​Biography

(1900 – 1981) 

Bartenieff studied with Rudolf Laban in the 1924/5 and left for Germany after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. She soon became involved in dance notation and helped establish the Dance Notation Bureau in New York. She studied with Warren Lamb and integrated his notion of Shape and Space into her BESS (Body Effort Shape Space). In America she studied physical therapy and became a pioneer of dance therapy. Her own approach to movement is called Bartenieff Fundamentals. 

Summary of Interview

She first met Laban in 1924/5. A moving evocation of life under the Nazis after March 1933. 

Her first experiments with Labanotation between ’36 and ’38 leading to the creation of the Dance Notation Bureau. Hanya Holm and how she managed to integrate Wigman’s aesthetic within American dance. Warren Lamb and the development of Effort Shape. Judith Kestenberg’s development of Laban’s ideas (via Lamb). The development of Bartenieff Fundamentals. The importance of Laban’s German books. Her family background. Life during World War I.

 

Tape 64

IB: When I came here I met on the first night in the house of a German refugee, Irma Otte Betz who was Viennese girl married to an American. And she was an architect. We made friends because she was burningly interested in notation. 

 

JH: What year was that? 

 

IB: Pardon? 

 

JH: What year was that? 

 

IB: It was 1936. 

 

JH: The year of the Olympic Games.

 

IB: Over a year together, by 1938 we had the first studies in Laban notation to be published here. You didn’t know about it? 

 

JH: No. What were they? 

 

IB: We did it in our self-publication. We printed about 1,000 copies. Then we cut a profit. I tried to get back to Germany to get my children. And I asked them what the real [something about Russian or Prussian? inaudible]. As my friend Irma Otte Betz used to put it, He is the kind of Russian for whom waiting is an occupation. But while I was away we lived sort of in … Irma Otte-Betz had a very small apartment. So she had asked me to store this big box of printed things and our, which was also one room only. My husband decided to move to some other place and he forgot the box there and it went into the garbage truck. And we had only about fifty that were in circulation, and those that Betz had in her house. So that was such a terrible blow for all of us. But I was rude. I was really rude in every sense of the word. Because Otte- Betz didn’t want anything to do with me anymore and as far as John Martin was concerned, and also him. And now the other tragedy happened. As we moved to Pittsville because they had to start his practice in re-adaptation there. So then, two year later, she came down with a very rapid spread of cancer. And the saddest thing was that she also in her last month, she said she didn’t want to see me. She called John Martin to her hospital bed and asked him to take all the papers and all the whatever was left of that edition, I had one for myself only. And so then, and you know I had all kinds of things that I had  brought from Germany, I had such a big box, with the symbols cut out in wood, one of my colleagues had done that for me before I emigrated. She gave it to John Martin personally. She brought it to his country house somewhere in Connecticut. It was just stored and rotted away, as we later found out. And, so she didn’t really take care of it. But I could not enter this… the office of John Martin any more till about five or six years later. Meanwhile I have been mainly doing family [inaudible] work, first, four years in Massachusetts and then in New York. And then of course, meanwhile, yes, and then came Ann Huttchinson, 1942, or something like that, and she got in touch with Hanya Holm, you we had sort of prepared the ground. And John Martin warned her against me. So she did the actual founding of the [Dance Notation] Bureau, was Ann Hutchinson, what’s her name Rodgers and another girl from … Henrietta Greenwood, she used to be called in her youth, but she has another married name now, which will come back to me. And those three are the official founders of the Dance Notation Bureau, which was ‘43/’44. 

 

JH: And was housed in Hanya’s studio? 

 

IB: Yes. Well, it was not exactly Hanya’s studios, but it was the headquarters for courses. Ann had her first thing in the elevator shaft of a house on 8th Avenue and 8th Street and it was in the back room of the studio that Joffrey was to have. We connected with the early choreographically

 

JH: When did it go to Hanya then? 

 

IB: She only allowed to have courses taught in that situation, it was not a closer connection. Because there [inaudible few words] … I kept on teaching there. Then Ann came into that. That was the story. 

 

[break in tape]

 

IB: In Germany just at a time I was emigrating and she belonged … that’s where the three founders – Helen Rodgers, Henrietta Greenwood and Ann Hutchinson. 

 

JH: Ann Hutchinson came when? 

 

IB: Around 1942. 

 

JH: This is 1940. 

 

IB: What was the time? 

 

JH: The time was June 1940. 

 

[break in tape]

 

JH: Who translated the first, the Laban notation idea? That was in ’38 was it? 

 

IB: You see, when I came in ’36 I met Irma Betz and she was of course Graham, because she had studied by the first correspondence course that Suzanna Ivers had developed for Laban. Knust was not involved in that correspondence course, it was Suzanna Ivers and it was very incomplete and so on. Irma Betz was very shaky in her knowledge, so she grabbed me immediately and we worked, we worked first in the summer of ’36 from June till the end of August there, and we lectured together in Columbia, in the Vermont College, what do you call it, Bennington College, where they all were. I met John Martin, I met Martin Green, I met the girl that… at the Julliard School, you know. What’s her name? 

 

VB: Martha Hill? 

