Laban Resources
Transcripts – John Hodgson
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Azra Laban (Tape 82)
Summary of Interview
She was taking Vivienne Bridson (and JH) through a photograph album commenting on various photos. She shows them a Kinetogram she made whilst studying with Knust in 1926. She shows paintings of her mother (Martha Fricke) who met Laban when working in Munich. She first met Laban at the age of 19 and they missed each other at the railway station in Berlin. Talk about his production of the Bacchanal of Tannhäuser at Bayreuth in 1930.Vivien Bridson: - in Paris –
Tape 82
Azraela Laban: In Paris? No. I was only eleven months - I was barely a year old!
VB (in English): She was only eleven months old. (laughs)
John Hodgson: Ah… then where did she go?
VB (in German): And then-
AL: And my memories all come from my mother’s sister, you see? She told me stories of my parents.
VB (Ger.): Yes? Can you say to us, this memory, yes?
AL: Yes, that isn’t so, it’s much better to write, and then you would, you could -
VB (Ger.): But, after you have say this I have wrote this in English.
AL: Hmm.
VB (Ger.): Still today, but later. So if you say you have – what you can, to us now, and later I will write everything down, here on paper, and then -
AL: - In English.
VB (Eng.): Yes, in English.
AL: Yes, yes. Yes well at the moment I wouldn’t be able to. I prefer to write, rather than to speak. Because at the moment, I can’t remember, but if I wrote it down, you would be able to translate it, wouldn’t you?
VB (Ger.): Yes. But it is also good if – if you speak a little bit of this thing, yes?
AL: Hmm. I see, so just...
VB (Ger.): Yes -
AL: Well, what can I say about this...?
(recording interrupted, noise)
AL: - I myself, just photographs, because it is, for example right here, this is one with father and mother, right? And me and grandmother. This is much... this one I remember, it’s the one with the tortoise, we had a pet tortoise, you see, and I played with it. And when I was eleven – here, fifteenth of September, I had my picture taken, from all sides, in 1903, I was born in 1902, and then, ah, and my grandmother came and took me with her, she said, that’s no life, with these artists, and she took me with her, you see. And so then I had to have my picture taken, you see?
VB (Ger.): And where did you live with your grandmother?
AL: Then I lived with my grandmother… that was in Nienburg, this is here, right, here I’m already in Nienburg - so before I was in Paris, and then I was in Nienburg. And then my mother came to visit us, right, here. You can see that, right? And this is Nienburg, and here I was – here I’m in Nienburg -
VB (Ger.): That is very interesting.
AL: Yes. This is also in Nienburg, all of this. And after that we went to Berlin. And my mother lived apart, she was a painter, and I lived with my grandmother, right, I would say I was raised by my grandmother, right. And then, here’s the next one already, well, here he came to visit us, and this is already after the death of – my mother is already dead here, right, I was seven years old, you see, I don’t remember very much. Here’s the whole family, and unfortunately I’m not – and then I was with my aunt, or with both aunts, who raised me. Right. And this here is Arpad, over here, the little one, and –
VB (Ger.): The little one -
AL: And there he is again. But here he’s missing. And then afterwards, this is all about me. And then Arpad – I only really met him at that age. Have you met Arpad?
VB (Ger.): We – ahm -
AL: Once, yes? Just quickly? Hmm.
VB (Ger.): Yes, yes.
AL: I must have been about nineteen or thereabouts, right, and my aunt had died, and I was in mourning, and then Arpad came, you see? And then – this is nothing – and this house, this is important, Gildstrasse 10, or have you, the dance – where he had his choreographic institute –
VB (Ger.): Yes, in Würzburg..?
AL: No, in Berlin.
VB (Ger.): In Berlin, yes.
AL: I went there and that’s when I studied with him.
VB (Ger.): Yes? Yes!
AL: Right, choreography and all that, right.
VB (Ger.): And – which years you student – student, have you studied here, choreography, yes?
AL: Two years I studied with him, yes. Lay Dance, yes and Dance Notation, when I worked with Knust
VB (Ger.): I have seen this Kinetogram by Laban! (Both laugh)
VB (Ger.): So, in Berlin. Which years?
AL: When this was? I can’t remember...
VB (Ger.): Yes, do you remember when this was?
AL: In 1926, how do you say in English, twenty-six.
VB: (Eng.) Twenty-six, yes.
AL: It doesn’t say... here...
JH: May I copy that?
AL: Twenty-five, it says here, doesn’t it? So it must have been in twenty-six. Twenty-six
VB (Ger.): And could we have a copy of this, too?
AL: Yes, yes. That is – that was very nice, that’s when I studied for two years.
VB (Ger.): Yes, with which teacher?
AL: Knust, mainly, because Jooss wasn’t there, not at that time… Ullman, Lisa Ullman was studying at that time, somewhere else, too
VB (Ger.): He was student, Ullman? With – ah
(noise)
AL: - Student, right, this is Kinetography, right –
VB (Eng.): with Laban, she’s part of the class here.
AL: This was at Gildstrasse, in this one, in Gildstrasse, and there is another famous person, Roobst? You may have heard the name before, Snell, have you heard of Snell? And who else is there... no, the others were not... I don’t know this one...
(noise)
VB (Ger.): Where, where was your mother born?
AL: My mother?
VB (Ger.): Yes.
AL: In Nienburg.
VB (Ger.): In Nienburg.
AL: In Nienburg, near Hannover.
JH: What was her background, her parents…and in addition, do you know when she met Laban?
VB (Ger.): Your mother, when did she meet Laban?
AL: In Munich.
VB (Ger.): In Munich.
AL: In Munich, so, wait a minute, yes. In the Pinapothek, that was the gallery, right, where she was sketching, and as far as I know that’s where they met.
VB (Ger.): Oh yes. And your mother, she was painting, as well –
AL: She was a painter, yes. This, up here, this is one of her paintings; this is my aunt, the one up here. And then I have another one here, now you’ll have to get up quickly, this is my favourite painting? Here? You’ll have to get up, no, not that one, the other one?
VB (Ger.): Your mother, ahm, was, ah...
AL: Why don’t you say it in English, maybe I’ll understand..
VB (Ger.): Can – ah
AL: But slowly.
VB (Eng.): What was your mother like, as a person?
AL: I’ve got an English dictionary somewhere, I have a big dictionary, too–
(noise)
AL: Well that was for him, and he writes about that too, in „Ein Leben für den Tanz“ (A life for dance), right, that’s where he wrote about her death, right, there’s a whole chapter about her... Life and Death of a Being... well that is, she was very, ah...well she was an artist, you can see that in her paintings, too, right
VB (Ger.): She was an artist, yes, but what was her character like, your mother, what was her character?
