Max Terpis

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Max Terpis (actually Max Pfister , also Max Pfister-Terpis ; born March 1, 1889 in Zurich , Switzerland ; † March 18, 1958 in Zollikon ) was a Swiss dancer , choreographer , director and psychologist . His name Terpis , adopted as an artist, is a partial anagram of his actual name Pfister.

Live and act

Max Terpis was the son of the bookbinder Wilhelm Pfister and his wife Mina geb. Meyer. He studied architecture at the Eidgenössisches Polytechnikum Zürich , worked in architecture offices in Berlin and Paris and after his military service opened his own architecture office in Zurich.

In 1922 he began dance training with Suzanne Perrottet in Zurich and Mary Wigman in Dresden, where he met Harald Kreutzberg , with whom he worked for many years. In 1923 he made his debut as a solo dancer at the Städtische Bühnen Hannover in his own choreography under the direction of Hanns Niedecken-Gebhard in the legendary play The Dancer of Our Lady by Franz Johannes Weinrich and Bruno Stürmer . From 1923 to 1924 he was ballet master in Hanover and from 1924 to 1930 head of the ballet at the State Theater in Berlin . There he appointed Victor Gsovsky as ballet master and staged, among other things, the dance symphony Die Nachtlichen based on music by Egon Wellesz (1924) and the ballets Don Morte based on Edgar Allan Poe and the music by Friedrich Wilckens (1926) and The Last Pierrot based on music by Karol Town Hall (1927). He then founded a dance school with Rolf Arco and was a lecturer at the "German Dance Academy" of the "Reich Academy for Stage Art" in 1937/1938.

In 1939 he returned to Switzerland. In 1940 he worked on the Leopold Lindtberg productions of Faust I and Faust II at the Schauspielhaus Zürich . In 1940/1941 he staged the operas Romeo and Juliet by Heinrich Sutermeister and Madrisa by Hans Haug at the Bern City Theater .

From 1940 to 1944 he was a director at the Stadttheater Basel . There he staged several operas, including Romeo and Juliet and Die Zauberinsel by Heinrich Sutermeister, The Beautiful Helena by Jacques Offenbach, A Masked Ball by Giuseppe Verdi, The Barber of Seville by Gioachino Rossini, La Bohème by Giacomo Puccini, Fidelio by Ludwig van Beethoven , Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss and Idomeneo by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In 1941 he directed William Shakespeare's Hamlet with Leopold Biberti and Eléonore Hirt , and in 1943 he choreographed the mythological dance scenes Kirke by the composer Max Lang . As a guest he has directed at La Scala in Milan and at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona.

From 1944 to 1946 he was the administrative and artistic director of the “collective of Swiss Abroad stage artists”, where he staged the dramas Gyges and his Ring by Friedrich Hebbel (for which he also designed the set), King Oedipus of Sophocles and Iphigenia in Delphi by Gerhart Hauptmann, the Swiss premiere of which took place in 1946 at the Schauspielhaus Zurich. In the same year he published his book Tanz und Tänzer , which was dedicated to his friend Rolf Arco.

From 1945 and 1952 he was teaching choreography and directing at the universities of Zurich and Bern .

He then studied psychology at the Zurich Institute for Applied Psychology . He was particularly concerned with the effect of colors on people's emotions and developed a “color pyramid test” in his diploma thesis, which was further developed by Robert Heiss . In this test, no performance requirements are placed on the subjects .

Filmography

Fonts

  • Dance and dancers. Atlantis, Zurich 1946.

literature

  • Robert Heiß , Hildegard Hiltmann (Ed.): The color pyramid test according to Max Pfister. Huber, Bern 1951.
  • Wolfgang Martin Schede : the play of colors in life. Max Pfister Terpis. Architect dancer psychologist 1889–1958. Atlantis, Zurich 1960.
  • Elisa Frasson: Max Terpis, dance and dancer. Dissertation. University of Venice 2005, OCLC 601339304 .
  • Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller , Klaus Sator : Terpis, Max. In: Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller (Ed.): Man for man. Biographical lexicon on the history of love for friends and male-male sexuality in the German-speaking area. Part 2: Council – Z. Lit, Münster 2010, ISBN 978-3-643-10693-3 , pp. 1165f. ( Google books ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Reto Caluori: Collective of the Swiss Abroad Stage Artists . In: Andreas Kotte (Ed.): Theater Lexikon der Schweiz . Volume 2, Chronos, Zurich 2005, ISBN 3-0340-0715-9 , p. 1016 f.
  2. ↑ Color pyramid test according to Pfister-Heiss. In: Paul Mohr: Color therapies. Pro Business, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-86386-479-8 , p. 34 ( Google books )
  3. ↑ Helmut Enke : The course in clinical psychotherapy. Springer, Berlin 1965. Electronic resource: 2013, ISBN 978-3-642-86179-6 , p. 58 ( Google books ).
personal data
SURNAME Terpis, Max
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pfister, Max (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss dancer, choreographer, director and psychologist
DATE OF BIRTH March 1, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Zurich , Switzerland
DATE OF DEATH March 18, 1958
Place of death Zollikon