 

IB: Martha Hill – they were all there that summer. It was a very important summer for the American dance. And what was John Martin doing there? You know that he originally was in acting? And he then, you see, he felt to be more than just a dance critic. He felt he was a creator of the American dance style. That’s why he makes all the remarks about the existence of this dance. At the height when they thought they were creating really the American dance, with no other influence. So they were actually very hostile. And the reason that Hanya Holm had succeeded was she happened to be a very vigorous, dynamic personality that could sort of easily adapt. And she was in a Wigman robe, you know, who could very easily adapt to that vigorous, abstract style, between Humphrey, Wigman and Graham. She was a new element. There is a very famous column, to me very famous column where , and I do not know who it was, somewhere, four or five years after this, when she came, where John Martin praised her how she had found immediately the connection to the American soil. And I did not succeed because I had a very soft movement and represented sort of what they would call the worst of Laban style. And you see, the point was that already, the point that Irma Betz made, was that she said, ‘It’s not an outcome of Laban’s style of dance, it’s really something that goes way beyond that, it is universal in its application.’ She always had that thought when I lectured, I also emphasised that quite a lot. So they accepted me only on the grounds of association. That it was all wiped out by the fall of ’39, of ’38. In November I made this trick to get my children out of Germany. They were still there. And then I came back and that happened.

 

[break in tape]

 

JH: How did you go on developing your own approach towards it from that point? 

 

IB: You see, I met Ann in about 1944.

 

JH: You can had been cut off from the Bureau up until that point? 

 

IB: yes. I met her while I was in [inaudible] I went to the Principal of that [inaudible], so I met her, we met on the street on the road up to the [inaudible] and we discovered that we were both very interested in notation and she had heard about me. 

 

JH: And you had heard about her? 

 

IB: yes, I had heard a little bit that she was trained by Lisa and Jooss, and through Laban. And all of that. So she invited me to contribute to the Bureau, to what I could spare of my energy. You see, I came here with the complete translation of the L’art d’ecrire la danse of Feuillet that I had done together with Knust before I emigrated. And a number of these dances of [inaudible], I had already translated and also published by my own printing a minuet by Taubert. Another entry was the historical dance because my husband and I had done also reconstructions of those. But that even, that also didn’t really work because we couldn’t make a living out of it. 

 

JH: You translated Feuillet into Laban notation? 

 

IB: The whole L’art d’ecrire la danse. 

 

JH: And that’s been published? 

 

IB: Yes. You see, when I, a few years later, when the Notation Bureau became a little bit known, I tried to approach several publishers. Now, of course, everybody reads [inaudible] and doesn’t need a transcription into Laban notation. [inaudible sentence] … they have not a competition, they have not the same opinion of it. I, of course, was … then Knust at the Folkwangschule worked with Gisele Renber on some of these dances also. So he had published some of the things, but not the L’art d’écrire. That was never published. It rests as a manuscript in the Bureau. So these were sort of… but it had to do … I just had to succeed at my first thing. In America that is the point, really the point. But you see, by 1945 I was back in New York and of course in 1944 I had met Ann and she invited me to come to meetings because she had sort of a favourable impression in spite of the warnings of Irma Betz. And then I contributed a lot to all those and did some work, I was in all the discussions on the development of the notation. 

 

[What follows, up to 00.37 is an account of the development of the Dance Notation Bureau, New York]

IB and Warren Lamb

IB: Laban sent me to Warren Lamb, but I studied with Warren Lamb almost four or five consecutive summers. I came for two or three weeks and had almost daily lessons with him. And then I came once [inaudible] and had a few lessons from Valerie [Preston Dunlop] and a few lessons from Marion [North] and took part of classes, after a lot of struggle, they allowed me to do in the middle of the semester. But meanwhile I had of course to apply the whole Effort thing in my rehabilitation work. 

 

JH: Did you get most inspiration from Warren than from others?

[00.37.54 - How IB Developed her take on Effort Shape Through Warren Lamb

IB: Yes, the most. And I want to tell you something that I discussed also yesterday with my co-author/editor. You see, we had last Spring, when Marion came for the second time. She couldn’t sit down with all of us as though it was a matter of New York getting people together. She wanted really to know why we speak of it as a [team, cheat? inaudible]. So I said, she is very good with the symbols, of course it was the first thing I met with. And it took me the whole summer where I took a course for Marion and I talked to Warren, by 1956 or so, or ’57, to understand how they used the whole Effort, and what was their relationship to Space Harmony and Shape and all of that. And you see, I had always thought of, because of [inaudible], that the whole concept of Shape is based on the affinities. You see, this whole assessment rests on the fact of the interrelationship of the orbits of Shaping, it continues only the orbit of it, then it began to dawn on me that because he had that specific focus of executive behaviour, that he couldn’t do anything with direction. This was not what worked to define the adaptation in, the spatial adaptation. I took this always for spatial adaptation what he called Shape, which I think is right. Because otherwise the affinities, you know, that go together with the dimensional scale, only that he enlarged it into the orbit, planar movement as the decisive kind. So then I began to see also that Warren Lamb stressed variation Effort, the points where changes occurred, where transitions occurred. Into what did they change? While Marion collected all the possibilities of combination which gave her the access to the inner attitudes which Warren Lamb simply did not consider. Then it began to dawn on me what Laban had always done, that he gave to the people what he thought the people needed, or what they could digest at that time. But meanwhile in the visit of Marion North also was Kestenberg who had been corresponding with Warren Lamb who had been seeing him before, already two summers and taking sessions with him, and paid him very well for that. So I began to see that, I began to see two things: 1. That the kind of thing that Laban promotes is that the whole framework of concept is a very elastic framework and that already, without fully realising that, in my training of people I had always emphasised, I consider you understand the Laban concept. If you recognise that also in applications, you know, ‘What has been used’? But that was a slow process to get them to that point, you know. They got only confused. But Marion North says this and Warren Lamb says that. But you see, I was forced into, I do even count that as a special merit of mine, but the circumstances here in America forced me to think harder and to put it into perspective. But I think, I taught my really first official course in Effort and Space Harmony, and at that time many things I had to dig out from the past and have only talked to myself because in my work I thought in space, as soon as I got notice of the Effort I merely translated that into my rehabilitation work. And when I found different solutions, unconventional, I was met with the idea, ‘She’s just a very intuitive person.’ Well, you couldn’t talk about principles to the rehabilitation people. So, you see that was a sort of hard school, but which I am increasingly recognising, is a very good school. [00.44.25]