AL: Oh, I see, character! Character!
VB (Ger.): Yes, character.
AL: - My aunt – this aunt here, that she photo- painted, she loved her, my aunt – both of them, yes, loved her very much, right, and they... yes... as did my father. For my dad and my aunts she was the one and only. For example, I just remembered, they once wanted to go to this ball, both of them, but didn’t have any money, none of them had any money, and then mother spent days sowing something out of the curtains, right, and then she was completely – quite unwell after that, and she said you go without me (laughs) And she stayed at home, right. So she wasn’t someone who need to be out all the time, right, you can see that in her paintings, she was quite an austere character, must have been, right. I do believe that she was a wonderful person, but I have no memory of her, right, only what I have heard from my aunt, her sister, I was always closer to my father...
VB (Ger.): And, about your father, can you talk a little bit about your father? (To JH) She says she can remember more about her father than her mother.
JH: Hmm? Yes, tell us a bit about him.
VB (slowly, in English) : Tell us a bit about your father, (in German) your father, your father…
AL: About father?
VB (Ger.): Yes, your father.
AL: What about my father?
VB (Ger.): Tell us a little bit about him!
AL: Tell you?
VB (Ger.): Yes, tell us a bit about him.
AL: Ah, about him? I see, well... that is hard to say… I was – I met my father, I mean really, in a fully conscious way, when I was nineteen, right, and he wrote to me, he’s coming to Berlin, and I missed him at the station, and so I went back home, very sad, because he hadn’t been there, and in the meantime he had come here – right, not here, here in Berlin -
VB: Yes.
AL: - and he opened the door, right, and I, and he hugged me, and I’ll never forget the kiss, because a kiss like that, really, I never got another kiss like that! And then another time, he gave me a look, I don’t know, you know him too, well, he looked at me with big eyes and – as if you’re drowning in a lake, that’s what it felt like, right. I loved my father very much but I only saw him very rarely, right. Because he was often on the road, even when I was in the house in Gildstrasse, those two years, always on the road, right, on tour and so on, and I saw only little of him, right, but we wrote, even if we didn’t write often - but it was very nice. Yes. (silence, pause, recording interrupted)
JH: -anything about her father since the early days, she was obviously with him with Knust… Bayreuth
VB (Eng.): She was just saying, the first time they met, again, after her childhood was when she was nineteen, in Berlin, she went to meet him at the station, and he had already come home and so found the door closed and it was terrible, but they did meet in the end, and she met him ten on and off for two years, but he was always travelling, and so she saw him very little, but they wrote to each other.
JH: Does she know anything about the later period?
VB (Ger.): Have you seen your father, uhm, when your father a little... have you – I, I - I’ll think for a moment please. (Both laugh)
(noise, recording interrupted)
AL: Later, you mean, right? Yes. In Gildstrasse, so that was in twenty-six, and then when he celebrated his birthday in Essen, his fiftieth –
VB (Ger.): For his fiftieth birthday?
AL: - right, his fiftieth, yes. That’s right. But it was always very quick, very quick, unfortunately, right?
VB (Eng.): Again, at school, when she became a student, and also at Essen, for his fiftieth birthday, but always for a very short time.
JH: Did she see him at Bayreuth, at all?
VB (Ger.): Did you see Laban in Bayreuth, when Laban was in Bayreuth?
AL: Yes, I was in Bayreuth, yes – here, this is Bayreuth, here, Knust, Snell, me, you see? Here I’m teaching already, yes, what does it say here... 1930, right, yes. There we were, [to herself, while looking through photos] wait a minute, do we have anything of Tannhäuser, we should have, really – no, there’s no Tannhäuser, this here is already with Knust, this is with Knust, here, right? Because he was there, too...
This was in Bayreuth, when I saw Tannhäuser. Yes, of course, wonderful, right, the –
VB: Ca –
AL: The performance, I saw the dress rehearsal and then all the performances, right, hmm. That was the year Siegfried Wagner died, right? He once said to my father, so my father of course had his own way of directing, the way he wanted things done, and then Siegfried Wagner said :„No, that’s not what Papa meant!“ So when he said Papa of course he meant, Wagner, Richard Wagner, right? But of course that didn’t change anything, he had his own way of directing, Laban did, right, of course.
VB (Ger.): And Tannhäuser, can you talk a little bit about that?
AL: There’s not much I can say about that...
VB (Ger.): Yes?
AL: ...Yes. Well mainly that – what was it– this.. the dance of the Venusberg, right, he did –
VB (Ger.): Ja, Venusberg…
AL: Yes.
VB (Ger.): I have read a little about this Venusberg in Bayreuth. What was it? People had wrote, it was, not terrible, but – do you understand?
AL: Perhaps, yes, it’s possible. Because Laban always went deep, right, so perhaps somebody who – you see I was used to this, but somebody else might have had quite a shock, right, with all these representations of these desires and all the sensuality of it, right. But to me it was…
VB (Ger.): -Beautiful?
AL: Interesting as well as beautiful, right? Yes.
VB (Eng.): Interesting. Some people found the choreography for the Venusberg scenes a little bit shocking, which she found it very interesting, and just really -
JH: Did she see him working on it?
VB (Ger.): When you were in Bayreuth, did you work with Laban? Or did you assist Laban –
AL: Oh yes, we even did, I know, we did with Jooss –
VB (Ger.): Yes?
AL: and he was teaching, and he was explaining his ideas to my father, and I was also busy at the time with choreography and with dance notation, and we were discussing these things together, right, and then he wanted to hear my, or - no – I did – this is what happened: I had taken lessons with Jooss because Jooss had his own method, and then he – I mean Laban – wanted to hear from me about this, right, only briefly, of course, because he knew so much about it, of course, I don’t remember exactly what it was that made Jooss’ ideas so special, right? At the time I was – I was already teaching in Bayreuth, beginner level, right, so with the beginners – in choreography, working with this – this notation, right, ABC, right, one two three, if you know, right, the choreography – or choreology, I should say, right. And at the same time I was taking classes at a more advanced level. But now I’ve forgotten a lot, slowly. But not everything, still, it is part of you, you see the harmony in everything, and I still enjoy watching dance, of course, right, of course I see something different from somebody who has not had that training, obviously.
(noise, recording interrupted)
JH: - anecdotes about her father, his sense of humour for which he was renowned, or his observations which was also known or his perception…
AL: An anecdote? I understood that, an anecdote! (All laugh) Yes, well, from this time in Bayreuth or from before, or after that...?
VB (Ger.): Oh before, or Bayreuth or even after that, whatever you think...
AL: Yes. Yes. I don’t know, I have a book here, well, not a very nice one, by a certain Wagner-Regeny Are you familiar with the name? He did, he wrote a book with several anecdotes, but I don’t like them.
