Julia Marcus

Julia Marcus (also Julia Tardy-Marcus , born December 24, 1905 in St. Gallen , died July 17, 2002 in Champcueil , Île-de-France ) was a Swiss expressive dancer and choreographer , dance critic and translator. She became successful as a grotesque dancer and dance pantomime with political and socially critical parodies.

life and work

Julia Marcus is the daughter of the Swiss music teacher Otto Marcus (1878–1942) and Christine Wilhelmine Julie Marcus, née Brink. After her parents divorced, she had to drop out of school at the age of 13 and was sent by her mother to an embroidery factory where she did unskilled work. In the evening she attended a trade school, learned shorthand and typing . She spent her free time with her brother in the youth movement " Wandervogel ".

She decided to become a dancer after seeing a dramatized version of Johanna Spyri 's children's books Heidi in the Stadttheater St. Gallen , which was performed with dance interludes by dancers from the Émile-Jaques-Dalcroze School. She took dance lessons from the Dalcroze teacher Margrit Forrer-Birbaum. She earned the necessary money as a nude model . This was considered offensive, but the 16-year-old Julia Marcus soon danced in the Forrer-Birbaum ensemble at performances. From 1923 to 1925 she trained in movement art with Suzanne Perrottet at Rudolf von Laban's school in Zurich. She then became a student of Mary Wigman in Dresden, from whom she received a diploma in 1927. During the Swiss Exhibition for Women’s Work in Bern in 1928, she presented her first own choreography with the solo “Ägyptisches Lied”.

From 1927 to 1933 she was a member of the classical ballet ensemble of the Deutsche Oper Berlin . On the side she appeared as a dance pantomime in the cabaret "Die Wespen" founded by Leon Hirsch . She increasingly worked her political convictions as a communist into her appearances. She mostly danced in grotesquely large masks designed for her by the Berlin artist Erich Goldstaub. In her "Hitler Parody" she hopped across the stage as a living swastika for the march of the gladiators . In the " Cabaret of the Comedians " on Kurfürstendamm, she parodied the American blackface actor Al Jolson with a huge mask . The repertoire also included the number “The Sewing Machine”, in which she imitated the mechanical pedaling rhythm and exhaustion of a seamstress. From September 1931 to January 1933 she was regularly seen with avant-garde dance parodies in Werner Finck's cabaret “ Die Katakombe ”. Her last piece was the furious "Waltz 1933", in which she turned a handbag into a gas mask that at the end covered her face.

Through the “ Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service ” of April 1933, all those suspected of being “politically unreliable” or of Jewish descent lost their jobs in schools and theaters. Julia Marcus, who was considered a “ half-Jewish ” under National Socialism , was dismissed from the opera ensemble for “anti-state sentiments”. The opportunity to leave the country legally offered her participation in a choreography competition in Warsaw in autumn 1933, where she received an award for the best grotesque dance ( Gandhi and the British lion ). The German press called their appearance a "value-destroying performance".

Julia Marcus emigrated via Poland to Paris, where she initially lived illegally and penniless without a visa. She kept her head above water with small appearances and lived with other emigrants in a cheap hotel. For a year and a half she gave gymnastics lessons in a sanatorium and was able to work at times as a lecturer at Jean-Louis Barrault's pantomime school . In 1936 she danced with the American dancer and choreographer Jérôme Andrews at the Théâtre de la Gaîté , and in 1937 she appeared in a humorous dance performance at the Grand Guignol Theater on Pigalle . In the jazz club Bal Nègre on Montparnasse , she soon belonged to a circle around Jacques Prévert and Robert Desnos , where she met the French engineer Daniel Tardy. In 1938 she married him. The marriage offered her protection during the German occupation of France in World War II . When in 1942 Jews in France had to wear the yellow star and the Gestapo increased controls , she only appeared occasionally as a soloist with short comedic pieces or with other dancers. She had several appearances with Valeska Gert . Your last choreography was "En attendant la pluie."

After the war, Julia Marcus gave up dancing. She stayed in Paris and began to write dance and theater reviews for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung , the St. Galler Tagblatt and French literary magazines. She translated books on dance and political literature from French into German and vice versa, including Joseph Wulf's biography on Martin Bormann ( Martin Bormann, l'ombre de Hitler , Gallimard 1962). In memory of the Russian dancer Tatjana Barbakoff who was murdered in Auschwitz , she donated a dance award in 1986 and a translation award in 1988 in honor of Nelly Sachs , with whom she was friends. In 1990 she dedicated a memorial created by Mechtild Kalisky to her friend Robert Desnos in the Paris suburb of Massy, ​​where she lived until her death.

supporting documents

literature

• Christine Wyss: Tardy-Marcus, Julia. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Marianne Forster: Julia Marcus , in: Andreas Kotte (Ed.): Theaterlexikon der Schweiz, Chronos Verlag Zürich 2005, Volume 2, p. 1173, also online .
• “A nice present” Magdalena Kemper in conversation with Julia-Tardy-Marcus . In: Denny Hirschbach, Sonia Nowoselsky (Hrsg.): Between departure and persecution. Women artists of the twenties and thirties , Verlagzeichen und traces, Bremen 2002, ISBN 978-3-924588-23-6 , pp. 207–216
• Julia Marcus , in: Jacqueline Robinson: Modern Dance in France. An Adventure 1920-1970 , Routledge, London 1998, ISBN 978-90-5702-015-5 , pp. 143-144

Web links

• Hans-Peter Litscher: Pas de deux with polyphonic chants, Allegro ma non troppo , Neue Zürcher Zeitung, August 9, 2008
• Richard Butz: Dancer against Hitler , St. Galler Tagblatt, August 27, 2008
• Katja Nicodemus : “That would have been in bed” , Taz, January 16, 1995