 

JH: Were you able to explain to Marion? 

 

IB: Nothing. [David? inaudible] understood better, much better. In fact, he is deeply interested in sort of what I call fundamentals. You see I am the last person to want to be understood because I have not been understood for over twenty years, so it doesn’t really matter in one way. But I am also … knowing Laban. You see, I had to fend on my own and forced me to find things that I hadn’t known before and kept me also curious all the time to discover something I hadn’t known and that goes on still, really now. When I read every half year when I read Mastery of Movement or in Choreutics, I hadn’t understood before, which has deepened. And because I also have seen now many things in the ethnic and in the behaviour, that has really created many connections. So I didn’t get stuck with one particular thing that Laban had taught me. You see that was my… 

 

JH: I think that’s one of the problems about the English period of Laban, that he didn’t ever give anybody a broad vision. 

 

IB: I know that.

 

JH: But it’s very frightening because they’ve all taken a bit and have pursued, developed it even, but not understood it in a total context and I think that’s a quality of English thinking, of the people that Laban came across, and I think this is one of the things that a German mind, I find that amongst all the German women that Laban was linked with, a much wider philosophical appreciation. 

 

IB: Like Sylvia [Bodmer]. Sylvia is … that paper. Did you hear that paper in the conference… I was just …

 

JH: It’s a pity that Lisa didn’t come and contribute. It was a great mistake. 

 

IB: In the last visit … it was not good… [inaudible]

 

JH: of course, but you see, that’s a pity that Lisa didn’t sit down, hadn’t sat down and thought it through. 

 

IB: Yes, she could do better. 

 

JH: She wouldn’t have Sylvia’s thinking capacity, but she could have a lot of understanding, Sylvia wouldn’t have. 

 

IB: Well, she could a much more… going a lot deeper, which would 

 

JH: I don’t think anybody in the English scene has got that understanding. They all know Laban in a post-War Laban and don’t understand the roots.

 

IB: You see that’s why I come back to, all the time translating from the early books Laban wrote. I have now this last year I started Dance and Gymnastics. I mean there are two quotes in that article, beautiful. 

 

JH: I mean the good thing about all Laban’s thinking and writing is that it’s pretty well basic. He always returns to first principles and that’s what he … he may here and there want to change, alter, modify but he never totally supersedes. 

 

IB: And you see. Now if Lisa and Marion attack us here for Effort Shape, I feel about that, that Laban, I feel that he, in a way, like me, feels to the last moment of our lives we think we are making new connections. So he didn’t want too early to connect really. He had that concept of the dynamosphere in contrast to the spatial icosahedron, or anything of that kind. He had set already the stage for the interconnection of Effort and spatial pattern, you know, if you want to call it that way. But he didn’t want to be nailed down by that, you know. But you see on my justification for using that Shape concept is that of course it is not quite fully even fulfilling what we have to deal with. Because you see in a developmental thing you deal with pre-Shape, you deal with pre-Directional movement and that’s why, where the Shapeful concept for them is tremendously useful to us. And if you would listen to the tapes in the discussion of three of my colleagues with David McKittrick, it went for two hours. It circled around this concept of Shape-Flow of Shaping, of Shape, of Space Harmony. 

 

JH: Why is time left out? 

Judith Kestenberg and the Kestenberg Movement Profile

IB: We didn’t, we had no bones to break or to do middle at as far as Effort was concerned. But it was the concept of the spatial, you know, that Laban, that Warren Lamb had deduced this spatial to orbit, you know, and that we had felt already that the dimensional things in babies, young children’s movement, that the orbits were not yet developed, you know. You see, our first correspondence with Kestenberg was really … and Warren Lamb, was that we tried to define the biological rhythms. We used full Efforts, you know, and all kinds of things, for things like urinating and defecating and … that was sort of… Kestenberg had sort of an idea that somewhere in these rhythms lay the … lay something in the organisation of rhythms in the human body which is a very, which is, to me, a very acceptable idea. And so, inner rhythm, you know and she developed that what she called tension-flow. Have you ever seen her recording sheets? 