VB (Ger.): Can you – could we see this book , please–
AL: -show you, yes -
(noise, recording interrupted)
AL: - what, me, an anecdote?
VB (Ger.): Yes?
AL: No, not really..
VB reacts (Ger.): No?
AL: What, off the top of my head?
VB (Ger.): Yes?
AL: Off the top of my head? Well, I’ve told you a few already, haven’t I?
(noise, recording interrupted)
AL: - know, during the last few years of his life I was not very much in touch with him, I would have liked to hear about that from you, but maybe that will be in your book, right? And my sister will be able to translate it for me, maybe.
JH: Can she remember any funny stories about her father?
(noise, recording interrupted)
AL: - he was a very cheerful person, he was a genius, in my opinion, right.
(noise, recording interrupted)
AL: - man, but what I’d like to know now, is what you are - you’re a teacher, right, as far as I know?
VB (Ger.): Yes, we are both teachers.
AL: Both of you?
VB Ger.): Yes, at univeshity, universh –
AL: University. University.
VB (Ger.): University. Is that better?
AL: Yes Yes. Both of you, teachers? What kind – Dance teachers, also? No.
VB (Ger.): Yes, I do Dance and John –
(Recording interrupted)
VB: - your father? What can you say?
AL: What can I say about this? I always say, he was a cheerful person, right, a cheerful person, and generous, right, what else is there to say – in any case, I admired him very much, right, of course I did.
JH: Was he a good teacher when he taught in class? Did she learn from him?
AL: As a teacher? Or how do you mean? Well, as a teacher he was very strict – oh here I just remembered a good anecdote, when we had our exam with him and everybody was frightened, right, so we wrote in the dirt on the windows, right, we wrote one two three or whatever it was, right, and then we also had a quick one, just before, to relax a little, and we couldn’t keep it together because we started laughing – and he got so angry. He was so – he didn’t know, did he, that we were just so nervous, right, and I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t remember anything, because I’d had, you know, I’d had a drink, right, because I was so scared, I was completely incapable. And he said in public – meaning in front of all the others: Such a shame when your own daughter lets you down so badly, right, and then of course I was completely down, and then I had to do it in writing, so everything I didn’t remember – I knew it all, afterwards, right, just not during the exam. And he was so angry, right, because he – the entire crowd smirking – laughing, right, and he didn’t know why, he thought we are not taking it seriously, when in fact we were so scared – such nonsense, right?
VB (Eng.): At one time there was an examination which she was taking, she had to sit the examination with Laban, and there was something written up on the window and this was their way of making a joke and he got very, very cross.
All laugh.
AL: Yes, well, he got very angry.
JH: Did she pass her examination?
VB (Ger.): Did you do the exam?
AL: Yes, yes of course, there were, they were really slightly more advanced questions because he thought I was ready – and I was the best one there, particularly in choreography and I always gave everyone who – and afterwards they went to him and they said: dear God, she’s the one who helps everybody with all this! And on the day I couldn’t remember!
VB (Eng.): Yes, very well, she was the best.
AL: I did the choreography exam, right, as well as dance notation – after that I worked a lot with Knust and also in Lay Dance, I did that too, right?
JH: Can she tell us a little bit about her work with Knust?
VB (Ger.): Yes, with Knust -
AL: Talk about – with Knust?
VB (Ger.): Yes, for kinetography, yes? And Lay Dance, and your work with Knust –
AL: Knust, yes, we worked on kinetography together, right, which was very intense, late into the evenings, I lived with him at the time, yes...
VB (Ger.): Yes, yes, I understand... lots of coffee!
AL: I don’t know if he was drinking coffee at the time – is he a coffee drinker? It’s possible, yes. But it was always the same – “come over here, Azra,” and then we did the steps – you know! You know Knust! So you know what he’s like. And we really worked very hard, right, and I was also teaching there, dance notation mainly, and also harmony theory. With Knust. Lay Dance a little bit, but less, right, because that was mainly his field, really. And... [I] wasn’t there very long, I believe I spent two years in Hamburg, with Knust, right. And then I left.
JH: When was that?
VB (Ger.): 1926..? Was that in 1931 or twenty-six? When you were with Knust in Hamburg?
AL: No, later, later, yes.
VB (Ger.): Later?
AL: But of course Knust would know exactly, you just have to ask him. Thirty, yes, thirty, thirty-one, thereabout ...
VB (Ger.): Yes, thirty?
AL: Thirty-two, maybe. In thirty-three I left, I believe. Yes.
VB (Ger.): And – you go to Hamburg, later? But where?
AL: After Hamburg I then, I got married.
VB (Ger.): Yes?
AL: I had met somebody, in Hamburg, and it was complicated at the time, right – it was just before Hitler, right, and those were very bad times, politically speaking, and at that stage Knust couldn’t keep me any longer. First I worked part-time and then– I happened to get married, right. And after that came Czechoslovakia, I went there, first, my first husband. The second one I married here – I got married to him here, right. Wait a minute, I still have more pictures.
VB (Eng.): She met her first husband, and she married him in Hamburg, then the war was starting so they had to move away, and she didn’t see much of Knust because he had to hide at the time and he got on with his work, and (unclear)
AL: Just a minute, you’ve seen these, those are the later photos, right?
(noise, recording interrupted?)
AL: - but surely Knust or somebody will have those, from when he died, I still have –
(noise, recording interrupted)
AL: -“ for a depiction of my countenance has hereby been granted. May all your other wishes come true, too, lots of love” – he always signed off with „your old father Laban“. This is [in] forty-seven.
VB: (Ger.) Yes. (Eng.) Forty-seven. „Greetings from your old father“.
JH: Yes, very Laban (unclear).
AL: And this here, he wrote this as well: „I am touched by the sorrows of all humanity.“ Do you understand?
VB: (Eng.) Yes.
AL: Yes. This is also forty-seven.
VB:(Ger.) Yes. (Eng.) Life moved on rather fast for her - (unclear)
AL: Here, this is ten years before his death, right. What have I got here – my husband – my husband died in May, same year, and in June my father died.
VB: (Eng.) Her husband died in the same year.
AL: Here, I don’t think I have any more photos... (unclear)
(recording interrupted)
VB: (Ger.) We have heard a - I think, it is a fairytale about Laban: we have heard, when Laban was in Paris, he was a dancer with Moulin Rouge. Do you, do you know this?
AL: No. No.
VB (Ger.): No.
AL: Back then he wasn’t dancing, yet, in Paris, he was still a painter, wasn’t he. And he only had this idea of Dance, right? I don’t believe that, I’ve never heard that.
VB (Ger.): Yes.
