Maja Lex

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Maja Lex (born August 23, 1906 in Munich , † October 13, 1986 in Cologne ) was a German dancer, choreographer and teacher. She founded the elementary dance .

Life

From the age of six Maja Lex had regular piano lessons and actually had the desire to become a concert pianist. In 1921 she began to take part in the gymnastics classes of the traveling gymnastics teacher Marie Müller-Brunn . In 1922, after high school graduation , the parents provided their daughter with a bank apprenticeship and home economics training . Maja Lex soon broke both of these.

When Maja Lex entered the Günther School in Munich in 1925, a fate came true for which the absolute focus would be dance. After just 15 months of the planned two or three years of training, she acquired her certificate of teaching qualification for gymnastics. Soon afterwards she became the main teacher alongside Dorothee Günther , Gunild Keetman and Carl Orff at the Günther School in Munich.

Building on the pedagogical-artistic working basis of the Günther School in Munich, Maja Lex was able to develop a completely new dance education with pedagogical-artistic intention from 1926 onwards. Her dance of lively and free movement in constantly emerging rhythmic-dynamic and spatial variants emerged - the “absolute” and “image-free” elementary dance. The congenial collaboration with Gunild Keetman, Carl Orff's musical education and Dorothee Günther's work also contributed to this.

To this day, the focus of the way elementary dance works is body training that smoothly leads into the process of creative work. The technical work is based on differentiated perception processes and experimental experiences of the movement possibilities of one's own body. The so-called structured improvisation represents the connecting element between special forms of training, body, movement and sensory training. It forms the basis for the composition and is an inexhaustible source of inspiration to rediscover and develop the individual movement possibilities again and again.

From 1927 Maja Lex performed with her own choreographies. As a soloist and choreographer of the “Tanzgruppe Günther-München” (director: Dorothee Günther), in collaboration with the musical director of the group, the composer Gunild Keetman, she achieved the decisive breakthrough in 1930 with the “Barbaric Suite”. Numerous guest appearances and awards at home and abroad followed until the school was forcibly closed in 1944 and finally destroyed in 1945.

Maja Lex, whose health has been in very poor health since the early 1940s, moved to Rome in 1948 and lived there with Dorothee Günther in the house of their mutual friend Myriam Blanc . At the beginning of the 1950s, Maja Lex resumed her artistic-educational work and taught a.o. a. at the invitation of Liselott Diem at the German Sport University Cologne . There she taught as a senior lecturer from the mid-1950s to 1976, specializing in elementary dance.

The concept of elementary dance was further developed by her and later in collaboration with her successor Graziela Padilla at the German Sport University Cologne. Educational films and textbooks on elementary dance have been produced since the mid-1970s. Maja Lex was also active as a choreographer and dance group leader during her time in Cologne. Until her death in 1986, the center of her life consisted of elementary dance. Two days before she died, she commented on a slide series from her hospital bed with pictures from her life as a teacher, choreographer and dancer.

source

Iris Haarland: Maja Lex . In: Info-Brief 2000, pages 16–17, ed .: Elementarer Tanz eV - Also in: Karoline von Steinaecker: Air jumps - Beginnings of modern body therapies , page 161, 168f, Munich-Jena 2000

literature

  • Dorothee Günther: The dance as a movement phenomenon . Reinbek 1962
  • Maja Lex, Graziela Padilla: Elementary Dance (Volume 1 to 3). Wilhelmshaven 1988
  • Ilse Loesch: With body and soul - experienced past of expressive dance. Berlin 1990
  • Michael Kugler (ed.): Elementary Dance - Elementary Music: The Günther School Munich 1924 to 1944 . Mainz u. a. 2002.
  • Herrmann Regner, Minna Lange-Ronnefeld: Gunild Keetman . Mainz 2004
  • Karoline von Steinaecker: Jumps in the air - the beginnings of modern body therapies . Munich-Jena 2000

Web links


personal data
SURNAME Lex, Maja
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German dancer, choreographer and teacher
DATE OF BIRTH August 23, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH October 13, 1986
Place of death Cologne