 

JH: No

 

IB: Well, you will. She saw - this is really fantastic – you see when I met Kestenberg… Let me digress at the moment and then go back. I had met Kestenberg. She had been writing sort of codes of movement and then she had read some place about Laban and she looked for some Laban person. She had first thought Betty Meredith Jones. Betty Meredith Jones refused to work with her. She was really too narrow in that sense. So, then I think I, 

 

[Break in tape 00.53.25 – 00.54.05]

 

IB: … a completely Freudian trained analyst. A psychiatrist with a doctorate. 

 

JH: what’s her special area of investigation? 

 

Kestenberg and Freud

IB: Child development. And she is… I think she has really a parallel… and she wanted to develop a kind of developmental scheme that would parallel Anna Freud’s developmental scheme. So she was, in way, structurally-bound. She had to fit her movement discoveries into that model, somehow. And it showed in their first interpretation was very much Freudian, anal and clonic stuff. But gradually, over the years, it was clear, it became clear to us who watched it, and some people in our circles, were deadly set against her, but I began to see that if you did think of these patterns just as a pattern, they did appear in a certain sequence that was developmental, you know. And the emphasis was towards control of the bladder, then together that a child can also run and start a movement, these kind of connections that she made and a number of others in that line that I felt they were very significant because certainly, I could go along without making speaking of clonic rhythms in babies, but I am beginning to see now that there are maybe really clonic rhythms in babies already, because when you compare girls and boys. But we not have the right words for that, really. I mean the Freudian term is just too, too limiting, because it has acquired a certain connotation. But you see now, after using this nearly twenty years, because it was in the ‘50s when I began to work with her, the second part of the fifties, that she tells me, ‘This last summer I had a long talk.’ We have now occasionally long talks when we ... There came a point when it was impossible to work with her because she was overwhelmingly Freudian interpretive.  [Inaudible] we took, and that turned her off Marion very much when we visited in England because she was too ready always to do the interpretation and not seek the movement tension. But now she tells me she spent three summer studying in Kibbutz, children in families growing up in Israel, she tells me, this summer she said to me, ‘I do not [Inaudible] Freud’s interpretation any more. I see all the evidence that makes me interpret any movement. And I found that very significant. On that basis we now have a sort of new-found basis of talking with each other. Not that we ever had bad relationship, but it was sort of intolerable, it was just intolerable. Of course Marion is turned off by her

 

JH: Still? 

 

[break in tape] 

 

IB: And this great refinement. I think she does a lot more than the profile of Warren Lamb, because she investigates several aspects.

 

[break in tape]

 

JH: How did Force [?] develop? 

 

IB: Around 1960 a committee that consisted of Elizabeth and various department heads of academic dance, not of anybody of the Ballet companies or even … well Martha Graham and people were not directly involved but …

 

[break in tape]

 

Description of her course

IB: They had a course of three terms … we had worked out a programme that in Space Harmony you cover a certain amount that leads into the Ikosaeder [icosahedron] and into peripheral scales. In Effort you cover everything, Flow concepts, to full Efforts, to incomplete Efforts and Drives.  We are supposedly to discuss that; what we call our training programme. Because in some ways we seem to … of course you see our course is… and I am very, very aware and at times, it feels very handicapped, we are doing a job of dispensing knowledge of Laban’s theories in a movement illustrated form, in a rather condensed form. All the English people that came and we said, ‘In the first semester we do that and’ – ‘What? You do that already?’ You know, things like that. But I keep on saying, I said, ‘We have negative and positive results with that. And we have only an elite begins to get from this condensed transmission of knowledge, begin to apply either immediately or come back to us, begin to teach with us as co-teachers, or assistants, and then discover the full depths of it, or in their projects. At the end of that time they have to do an independent project that can be anything from composing a choreography to choosing a dancer for a particular choreography to a behavioural project, you know some pure observation project. Anything, but it has to be their own work, you know. We advise them on it. We supervise them also. That shows us that [inaudible] and we find of course that the people that have either a teaching experience or a performing experience or have been a combination of movement and sort of therapeutic approach, a psychological approach, they do best when they apply it in their own field. 

 

[break in tape]

 

JH: How many colleges have the notation? 

 

IB: I am feeling close to one hundred. 

 

JH: And they have a permanent notator on the staff and make it part of their education? 

 

IB: Well, they have a certified teacher on the staff. 

 

JH: certified notation teacher? 

IB: Notation teacher. 

 

JH: certified by the Bureau? 

 

IB: Yes. But notator is a different matter. A notator is a high skill that is like in a conservatory when you train up to performance level, you know. 

 

JH: Except that notation 

 

[break in tape]

 

IB: … bound flow and then I have a little indirectness and a little quickness at the end, you know, so that this kind of curve 

 

JH: And Warren developed that? 

 

IB: And that is beautiful. Of course Warren has not developed this as a sequence so much, but he has made us see how often it may change. He has put us up that variation and change is in the process of any action and what is sort of, and even is very boring, and has no impact you know. Either arousing someone when they are sitting sort of like that, mushy, you know. Doesn’t arouse anybody’s interest or response. 

 

JH: And in fact it’s not mushy, in fact it’s very clear. 

 

IB: Too clear. Too much one [inaudible]

 

JH: Do you think that Laban hadn’t got that far? 