AL: He had this idea, he wanted to do something like that, right, but he was a painter, right an artist. No, I don’t believe that he... he hadn’t even – He had to learn to dance first, right, Dance is, one cannot just get up and start dancing on day. Who says that?
VB: (Eng.) An - Where had you heard it before?
JH: In the Observer.
VB: (Ger.) We have read this in the newspaper, in London, the Observer. Yes. And we have also made this question to Suzie Perrottet.
(recording interrupted)
AL: - said, that this is when he first had this idea, right, that somehow with Dance, that he wanted to do something with Dance, because this rigidity, from ballet, right, he wanted to do away with and instead more something grounded in emotions, right?
VB: (Eng.) He was studying ballet but this was... there was not enough feeling in this. But he was a painter at this time (unclear), something like that, but it was still very much an idea, rather than… a beginning.
JH: Does she remember any moments when her father was particularly concerned with dance and movement – did she observe any? He was a very good mimic, he was a very good impersonator.
VB: (Ger.) We have heard your father was a very good “Mimiker, Mimiker” . Yes. Your father? Liked to. “Mimiker“. Have you seen this?
AL: No, I wouldn’t know that, he didn’t, I don’t think – he was more concerned with the whole body. “Mimiker“. Or do you mean mime artist („Pantomime“ in German)?
VB (Ger.): Yes, mime artist!
AL: Yes, mime artist! Well, yes of course, with the body, right – without music! Without music, when I studied, we mostly did without music, right. Unfortunately I didn’t see him very often, so I didn’t see much of his [work], right? For example, in „Welt des Tänzers“ there is „Der Mathematikus“, right? Because he did things like that, too. But then they said: it was grotesque, right, yes. And here – too much in your head. People found he was being too... yes, well, intellectual, instead of grounded in emotion. (pause) I think I saw Don Juan once, I can’t remember.
VB (Ger.): You have seen Don Juan?
AL: I think so. I mean I really don’t know... Or maybe I heard about it, right. That was when, he somewhere broke his arm,right? With the – oh the dancers, when they were pursuing him, right, and then he broke his arm. And that’s, I think, when he had to stop, he stopped dancing at this point, right. I rarely saw him dance. Rarely, yes. It was more lectures and as a director, right, when he later, and… well and also... well, at the [Berlin] State Opera (Staatsoper), he was there for a long time.
VB (Ger.): Yes, the State Opera, we have also visited this State Opera.
AL: Yes?
VB (Ger.): Yes. In West Berlin, yes.
AL: Oh, now? In West Be – in East Berlin? Here, were we are?
VB (Ger.): Yes.
AL: Yes. And, did you find anyone there?
VB (Ger.): Yes, yes, a little. They have the program for -
AL: Oh you saw the programs –
VB (Ger.): Yes. And we spoke with the man at the archive there, yes, and that was very interesting.
AL: Well, and Ivers, Suzanne Ivers, you must have heard that name before, she worked with him there.
VB (Ger.): yes, and we also met a dancer, Rita Zabatkow [?], in East Berlin.
AL: What’s that?
VB (Ger.): Zabatkow – no, no -
AL: I don’t know her.
VB (Eng.): She said –
(Recording interrupted)
VB (Ger.): When you were a young child, and you live with the grandmother, and Laban came to visit, maybe. Did Laban come to visit you with your grandmother, when you were a young child?
AL: Yes, yes, those are the photographs.
VB (Ger.): Yes, we have seen them. And when you met your father, was that difficult for you, or did you good your father, ah?
AL: I can’t remember anymore. I only have one memory of my parents, not really any of my mother, but this must be my own memory: we went sledding, in winter, you know, sledding, yes? And I must have been very little, maybe like this, right, and they took me up and down with the sled a couple of times, right, and I was terribly scared of course, and then I went up and I had this feeling, just a feeling, something is wrong with my arm, so I went between my father and my mother, and afterwards, I was very happy that I was away from the sled, and I had this feeling of being protected, do you understand? This is my only feeling from my you – well from my childhood, of my parents, right. I’m thinking, oh yes, now you can protect me, and I don’t have to go sledding anymore. Other than that I don’t have any memory of my father, somehow, that is all only what I know from my aunt, who told me stories.
VB: (Ger.) Ja. (Eng.) The only thing she can remember is the day when she had a broken arm. Her father came to visit, and it was in the winter, and they had heavy clothes on, and they didn’t cover the arm, and her father and mother – her father was on this side, her mother on that side – and they would pick her up to swing her, and she said no, this is my broken arm, and it became a joke.
JH: Hmm.
VB: (Eng.) But, it’s very, the only memory she has, this is the only one, that she really remembers herself.
JH: Hmm.
AL: I was always very unhappy that I didn’t have any parents, right, and the other children said to me, you don’t even have a father or a mother, and then I would say, yes, but I have aunts! But yes, it was very hard, right, because my mother died so young and then he got married again, right, but I wanted to stay with my grandmother, and she didn’t want to give me away either, right, having just lost her daughter.
JH: (unclear) Her mother’s mother’s tongue was German?
VB (Ger.): Your mother’s language was German, yes?
AL: My mother was German, yes, she was from around Hanover. Hanover, yes. From the Heide area. He writes about this in the book, in „Ein Leben für den Tanz“, there he writes about the area, the Heide area.
JH: Did she find her father’s German was the German of a man who’d learnt it later?
AL: My father was German-Hungarian, they also spoke German, I think, right, as far as I know. So Austrians used to call themselves Austria-Hungarians. He also spoke Hungarian perfectly, right? I’ve heard that, but I don’t, I don’t speak Hungarian. But Etelke does, she speaks Hungarian.
VB (Ger.): Yes, you said, yes.
AL: - She was in Hungary.
VB (Ger.): But Laban’s German was good, yes? As good as Hungarian?
AL: Yes. But it was more an Austrian German, in a way, right?
VB (Ger.): Austrian, more like -
JH: And when she reads, for instance –
AL: Because when you say – at the table, and we say, on the table, right? ON the table.
VB (Ger.): Yes. Swiss German is also – different from German, yes?
AL: Yes
VB (Ger.): It’s the same, yes?
AL: What?
VB (Eng.): It’s like speaking German with a dialect.
JH: Does, ah, when she reads “A life for the dance”, does she find it, as a native speaking German, easy to read, or difficult?
VB (Ger.): When Laban wrote „Ein Leben für den Tanz“, do you think he wrote in Austrian German or in High German? When he wrote?
AL: No, in High German, yes, definitely.
VB (Ger.): In High German?
AL: Well yes, it is. Well - they had, maybe he discussed it with someone, I mean, it is more in the pronunciation, the Austrian, right. It is not really a different German, it’s in the pronunciation, isn’t it, a Bavarian speaks differently from an Austrian, a Northerner – Hanover, they speak completely differently, right, like a dialect, we could call it.
