Maria Ley

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Photo by Franz Xaver Setzer , 1925

Maria Ley (born August 1, 1898 in Vienna as Friederike Flora Czada ; † October 14, 1999 in New York City ) was a dancer, choreographer, director and teacher for dance .

Life

Maria Ley was the daughter of the Hungarian city architect Edmund von Czada (1861–1920) and the Bohemian pianist Frederike Brunswick de Corrompa (née Schuldes, 1876–1916) from Bodenbach . Maria Ley was trained as a dancer in the style of Fanny Elßler in Vienna . In the 1920s she performed in Vienna, Paris, on the Côte d'Azur , in Berlin and in the United States. Between 1924 and 1929 she worked with Max Reinhardt . She received her doctorate in 1934 from the Sorbonne in Paris and was the author of poems, novels and plays.

Ley was married three times, his first marriage in the early 1920s to the Austrian officer Robert Emanuel Bauer from the Czech Republic, and his second marriage from April 1928 to Frank Gerhard Deutsch (1899–1934), the son of the industrialist and co-founder of AEG Felix German and Lilly Kahn from Berlin. Her third marriage was in April 1937 in Neuilly-sur-Seine with the German director and representative of the political theater Erwin Piscator (1893-1966).

After emigrating to the United States at the turn of the year 1938/39, she was a professor at New York's New School for Social Research . With Erwin Piscator she founded the Dramatic Workshop at the New School in 1940 ; Students included Harry Belafonte , Tony Curtis , Marlon Brando , Tony Randall and Walter Matthau . After Piscator left the United States in 1951, she temporarily took over the leadership of the workshop and was still a senior lecturer at several US universities.

For personal and professional reasons, she did not follow her husband to Germany in the 1950s, but remained closely associated with him throughout his life and visited him regularly. In memory of Erwin Piscator, she maintained a “Piscator Foundation” in New York in the 1970s and 1980s and in 1986 donated the “Erwin Piscator Award”.

Honorary grave of Maria Ley and Erwin Piscator in the forest cemetery Berlin-Zehlendorf .

Publications

  • Maria Ley: The dancing self . C. Konegen, Vienna 1924.
  • Maria Ley - German: Le Gueux chez Victor Hugo . Droz, Paris 1936 (Bibliothèque de la Fondation Victor Hugo; 4).
  • Maria Ley-Piscator: Lot's Wife . Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis 1954 [in Hebrew translation 1956; in Spanish translation 1958].
  • Maria Ley-Piscator: The Piscator Experiment. The Political Theater. James H. Heineman, New York 1967 (3rd edition 1979).
  • Maria Piscator, Jean-Michel Palmier: Piscator et le Théâtre Politique . Avec 8 planches hors texte. Payot, Paris 1983.
  • Maria Ley-Piscator: The dance in the mirror. My life with Erwin Piscator . Wunderlich, Reinbek near Hamburg 1989.

TV reports

  • Gero von Boehm : Exchange of words . Pas de deux of the arts. Gero von Boehm interviews Maria Ley Piscator . Südwestfunk 1988 (Südwest 3 premiere: July 1st, 1988).
  • Helmar Harald Fischer: Dancing I - Maria Ley-Piscator's life and legacy . Sender Free Berlin 1997 (90 min.).
  • Rosa von Praunheim : Dolly, Lotte and Maria - Rosa von Praunheim visits three German women in New York. Norddeutscher Rundfunk 1986/87 (ARD premiere: February 16, 1987).

literature

  • Peter Diezel: Lead soldiers and a largely unknown piece of Maria Ley-Piscator: The Giant of Flanders . In: Klaus Siebenhaar (Ed.): "The language of images". Hermann Haarmann on his 60th birthday . B & S Siebenhaar, Berlin 2006, pp. 87-100.
  • Helmar Harald Fischer: Humiliated, incapacitated and disinherited. The scandalous story of Maria Ley, the widow of the great German director Erwin Piscator . In: Frankfurter Rundschau , November 27, 1993.
  • Henry Marx (Ed.): Erwin Piscator. Letters from Germany. 1951-66. To Maria Ley-Piscator . Collaboration with Richard Weber. Prometh, Cologne 1983.
  • Detlef Friedrich: Persistent pirouette. Maria Ley Piscator turns one hundred in New York . In: Berliner Zeitung , August 1, 1998

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Czada was together with his brother, the architect Franz Czada, builder of the women's bath (1894) in the Central-Bad and with his partner Barak construction manager of the Volksbühne in 1912, today's Renaissance-Theater ( Theater der Jugend ) in the Neubaugasse.
personal data
SURNAME Ley, Maria
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian dancer
DATE OF BIRTH August 1, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH October 14, 1999
Place of death New York City