 

IB: Laban has gotten… I mean what Lamb has gotten out of Laban is you expect every moment changes and you see this has for instance, you see how long this all takes. I am ashamed sometimes what I didn’t see back then. 

Bartenieff’s Fundamentals

Now this… but training with 50 people and giving 50 people that background of what I call Fundamentals it only occurred to me that - and you see I was probably also influenced by my physical therapy background – that to speak, certain muscles are tense and you have to do something about to change attention, that is sort of the crust, simplified thing. [inaudible] said that to start in a certain way and do really… pursue a direction or a spatial pattern and that causes the energy and the Effort to change, but what I am trying to have found out in the last two years, which is [inaudible] really do Fundamentals now, a method that people, and you see that they understand the exact nature before the input now. You see, I have for instance, I have a girl that everybody calls very tense, that is by our terms much too general to speak just tense. Now I … lifting the leg lying up, where I see you hollow yourself in order to get a rounder shape she puts in a shrinking. Each time she shrinks first before she does any move. There is where the shape-flow concept is so valuable, because it shows you those not specially definable, not just by Effort-flow definable, little inputs that interfere with the clear development of the shape of the movement.  And this kind of thing. So I see initiation is the … which is a Laban concept…

 

[break in tape]

Gertrud Loeszer

IB: So as Loeszer taught Eukinetics, the ‘how’ of the movement in which was included into thinking about transference of weight as one of the expressive things, weight distribution is an expressive factor, you know. She would probably easily agree. 

 

JH: And those are? 

 

IB: Those are Choreutics and she had a clarity, beautiful, beautiful and I remember Laban giving a dance evening with her, he was like a magician. She had all abstract titles in the lower diagonals. They were loose studies and they were all in terms of the Space Harmony, what you call [inaudible], in Munich this was. She looked as if she was getting a pulling out of this marvellously flexible spatially aware, she was a very intelligent woman. 

 

JH: Loeszer?

 

IB: Yea, yea. How he extracted the movement really was marvellous. 

 

JH: Was Bereska intelligent? 

 

IB: yes, oh yes. Bereska was a Russian and she had this combination where intelligence and feeling that is very closely interlinked. She was… I adored her also. 

 

JH: Did she have many followers? 

 

IB: Well, I am not sure now. And of course Felicia Sachs loved her, you know. 

 

JH: But Felicia didn’t work with her the same way as you did. 

 

IB: No, she had a sort of private, solo status. 

 

JH: [Laughs long]. Exactly, hmmm. Yes. But he did have a lot of intelligent women. I think more intelligent women than he had later. I think he regretted it. I think one of the sad things about Laban’s later days was that the English women he gathered around him were not of the same intelligence as 

 

IB: I am inclined to believe that, yes. 

 

JH: I think there’s almost something about 

 

[break in tape]

 

IB: He used to say all this. You know, he is Hungarian, you know, as you well may know. He said, I stayed in Germany because a German kind of mind responded best to the [inaudible] of my ideas. I heard him repeatedly say that. And of course, I’m very much inclined to believe because there are certain aspects of … you see, I had long talks in the last few years with a Cambridge-trained ethologist who I found a very profound man and very thorough in his thinking. And we used to have long talks about 19th Century trends of philosophy and all of that. He was an ethologist, he examined [inaudible] behaviour through ritual paths of behaviours. I began to add the Effort concepts. And it was interesting that we talked very often how untranslatable certain things of a German academic, philosophy, just a basic philosophy of learning, or the basic openness to research which produced all these fantastic philologists, that discovered inya, you know Sanskrit, the German Sanskrit men, or the Chinese Wilhelm who was a missionary and who discovered the depths and width of Chinese thought, that that was typically German really – to be able to grow in these different realms, you know. Of course the English, when they had India, they did also penetrate some of the thoughts of the Indian thought, you know. But the real philology, the real getting down to the language units and all of that, was very typically German, of a very wide and flexible mind. It was really the best kind of

 

JH: The women that he had, had also transcended the German. 

 

IB: Oh yes, that’s right. 

 

JH: There is a national quality about your

 

IB: Well you see I have a French maiden name and my maternal family comes from that border where France, Belgium and Holland and Germany come together. It is a very old tradition there of certain industries. 

 

JH: That may be why Germany was the right place because it was a kind of mixture, a hybrid, ironically 

 

IB: You are right. That is a very good … a very good remark. 

 

JH: Ironically, I suppose, what was making Laban flourish was the hybrid quality of the German mind when Hitler was trying to build the pure race, something that would be the excellent, without having the wisdom to see that excellence comes through mixing, not through a pure strain. 

 

IB: And you see we on the side valleys of the Rhine, we were very varied. We had types that looked just Italian from the Roman times, yet in Southern Germany, Swabia and Bavaria types that are very Mongolian. That was Genghis Khan. And a lot of seeds have be sown through the centuries in the transition.  And in the nearest part of Prussia, the Slavic influences were just as strong as the so-called Germanic influences. Silesia, East Prussia, of course some of the things are already Polish now, since World War Two. 

 

JH: And you were brought up where? 

 

IB: I was brought up in Berlin but my feeling of home was Western Germany, between Cologne and Aachen. 

 

JH: Where did you live most? 