VB (Ger.): Do you think Laban is a good writing, one – one minute –
(noise)
AL: Whether he was a good writer? Yes I think so, you can see for yourself, when you’re translating it–
VB (Ger.): Oh yes, but I meant –
AL: Oh in German? Yes, of c...- sure, yes. Here he is even in our dictionary, right, well here, in East Germany, not so much, because Laban went to England, but he is still in the dictionary. Even Knust, and Kinetography, it’s all in the dictionary, I have this 9 volume dictionary, he’s in there, yes. But nowadays he’s much more known for being a dance pedagogue, when he is mentioned at all, isn’t he.
VB (Eng.): She says the writing – the way he writes is in proper German, not Austrian- German, that it’s sound, rather than structure, it’s the sound that makes it different. And as far as she thinks it’s fine.
JH: Good.
(recording interrupted)
AL: - Klingenbeck wanted to write something about him, at the time, right, he was – he was also a dancer – and the both of us went to see – and I was also supposed to produce these kind of anecdotes and so on – and so we went to see him (Laban) and we went and presented this idea to him and he didn’t think very much of it. And as we were leaving – later he told me, I thought you wanted to get married! (laughs)
(noise, recording ends) 39:44
Rudolf Wagner-Regeny, composer 1903-1969
At this point there appears to be some confusion around the English word “mimic”. John asks if Laban had been a good “mimic”, could he imitate somebody’s quirks and mannerisms - in other words, was Laban good at impersonating people. When Vivien translates this question, she uses the German word “Mimiker”, which relates to the way somebody uses facial expressions, for example in face mime or in gurning competitions. Azraela strongly disagrees, saying that Laban was always concerned with the whole body (“der ganze Körper”), but then clarifies and asks if Vivien is asking about “mime”, or “Pantomime” in German, (which has nothing to do with the English tradition of pantomime), and she describes a mime exercise in “Die Welt des Tänzers”. John, of course, had asked if Laban had had a talent for mimicking, impersonating, or in German: “nachahmen”, “imitieren”.
Charles Weidman (Tape 80)
Biography
(1901 – 1975)
Charles Weidman’s career began when he danced with the Denishawn Dance Company created by Ted Shawn and Ruth St Denis. In 1927 he created a company with Doris Humphrey, also a dance with Denishawn. He wanted to create an American dance, one that yielded to the pull of gravity, rather than ballet which attempted to defy gravity.
Summary of Interview
He never met Laban but knew Juana and Wigman. He talks about the Humphreys-Weidman company and the work that they made together.
Tape 80 [00.19.39 – 00.28.55]
January 6th 1974
At His Expression of Two Arts Theatre.
VB: Did you ever meet him at all?
CW: No, no. I know Juanna, I know the daughter very well, I;ve known her for a long time. Have you ever met him?
VB: Laban? Yes, I was taught by him when he was a very old man. He died in 1957 [1958]. So I don’t really know anything about the young man and the man of the theatre, and the kind of wild person I think he was.
CW: I never heard anything about him. I knew Wigman, I met her, yes.
VB: And what did you think of her work?
CW: Oh, I liked it very much. And Kreutzberg. I never met Kreutzberg but I saw Kreutzberg two or three time of that German school.
VB: We met Wigman three times this summer, the last time just before she died. An interesting person. But I never saw her dance.
CW: I saw her when she came over here.
VB: What sort of impression did she make?
CW: Oh, very, very good. It was very, very different. Very different. Very good.
VB: In what way was it different?
CW: Well, of course it wasn’t… the thing is that she was a very mature woman. I don’t know how old she was, say if she was 60 she looked 70, but she danced like she was 50. Very remarkable.
VB: Do you remember any of her dances, at all?
CW: Oh surely, surely. I don’t remember the titles, I certainly remember them. She did an opening dance, and it was… she did it like a summer song, then she did once at Carnegie Hall, she did a… almost like the Brahms Hungarian Dances, a very peasant kind of thing.
[break in tape]
VB: Have they ever got out of
[break in tape]
VB: Was there any influence of Wigman’s work or style in America at all? Well, of course Hanya Holm stems from Wigman, and broadly speaking, just broadly speaking, in the modern, there was the Graham and there was Humphrey Weidman, and then Holm. Also on the West coast there was Lester Horton, which a lot of people they want to bring him into the picture too. Alvin Ailey, although he has studied with me and studied also with Martha, [inaudible name], they are all trying to keep his theories in the … going. And so, I know nothing, very little of the technique, of the Wigman technique. I’ve had people who have had it, and spoken to them, but I know myself very little.
VB: People say she was a kind of person who brought out of each person what they could do.
CW: That’s what it should be, yes.
VB: Rather than having a school of technique which one learned like a puppet. So I suppose in that way it’s not left behind as a sort of series of technical exercises. I think the principles or the way she … it’s so fundamental when your body moves, and when you use effort or motivation or feeling, it prompts you to move and it has form, and so one goes on. But I think each person is a different artist.
CW: That’s the way it should be, yeah.
VB: It’s a smashing philosophy, but in practice
CW: That was the thing they remarked about the Humphrey-Weidman Company. Each had their individuality of course and it was quite wonderful as a group too. You got that feeling, as against Graham’s which was always the same. But it was good. That was very powerful, very forceful too, at least in the early days of Modern Dance.
VB: I never had the fortunate experience of seeing anything of Doris Humphreys’ work.
CW: Yeah, well, that’s been done in notation and so people do The Shakers, The Water Study, over at Brooklyn College, they’ve done The Water Study over there, and even the National Ballet got very good reviews from Clive Barnes who went down and saw it in… three columns on The Water Study.
VB: I was talking to somebody in [inaudible name] this morning.
CW: How is she?
VB: She’s fine. And she was talking about these reconstructions of Doris’ work and said she felt it didn’t really get hold of the essence of it.
CW: They saw The Water Study, huh? I don’t know if she’d seen The Water Study in the early days. Did she say that?
VB: She didn’t say exactly, but she spoke as if she’d seen…
CW: For instance, like Deborah Jewett, you know Deborah Jewett, now she’s with the Living Voice, she considers herself a Humphrey-Weidman dancer because she was Doris’ company, the Julliard company, then Deborah also was in repertory when she did my work, Between Men and Women, the James Thurber thing. So she had that kind of a Humphrey-Weidman experience. However, she never had any of Humphrey in technique. She had me in technique. Doris was teaching repertory or composition at that time.
VB: so what was the relationship between the two of you then in the company, then? You role and her role? Were they interlinked or were they single?
