncan.

literature

• Horst Koegler : Holm, Hanya , in: Horst Koegler, Helmut Günther : Reclams Ballettlexikon . Philipp Reclam jun., Stuttgart 1984, ISBN 3-15-010328-2 , p. 208.
• Veronik Heimkreitner: "Hanya Holm, A Life for Dance", in: Veronik Heimkreitner, Ulrike Schäfer (ed.): Wormserinnen , Worms Verlag, Worms 2016, ISBN 978-3-944380-56-8 , pp. 116-122 .

Web links

• Hanya Holm in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Hanya Holm in the Internet Broadway Database (IBDb)