 

IB: I was in Berlin. 

 

JH: Can you tell me anything about the atmosphere, the artistic atmosphere, the political atmosphere, your own schooling, the general feeling…

 

IB: That’s interesting because I’m writing down some of these things at present, trying to sort this out. You see, my father was a state official, working for the Reich. He was in what you would call here The Treasury. And so he was stationed in Berlin. He himself came from the middle Rhine, from a French Huguenot family that had landed there. So my maiden name is Dolbois, a very French name. And my mother was, of course, from this family Prym, a completely un-German name, probably of Flemish roots, and there’s a lot of influx of connections to Italy, connections to France, connections to Flanders, you know. And so actually we were … and it was very interesting when the Nazis came, this inheritance, which made me think so hard of … that really, our genes comprise some of our spiritual and other kind of thinking abilities inherited, belong to that gene system. I could not understand this whole thing. 

 

JH: You knew the Nazis were coming? 

 

IB: Yah, so you see I lived seven years in Munich. I was really grown up and I married a young historian of ancient history, very German, very Prussian. I divorced him after six years. And then I met my Russian husband. And the point is that I, from the early youth while we were in Berlin and I grew up in the most conventional way.

 

JH: What was the convention? 

 

IB: First of all, I was to go at least twice a month to the Protestant services of Do, which the Kaiser attended the services. Or to the military church where the Kaiser attended the services. I am part of Shlecht [inaudible]. I felt a growing resistance and I had a particular resistance with a feeling, why should worldly power be mixed up with political power? So you know, I had this very strong feeling about that. My mother was very indifferent altogether, because the Rheinish people, there was a sort of liberal spirit, though she was protestant in a catholic thing which could have made her a fanatic. But she wasn’t, she was very liberal and 

 

JH: You resisted your father’s approach? 

 

IB: Very much, very much. And also then training in social dancing, this sort of [inaudible] name. And I had a very, very low opinion of them because I used say they only know the military list: the army list and the Gothar was a calendar, like a social register, from the point of the social aristocrats, you know. 

 

JH: where do you get that independence of thinking from? 

 

Ib: from my grandfather, my paternal grandfather. When he heard that I will refuse to concede to my father’s wish to marry some rich aristocrat, he sent me the pearls of my grandmother and said, ‘Keep it up!’ And he was of course, delightful because he, you see his firm, which is a brass industry, existed since 1585, in the same spot. There are six or seven families partly also this Flemish-mixed names, some with lower-Rhine names. The dialect of the peasants is very close to Dutch and Flemish. 

 

[01.21.00 – 23.59 More about her family history, particularly her paternal grandfather.] 

 

JH: What part did your schooling play in this? 

 

IB: I went to the German gymnasium and I happened to strike… you see between 1910 and 12 the development of the women’s gymnasium, I don’t know the English… Eton

 

JH: Grammar School, Public School. 

 

IB: There was a system in Berlin and I went to them. 

 

JH: What was the curriculum about? 

 

[IB describes the curriculum]

 

JH: And what gave you your interest in dance? 

 

IB: It went over biology. 

 

JH: Was there dance on the school curriculum? 

 

IB: No. No, nothing of that kind. Nothing. 

 

JH: Movement? 

 

IB: In the last year of my schooling I got introduced into Mensendieck that came up. Mensendieck was a great success in Germany. Of course, she was an American. 

 

JH: Dalcroze? 

 

IB: Dalcroze, I hated. 

 

JH: You met him? 

 

IB: At the age of 12 to 14. What I enjoyed in the age of 8 – 10, my mother sent us to a Russian movement, from the Baltic provinces, they spoke German fluently, who taught a sort of rhythmical gymnastics and swinging of ropes and so on, with music. That was a delightful thing and I count several people who later went into the Modern Dance that had this childhood training. So I consider that’s really quite important. But the school itself was rather terrible in physical education. 

 

JH: Okay, your father was employed by the Third Reich? 

 

IB: No. By the Kaiser. 

 

JH: Ah, pre-First World War. 

 

IB: He was still going to court receptions with uniforms, britches and white stockings and shoes. We were two sisters. And we lost our youngest brother very early and we two girls, well it was awfully funny. We had very little reverence for this kind of thing. 

 

JH: And what impression did that early period make on you? 

 

IB: I was aware of the stimulation 

 

JH: Of the First World War. Were you worried, anxious?

 

IB: No, in the summer of 1914 me and my grandmother were in this little frontier town near the Belgian frontier. We were always there in summer, we were 18 – 20 people there, always in the country. That was the wife of the family [inaudible]. And in 1914 we saw the beginning of the war and my grandmother, typical for her, she was… she had very big interest in social work, also. She set up a little kitchen at the station, and we grandchildren we had to help distributing soup and bread to the soldiers. And we saw the shine of Liege, of the battle of Liege, we saw from our windows. 

 

JH: Was it frightening for you? 

 

IB: I felt a dark shadow fell down. When I came back at the end of August to Berlin I couldn’t understand that the life went on as usual in Kufürstendamm everyone in the cafés. I had had such an impression of the war, because we saw the first wounded coming back and all of that. 

 

JH: But it went on in Berlin as usual.

 

IB: Yes

 

JH: Right through the war. 