CW: She would do her own things and I would do my own things, and then we would combine many times. And she had an idea, she had an idea like new dance, that’s a dance where the men and women, so it opened with a duet between Doris and myself. So she gave me the idea. The opening duet was like a beautiful unharnessed vitality of force. It had no form as yet, but of course we knew what we were doing, but it had that feeling. Then it was followed by two women’s dances. Two different themes. One, a very rhythmic one, then a very luscious unfolding, falling one, and that was followed by the men’s dance. And I did that. I did that in her companies she would let me do my own composition, like a theatre piece. I did two sections in the theatre which I did. Then in my own works, like Daddy was a Fireman, she was my vesta, which was my mother. She would come into my pieces too. We could combine that way.
VB: I heard, I don’t know whether it’s just a story, that Doris sometime went to Bayreuth and worked for a little while with Laban. Do you if there’s any truth in that?
CW: She never did, no. She never went over there. I think she went over much years later when she couldn’t dance any more, with José’s Company. But she never went over to… because we went with the Denishawns – that was way back in 1924. Martha was in the Denishawms and Betty Bourne and Lewis Horst, we were at the Coliseum for a whole month and then we went up to Manchester and Bristol. We played in the Denishawms dancing. But Doris never went to Europe. She went on the Oriental tour with the Denishawms in about 1925.
VB: Do you think the Oriental had any effect on
WC: On me? Yes it did. Well, we did the Oriental dances, but they had a wonderful sense of floor in their movement and I think the modern dance has a great deal of that thing, to me, because I felt that very, very well, so I put it in the modern form.
VB: Of course Martha Graham, she discovered the floor
WC: No she didn’t, no, no, no. The thing is that the floor. We all discovered the floor is that when we revolted against the ballet which was to defy the gravity pull. And when we realised… Because Graham’s technique is based broadly on contraction and release. Doris’s is based on Fall and Recovery which has … all the falls are in Doris’ work. And I had that, but I let her do that section of it, but I didn’t agree with a lot of her falls at that time so I would fall, but immediately would rebound out of the fall.
VB: Why didn’t you agree with her way, what was the difference?
WC: It was done by the girls. It was too feminine for the men to do. So, as I say, I would rebound the fall right away.
In the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, Lester Horton developed a modern dance technique based on Native American dances, anatomical studies, and other movement influences. In addition to creating his technique and choreographing a number of works for stage and film, Horton established the Lester Horton Dance Theater, one of the first permanent theaters dedicated to modern dance in the U.S., in Los Angeles in 1946. (It closed its doors in 1960.)
Humphrey-Weidman is a modern dance technique consisting of "fall" and "recovery" (losing ... Weidman founded a dance school to teach their technique and a dance company to perform it; both were disbanded by Humphrey in the 1940s.
The Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts, founded in 1915 by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn in Los Angeles, California, helped many perfect their dancing talents and became the first dance academy in the United States to produce a professional dance company.
Mary Wigman (Tapes 79)
Biography
(1886 – 1973)
Wigman’s first experience of dance was when, aged 25, she went to study with Emile Jaques-Dalcroze in 1911. Two years later she heard of Laban and joined his summer course in Ascona. She continued to study and dance with him until 1919, the same year that she gave her first solo performance. She championed an expressionist form of dance, ausdruckstanz. She started her own school in Dresden, the Mary Wigman-Schule in 1920-21. Her pupils included Hanya Holm and Harald Kreutzberg. She toured the United States in 1930, 1931 and 1933.
Summary of Interview
How she came to know about Laban through German-Danish painter Emile Nolde while she was in Dresden at the Dalcroze school in Hellerau, nr Dresden, studying with Suzie Perrottet. How she got to Ascona with help from architect Mies van der Rohe. An account of life and work in Monté Verità (Ascona) and how Laban helped a woman with kidney problems.
Tape 79 [00.00.00 – 00.45.37]
Suzie Perrottet and the Road to Monté Verità
MW: Laban was the… I went to him. I had been studying at the Dalcroze School in Dresden, Hellerau and was a very good friend of a very famous expressionist painter in Germany, Emile Nolde. And Emile Nolde, I showed him and his wife some of the things I did by myself independent of the Dalcroze method and the sort of business they were doing there: dances without music, so after Nolde had seen them, he was quite enthusiastic about it and then he said, ‘Oh, I have just met the man in Munich who you should meet because he moves exactly like you and works with his students without music, his name is Rudolf von Laban. Don’t forget the name and try to meet him because I think that would be worthwhile.’ So I remembered that name and a few months later, I had been in Italy in between and came back to Hellerau because Dalcroze wanted me for a job he had. Well, I met the first assistant teacher of Dalcroze. That was Suzie Perrottet, and Suzie Perrottet had been my teacher in piano improvisation during the study, the two years of study and I had been quite friendly with her, so I met her again when I came back to Dalcroze. And then I said, ‘What are going to do?’ ‘I am going to leave Dalcroze.’ I was stunned because they were so close; she was his star. Everybody about Suzie. She was a lovely girl, beautiful, charming young woman at that time. wonnig, as we say in German. She still is nice.
JH: Older, but
MW: Older, I have met her some years ago, but she’s tiny, tiny … yes!
JH: True. She’s still tiny.
MW: Like a little kitten, sometimes.
JH: She said Laban called her a bird.
MW: Well she was. She had qualities of a bird. That’s true.
[break in tape]
MW: Suzie told me ‘I’m leaving Dalcroze.’ I’ve met a wonderful man and he
[break in tape]
MW: … in the field of movement and dance, and he has discovered that dance can be done without music. And people later on said, it was a wonderful invention or discussion and something perfectly new. And how did I find it, and how did I discover it? I always knew it. I told them even. I said, ‘I didn’t discover anything. I only never had enough money to pay the pianist accompanying me. I did it without. And it was self-understood and I [inaudible] and I don’t think it is anything so … it is very different from the close work with music. If there is no music, there is no music. The music is in yourself and is answering to the music the movement produces, the bodily music it produces in … It has its own pattern, its own tune, its own metre. [inaudible] you have only to listen and to [inaudible] and to use it. Well, that’s what happened with me and it was quite a success when I did it. And even my first programmes were full of dances like that. Well, anyhow, there was the name of Laban between Suzie and me. And I found out that she had been living with him already for quite a while. And I said, ‘Where are you going to be this summer?’ ‘Oh’, she said, ‘we’re going be in Switzerland at Ascona which is a tiny little fisher’s village at the border of the lake Maggiore and he’s going to have a summer course there.’ I said, ‘Ok, I’m coming. I had not a cent of money at that time, it was terrible. I didn’t know what to do. And how to move, and how to get along. I said, ‘I must, I must, I must go. Here is the name of Laban coming towards you in this way, that means you have to see him and have to meet him.’ Well, a very dear old friend of mine came to see other dear old friends of mine and I mentioned the name of Mies van der Rohe. Does this mean anything to you?
