Milča Mayerová

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Hugo Boettinger : Milča Mayerová (1912) in the Oblastní galerie v Liberci
Milča Mayerová and Erwin Schulhoff (1931)
Hugo Boettinger : Milča Mayerová (1932)

Milča Mayerová , actually Milada Mayerová (born April 12, 1901 in Prague ; died September 12, 1977 there ) was a Czech dancer and choreographer.

Life

Milča Mayerová was a granddaughter of the Prague publisher Jan Otto . As a child, she trained at the dance school of Anna Dubska, who had also completed a course with Émile Jaques-Dalcroze in Geneva. Mayerová went to Dalcroze in Hellerau in 1922 , where her uncle, the Prague painter and caricaturist Hugo Boettinger , had already been studying painting in 1912. From autumn 1923 to the end of 1925 Mayerová was trained in the dance forms of expressive dance by Rudolf Laban in Hamburg . Back in Prague she joined the Czech artistic avant-garde and realized the visual implementation of the poem Abeceda in the artist group Devětsil in 1924 with Vítězslav Nezval and Karel Teige , which they also produced together as a book. It was one of the first artistic works that corresponded to the concept of poetism that Teige had propagated since 1923 . Mayerová appeared repeatedly on the country's stages in 1926 and 1927 with the performance of Abeceda . In 1926 she brought Laban, who was staying in Prague, to a guest performance on the stage of the Osvobozené divadlo ( Liberated Theater ).

Mayerová had engagements as an actress in the Osvobozené divadlo and appeared in the Divadlo na Vinohradech and in the Národní divadlo . At the premiere of Vest pocket revue in Osvobozené divadlo in 1927, she appeared on stage with Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich and caricatured the then new dance Charleston with the dancer Saša Machov . In 1928 she designed the choreography for Emil František Burian's music The Bus .

She wrote for the newspaper Národní listy and dance columns for the women's magazine Eva .

Mayerová ran a dance school in Prague until her death, but her hope of establishing her own Laban school in Czechoslovakia was not fulfilled. At the beginning of the 1960s she and her students performed the alphabet again.

In 1936, Mayerová had the architect Jaroslav Fragner build a residential building in the functionalist style in the village of Nespeky , Benešov district .

alphabet

Nezval's poem Abeceda , 24 rhyming quartets each with one letter of the (Latin, not Czech) alphabet, was written in 1922, Nezval was possibly based on the sonnet Voyelles by Arthur Rimbaud . It appeared in the first and only issue of the magazine Disk (Diskus) of the Devětsil group and in 1924 in Nezval's second volume of poetry "Pantomima". The poem was recited by Jarmila Horáková on April 17, 1924 at a soiree in the “Liberated Theater” in Prague, for which Mayerová, with Nezval's support, designed a dance choreography, which she also performed herself. Mayerová did not simply interpret the letters, but stuck to the text of the poems in her pantomime choreography. So she did not bring static images, one per letter, as the book suggests, onto the stage, but interpreted the respective verses.

The choreography was documented by the photographer Karel Paspa, who was engaged by Mayerová. During the production of the volume of poetry, Teige incorporated a photo for each stanza into a typographical collage with the letter and placed it on the opposite page of the book. This integrated "Verbo-Foto-Typ-Form" represents an avant-garde transformation of the idea of ​​the Gesamtkunstwerk. It illustrates the characteristic development of the second half of the twenties from pictorial poems to simple photomontages and typographic compositions with a functionalist character. The book is the first thoroughly photographically documented choreography in the history of modern dance.

The book was published in December 1926 by Otto Verlag in an edition of 2,000 copies, but only some of them could be sold, the mass was squandered.

Publications

  • Vítĕzslav Nezval: Abeceda: Taneční komposice Milči Mayerové . Graphic design by Karel Teige. Photos by Karel Maria Paspa. Prague: Otto, 1926
    • Vítězslav Nezval: Abeceda Translation from Czech into English by Jindřich Toman and Matthew S. Witkovsky. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 2001 ISBN 9780930042882

Posthumous exhibitions of the alphabet

literature

  • Matthew S. Witkovski: Staging language: Milča Mayerová and the Czech book Alphabet , in: The Art bulletin , March 2004, pp. 114–135 jstor
  • Sonia Reisingerová de Puineuf: Devětsil à la page. Le livre ABECEDA et a place dans l'avant-garde tchèque . In: Les Cahiers du Musée national d'Art moderne 78, 2001–2002, pp. 78–87

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Matthew S. Witkovski: Staging language , 2004, p. 122, p. 127f, fn. 36
  2. ^ Matthew S. Witkovski: Staging language , 2004, p. 114, p. 121
  3. ^ Matthew S. Witkovski: Staging language , 2004, p. 114
  4. ↑ a b c Matthew S. Witkovski: Staging language , 2004, p. 115
  5. ^ Matthew S. Witkovski: Staging language , 2004, p. 124
  6. ↑ a b c Milča Mayerová ( Memento of the original dated February 22, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , at the Liberec Museum @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / ogl.cz
  7. ^ Matthew S. Witkovski: Staging language , 2004, footnote 54
  8. ^ Matthew S. Witkovski: Staging language , 2004, p. 126f
  9. ^ Matthew S. Witkovski: Staging language , 2004, fn. 62
  10. ↑ Letní dům Milči Mayerové , at Filmavideo
  11. ^ Matthew S. Witkovski: Staging language , 2004, p. 117
  12. ↑ Zdeněk Pešat : Devětsil and literature , in: Rostislav Švácha : Devětsil: Czech avant-garde art, architecture and design of the 1920s and 30s . Design Museum, London; Museum of Modern Art, Oxford 1990, p. 54
  13. ^ Matthew S. Witkovski: Staging language , 2004, p. 119
  14. ^ Matthew S. Witkovski: Staging language , 2004, p. 121
  15. ↑ Karel M. Paspa (1899-1979), at DNB
  16. ^ Matthew S. Witkovski: Staging language , 2004, p. 115, p. 125
  17. ↑ January K. Čeliš: The Czech avant-garde and the "Constructivist International" , in: Bernd Finkeldey [ed.]: Constructivist International Creative Association, 1922 - 1927, utopias for a European culture . Exhibition Düsseldorf; Hall. Stiftung Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen 1992, pp. 242–247, here: 245f
  18. ^ Matthew S. Witkovski: Staging language , 2004, p. 125
personal data
SURNAME Mayerová, Milča
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mayerová, Milada (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czechoslovak dancer and choreographer
DATE OF BIRTH April 12, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague
DATE OF DEATH September 12, 1977
Place of death Prague