 

IB: Pretty much so. Because it ended and there were these terrible times of 1918, we were at the end of the war. Everything went so of haywire. 

 

JH: And do you remember that?

 

IB: Oh yes. 

 

JH; Can you describe that? 

 

IB: I did my final exam 1918 which is called Abitur in German. 

 

JH: This is your school exam?

 

IB: My school exam. 

 

[Drink is served]

 

JH: I’ll put you into a taxi to go home. So that was the year before the war ended? 

 

IB: Yes, it was already changing. There were food shortages. I remember girls that were graduating with me being really weakened by the food shortage, they fell asleep in the lessons because of the food shortage. 

 

JH: You knew this? 

 

IB: Yes, yes, yes. I was a little bit better off because my grandfather invite us to the country, they had a cow, they had a garden with fresh vegetables. But it was very limited too. 

 

JH: Was there a lot of indoctrination against the, the enemy? Did you feel hostile? 

 

[Description of her life just after the War ended.]

 

IB: Then, between 1918 and ’19 all of a sudden with the breakdown of the German thing came the flourish of … immediately of the whole expressive thing. There were modern school ideas, the experimental schools. 1919. Right after the war. There was a breakout of Expressionism, interesting artistic… and we began to look at that, of course. 

 

JH: How did the end of the war strike you? Were you worried by

 

IB: Very depressing. Very glum. But my mother was very much encouraging my going to university. She said it was very essential. My father didn’t really care. He wanted me to marry me off to aristocratic circles. To me it was just impossible. You see I had marvellous teachers in this city school. You see that was a generation that were all, they all had their PhD degrees, they were really… I had a French teacher who was a philosopher and [inaudible], you know. I had a history teacher who was really a brilliant man, you know. Whom I had already from the age of 9 or 10, my first course in ancient history, in one year we went through the Greek and Roman history and I remember we knew all the consuls and the whole succession. He demanded a tremendous lot of … And he laughed at me when I said, I cannot memorise so fast and he laughed, ‘You’re doing alright’ he said to me. But you see I had a terrific stimulus. There was in the last two, three years there were my interest in development, into biology, into language, particularly. I read medieval German and old German, Hoch Deutsch, Old High German. I read that in the original, fluently. Nibelung Saga and Parsifal. And you see, there began also, already a distinction and a rebellion against the romanticising thing. At the age of 17 I read Parsifal. It was the first time in Cologne, it was the first time it [presumably Wagner’s opera of the same name?] was given out of Bayreuth. Up to that it was only given in Bayreuth. And it was the greatest disappointment of my life, because I saw he was moralising, he was putting philosophy into that. It was really shady. And the music I found also exaggerated and shady and not really dramatic. I had a strong feeling about that and it has stayed with me that opinion of Richard Wagner. In fact, 1936 when I was no longer able to dance, and before we emigrated, I did a reconstruction of a Rameau opera which a musician friend of mine had unearthed from the library, directly from the library. That had never been done. In the ‘20s and ‘30s, this whole revival of Handel. All of this was in Germany. It was really incredible what happened in those years. And in the middle of the rehearsals of the Rameau, I was invited to see Tannhäuser. I misbehaved. I was like a little girl because I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I ever heard or saw in my life, because after really, these… though these baroque operas are sort of symbolic opera, but to me they had, they are made of action. I understood action through them. And I understood mood through them. And relationships, and not this artificial kind of thing which I found in Wagner. At just one level and so chased to death, you know. That prepared me for the music-less dance. I saw maybe Indekoven, that was the rage of about 1920 or so.

 

JH: Did you see any of Laban’s dances? 

 

IB: Well, I moved 1923, I moved. That was my first marriage and we moved to Munich and in Munich I met a Laban person who had been in the Ascona group. Lankovet. Daughter of a Munich painter. Very artistic family. The younger sister of her I was very fond of because she was a painter and very fine feeling for movement and we formed a little group. That’s how I really got into dance. After trying Loheland, this was a sort of aesthetic gymnastics with red [inaudible] and things like that. And you see I stayed away from Wigman, also because I felt I didn’t want to be swallowed. 

 

JH: And you thought you would be? 

 

IB: yes. 

 

JH: What right did you think you were going to be swallowed? 

 

IB: I saw in every performance all the girls looked like her. Little Mary Wigmans. The same with Martha Graham, exactly the same way. 

 

JH: So where were you in the ‘20s and 30s, then? The early ‘30s until the time you left. 

 

IB: In ’29 I was in Munich. 

 

JH: And what was the atmosphere in Munich. 

 

IB: I loved Munich, I loved Munich. 

 

JH: Laban had left by then? 

 

IB: In that time between ’25 and ’27 I was with Laban. And then Laban moved to Berlin and I moved to Berlin. 

 

JH: Laban moved to Berlin when? 

 

IB: Sort of ‘28/’29. 

 

JH: He came to America in 1928. 

 

IB: Those years between ’25 and ’29 were very unsettled years. And I must say, it was practically, I was terrifically lucky, I was in Würzeburg with him. Really, from Munich I came to Würzeburg and meanwhile my then husband became professor in Leipzig and he thought it was interesting that I wanted to do all these things. But I needed more freedom. So by ’29 I divorced him and went back to Munich. 