VB: A little
MW: He is a very, very famous architect, let me say it, the most famous architect in the [break in tape] Well, I was staying with Mies van der Rohe and his wife was a dear friend of mine, young marrieds, had three tiny little children and they lived here in Berlin. And so he, Mies, got the visit of another very dear friend of mine, who was a psychiatrist, his name was Printzau, he has written a very, very famous book Die Brinde Eider Geistes and was also quite a famous young man. And we talked and I told them about the story with Laban and then my friend Printzau got out his purse, looked in it, and said, ‘Well, 200 marks I have still. Here, the 100 is for you, maybe it even pays for the trip to Switzerland, or it is at least part of it. And we’ll look for more.’ Then Mies took out his purse and he said, ‘My girl, I haven’t that much, 20 I have and can give.’ So we had already 120, and then during the next days some funny things like that happened from time to time, so after very little time I had enough money, just enough money, for the summer course, for the trip from Berlin to Locarno, where there was the end of the station, of the railroad, and then some, yes, 50 Swiss francs for the summer course, and then not a cent more. It was always like that, always! I went as quickly as possible and arrived at Locarno at about midday. It was terribly hard. It was June or August, the hottest month there, and I had nothing but a tiny, little bag, thank God, and looked around and said, ‘Where’s Ascona?’ ‘Oh, it’s about an hour if you want to go by foot. It will take you an hour and a half, maybe. I looked at that damned sun and I said, ‘You go.’ I went, bag in one hand and jacket on the other arm, struggling against the heat and arrived at that… at those times, a lovely little fisher’s Dorf [town]. Today it’s a tourist meeting place, so to say, not that beautiful, I mean not that Romantic as it had been at those times, more than half a century ago, that I went there. And so I came to Ascona. It was a Post Office which is still at the same place, it looks exactly the same as it looked like sixty years ago and asked, ‘Where is the Monté Verità?’ ‘Oh, he said, up there.’ Now climbing. No real stairs or decent walk. Goat steps where you had to jump. Be careful not to fall into a hole. Well, I went up and went on, and there was a pass, a clear path, smooth, and shade. I sank down in the shade and said, ‘Nothing in the world can I go on. I have to rest a little.’ I stretched out into the grass to cool down. [break in tape] Three or four weeks later my fate would be decided exactly this same point, definitely. I climbed on and arrived at this so-called Monté Verità which was a queer situation. No hotel, a kiosk, like a little temple, built out of wood and even an office, a lovely looking Italian girl in whom I asked, ‘Can you tell me where I may find Herr von Laban?’ ‘Oh sure, he’s … they are dancing.’ I said, ‘Where?’ ‘In the Damenbad, the ladies bath.’ Now it was all for, the whole situation was, the whole institution was for vegetarians, of course. And so they had a hotel, yes, rooms in a stone house which were not even so very bad, and no restaurant, nothing, just very lovely room in this pavilion I told you of, where there was a tremendous big table, wooden table, which could be turned, and in the midst another table which also could be turned, and that was the dining room for the vegetarian guests and the queer thing was when you ate, you ate at twelve or after twelve, there were eating nuts, but about thirty people eating nuts, cracking nuts. You can’t imagine, it was like a Gewehrfeuer [musket shots]. Well anyhow, that isn’t the chief thing I wanted to tell. There was a gardener working and I asked him where is the damenbad? ‘Oh, he said, you just passed it, you pass the men’s bath first.’ So, I pass the men’s path, the garden was a wild wilderness, everywhere you saw build into the earth, baths, flat stone baths. And the idea was that very early in the morning you filled these tubs, flat, with cold water and then let it be warmed by the sun and when it was really warmed by the sun you took your bath. And you could see a little paper put at one corner, ‘This bath is Mrs so-and-so’s or Mary Wigman’s, or whatever it is’, because otherwise, if they hadn’t put their names on it, they would have been taken by others. Anyhow, but I must say that these warm baths were beautiful, they were lovely. Did you a lot of good. Anyhow, I got more or less into the interior of this mysterious bath and I heard drums, boom, boom, bobadoobaboom. Ta, ta, ta, ta. I said, ‘Well, I can imagine that Laban works with a drum. And I followed the noise and then I arrived at a small little wall, a broken door and came to a lawn, very beautiful, a mean not a beautiful lawn, not an English lawn, but a beautiful place surrounded by high trees but sunny and in one corner I saw a little group, three or four girls and one boy who looked like a dwarf, like a boy, but was a grown-up man, only that small. A painter from Munich he was. So, I watched and Laban… and there was a man, a young man, Laban was young at that time, very beautiful, beautiful, he had a wonderful face and he had a good body, so of course all the women fell in love with him, it was terrible, terrible … and he turned around and saw me standing there and said, ‘Who are you and what do you want?’ I said, ‘I want to meet Mr Rudolf von Laban.’ He said, ‘Well, that’s me. Then what do you want?’ ‘I want to take part in your summer course.’ ‘Aha, he said, well then start! There is a bush. Behind the bush you can undress quickly and come.’ It was always that way. So, I did undress and thank god I had a sort of dance training dress with me in my little Koffer [bag]. And went over and joined the exercises and what they were trying to do and had the feeling I’ve come home, I have never been away from here. That was my first meeting with Laban. It was really fine. Really wonderful. And I stayed with Laban. I did not go, what I should have done, to Dalcroze, because after working with Laban, and saying ‘yes’ to whatever he had to say, to tell me, I wouldn’t say even that Laban was a good teacher, but he was a marvellous inventor and a marvellous improvisator, everything he did in improvising was just miraculous, beautiful, in every field. And besides all the deep seriousness we had such a lot of fun that it was worth alone the fun, to be with him and see what he was doing.
[break in tape]
MW: Laban had installed himself at the Monté Verità and of course we got the food the people got there, that was vegetarian. Not a drop of alcohol, not a drop of real coffee or real tea, very strict. But you had means to procure these things aside. We tried to. No you couldn’t dance from morning to night, that’s impossible, nobody could do it. Anyway, we had to get up very early in the morning and for one hour work for the Monté Verità, some social work.
JH: Like what?
MW: Grabbing worms out of the earth, doing some field work in the fields, and dams that had not been taken care of for a hundred years, I think. And so I worked; with Suzie I was working on a terrace like that. A terrace with, I don’t know, strawberries which you could hardly find any more because they were covered by rubbish. So we made it very comfortable. We were studying the earth and the worms and insects which were living in it, and finding it wonderful. We didn’t over-work because after that there was an hour of gymnastics and we wanted to be fit for the gymnastics, not for the worms, but for that. And so we worked very hard, then there was one hour and half for breakfast which we had at the Monté Verità near the kitchen there was sort of dining room, not for the guests of the hotel in Monté Verità, but for the personnel. Of course we no guests, we were the personnel. I remember I found out the only thing which was for my taste drinkable was the cacao. Of course, without milk! Milk was from animals and didn’t exist. Anyhow, it didn’t matter so much, food was not so important and then, after we had time to make our rooms, because we had to do our rooms ourselves, there was a dance lesson which took about two hours. Funny, funny things.