 

JH: Was the atmosphere like in Munich in which you were working with Laban? 

 

IB: I didn’t work with Laban in Munich. That was my chorus. We did little performances.

 

JH: Where was Laban working? 

 

IB: Laban, I do not recall. When I started this course, it was still in Hamburg and then Jooss, I think, separated and went to Munster, you know, took the theatre.

 

JH: When did you meet Vera Tashimira? 

 

IB: Here in the United States.

 

JH: Not before? 

 

IB: Not before. She was in Hamburg. That is a strange thing, the Tashamira story. A sad story. 

 

JH: She had a very interesting beginning. She was working with A.S. Neill before she came to Laban. Anyway, go on, describe the atmosphere in Munich. 

 

IB: To me, after the Prussian Berlin it was liberation! And relaxation and joy of life, which my original Rheinish temperament was very [inaudible]. 

 

JH: Would you say that was the atmosphere in the city? 

 

IB: You see the great, bohemian time was actually just before World War

 

JH: One

 

IB: This was post-war and it was not quite the astounding people who were there. 

 

JH: What led to the bohemian for a time? Were there any factors in the…

 

IB: There were also some communist circles at that time and of course there was a real café life like in Vienna. You could sit with a cup of coffee a whole morning and do your writing or reading the papers. All the gossip of other artists, the talk through the tables, you know, with other people. And my then husband was preparing a major book on Alexander the Great, used to go into a café and write, not at home. He would not talk very much to other people. He was not a very sociable person. But he sort of absorbed … also being rather uptight, as you would say now… he absorbed this atmosphere with a certain relish. 

 

JH: I like to write in cafes, I prefer cafes. I can’t write at home. 

 

IB: I begin to write in every place. There were intimate cabarets in Munich which were partly political, partly aesthetic, or a mixture of the two. Very interesting. And then of course the excellent theatre in Munich. Kammerspiele and the small … all had … after Rheinhardt, a new flavour you know. Max Rheinhardt had dominated Berlin and this was … had a more intimate, more … it lacked the radicalism of a Piscator or … I knew, you know. But it had many other kinds of … intimate theatre, [Frank] Wederkind and 

 

JH: You saw the Wederkind work? 

 

IB: Some which had been shown already before. 

 

J: was it shocking? 

 

IB: Not really, because I was very … I didn’t like Hesse … I can still not understand that Siddhartha and Steppenwolf [novels by Hermann Hesse]. It is at present making whoopee in America. I still think him really as a … he has a certain ability to tell stories, you know, I mean as a novelist or so. But he’s too philosophical, he smells too philosophical, you know what I mean? While there as one man in that whole ‘20s/’30s thing who I considered to be … and I met him now in an English translation, only a few years ago, that was the man who wrote the Case of … my memory is terrible. He was a Jewish writer who was a tremendous story-teller and a tremendous depicter of …he described the subtle antisemitism of the war year, or before war years and so he … and he also described the figure of a prosecutor of really tremendous proportions whom his adolescent son finds out that he did a misjudgement on a certain case … it’s called ‘the so-and-so case’. It’s a tremendous suspense story and I like suspense stories but it also was with a marvellous sense of the psychology of the crumbling of that figure, by this innocent, pure young boy who zeros in on his father, goes once a week on home, and lives with all the people around this case and he helps to convict, to establish that he condemned an innocent man to years of prison. It is a fantastic book. The Mauritius Case. I think it’s a very good ‘20s/’30s story. From many points of view. […] 

 

IB: I was really the one who went out and broke down all this conventional stuff you know. I was not the kind of activist, you know. 

 

JH: Did you find it hard to break away from that? 

 

IB: I do not know how hard it was because there was this understanding atmosphere in my maternal family. I had one child-less aunt who was devoted to the arts. She herself was an amateur singer with a beautiful voice. And she collected very modern art, very modern art. And she build a house in 1912 with the colour scheme that is now, sort of you find in every … strong cobalt blue, yellow and black and white. This was the colour scheme in her house in 1912. So there was a sort of strange, liberal-minded feeling

 

JH: That was music, what about Berlin? 

 

IB: Berlin, I did not get the full impact of the ’25 – ’30, what is shown now in Cabaret, came to its full movement. I had some whiffs of it, you know. And I must say that the kind of vulgarity that Cabaret, the film describes is very well put. Because that’s what I saw, which is very different from the vulgarity of the West near the Rhine. There is a very great vulgarity but it is more like Dutch vulgarity.

 

JH: Why was that vulgarity expressing itself at that time? 

 

IB: That was the dissolution of many restrictions. Many people get impoverished. Many people returning from the war had a taste of things, of vulgarity, of cruelty, of sadism in many forms. 

 

JH: When did the restrictions start again? 

 

IB: I didn’t see that. That was coming with the new order of Hitler. In 1924, in ’23 or ’24, I attended a party in Munich and there was a lady who said, Oh I met [Erich] Ludendorff [a famous general in WWI] at a party and he spoke about this man Hitler and everybody began to speak in 1924 about Hitler in Munich and I said to Ludendorff, ‘I thought Hitler was for my milk woman and for my postman. I didn’t think anybody else would take him seriously.’ She said that to Lutendorf and you know of course he was already chummy with Hitler at that [end of tape]