Laban’s Lesson with a Lady with Kidney Problems
There were some sick people, guests of the hotel in Monté Verità. They took sun baths and there was one lady, driven around in a wheel chair, very sick-looking, very sad-looking and she had a nurse with her who drove her around through the parks and one day Laban called me and said, ‘Wigman, I want you tomorrow morning to help me with this solo lesson.’ I said, ‘Okay, at what time?’ ‘After the dance lesson, after our dance lesson is finished, we’ll have the lesson in that little house on the hill over there’, where there was sort of a studio, a small one, but you could work there a little bit. And I said, ‘Who is the patient?’ ‘Oh, he said. Die Wanderndenierer, the wandering kidney.’ That was the lady in the arm chair, in the wheel chair, whom we had called like that because we got to know that she was suffering from the kidneys, so we had called her Die Wanderndenierer. So, I said, ‘Laban, you are a murderer.’ He grinned. I said, ‘How can you dare to do that? This death, this suffering woman. No, it’s not right, I’m not coming to help you. Kill alone.’ He said, ‘Tomorrow at twelve, or half-past twelve.’ Of course, I was there. And the nurse the Die Wanderndenierer in, Laban and the nurse helped her out of the chair and Laban who could be a charming gentleman if he wanted, he could be as rough as a workman at the railroad. But he could be as elegant and so he changed it to his loveliest being and [inaudible] into the chair he had prepared for her, he put her on the chair with a gentleness of a mother, and then when she was sat there, ‘Let’s set to work.’ I was standing behind the chair and I was trembling all over my body because I was so afraid something might happen because I knew all the exercises by heart, I had gone and studied them all through. And there were very hard exercises among them which you never, never do with a sick person, not even if she had a little bit of swing, of dizziness in her, not even then, because they were next to acrobatics. Well, he started and let her move her head, down, and up, and down and up and so on. And she moved her head, first it didn’t work, after a while it started and her face changed and then he let her move her head to the side – didn’t work –to the other side – didn’t work. He moved it again up and down, that gave her her courage back, he was very clever, very clever. Anyhow, he got her to move the head without difficulties after about quarter of an hour, then he let her bend it and he let her lift her shoulders, she was sitting comfortably on the chair, some cushions in her back, so nothing would hurt, and she was enjoying it. I have never, never in all my life again, seen the change in the face like that. These moments. The saddest, the most unhappy face, changed into the most happy, the most serene face you could imagine. That happy she was, feeling that she was able to move. From the body there was not a word said. The damn kidneys were not thought of. Nothing. She was the happiest person in the world. She sat there and looked at Laban like he had been the Lord himself. He was that for her from that moment on. And he has helped her so beautifully are carefully that she could walk, not much, but that she dared to walk with those sick kidneys, could join the parties, could join with the other people’s meetings, and was, I have never seen anybody as happy as that in all my life, really. So, of course, he got a tremendous renown, he got a name, Laban the healer. It was. Then afterwards she said, ‘I want to pay. What do I have to pay?’ And Laban said, ‘Five francs.’ Well, five francs at that time was a fortune, you must not forget. Silver francs. Today you wouldn’t even give it as a tinkgelt, as a tip, today, but at that time it was, it was as if you pay somebody fifty marks for a lesson. Laban took it and said thank you, merci, thank you, then the ceremony of helping her into the wheel chair started, and she was wheeled out of the room, and Laban looked at the five francs and said, ‘what shall we do with them?’ He threw it into the air, let it fall on the floor. There is a hero, I don’t know which one, on the one side, and a Swiss cross at the other side, I think. So, he said, ‘What shall we do?’ He said before, ‘Cross would mean that we spend it tonight drinking, get out for a walk into the … do something very nice, go out for a walk in the darkness with the stars out and the fireflies all over the meadows’ - that was beautiful in Ascona in the summer - ‘or save it and get a decent meal for my family tomorrow. Then if the cross came out the joy was great. From now on we had a five francs piece every day because Wanderndenierer wanted her solo lesson every day, and we were rich suddenly. No, it was really lovely when I think of these… they were are not only funny when I think of them today, but they were funny at the very moment when they happened. They made you so happy and made you feel so good, so light, so not responsible for anything in the world. The responsibilities came later, not very much later, but of course them. But at that time I personally had no feeling of responsibility at all and that made it also more painful. And then we used to meet, six girls, three boys or four boys, sometimes even more boys, because the girls attracted boys and the boys attracted seemed to be quite nice, joined us. We all lived on Laban’s five francs. You got a lot. Big, big, maybe not five litres, but two, three litres of country wine. And the country wine was very good. Anyhow, we did not only drink, but we danced and that was the reason. And all these tiny, little inns around the villages, they had one thing in common, an awful instrument where you put ten centimes and it howled some music, dreadful. All old, nearly kaput, music. And we danced, on the table, under the table, over the table, around the table, wherever there was a spot you could put your feet, we danced until late and only when midnight was over did we return home. And I remembered how beautiful these walks were, and you passed or crossed a meadow, you call them Glühwurmchen [glow worms] are these the fireflies, which glow when float, flit, fly in the night? All of them dancing, coloured, the whole meadow vibrating with them in glow, with their glowing bodies, you can think what dancers would feel if they felt like firebirds, fireflies, marvellous. Wonderful, really. Oh, it was a beautiful time.
[break in tape]
And so Laban what could you do? He had already two women. He was living with … there was two of them. One was a legal wife, he had married Maja, and already had three children from her, and then Suzie. In the first time he used to introduce my legal wife Maja, my illegal but beloved wife, Suzie. Suzanne. And the people, these, their mouth had dropped like that. ‘My god, how terrible, how terrible, how awful.’ And then we had the greatest fun when we saw the terrorism we invented, it was just to make fun of the whole situation of everything and anything. Beautiful.
Emil Nolde (born Emil Hansen; 7 August 1867 – 13 April 1956) was a German-Danish painter and printmaker. He was one of the first Expressionists, a member of Die Brücke, and was one of the first oil painting and watercolor painters of the early 20th century to explore color. He is known for his brushwork and expressive choice of colors. Golden yellows and deep reds appear frequently in his work, giving a luminous quality to otherwise somber tones. His watercolors include vivid, brooding storm-scapes and brilliant florals.