Hanya Holm: One of the ‘Big Four’ founders of American modern dance

I feel an incredible sense of gratitude to Hanya Holm, one of the legendary pioneers of American modern dance from the 1930’s onward, even though I never studied directly with her. She was a fine modern dancer, a choreographer with the ability to adapt to many forms from musical theatre to film to opera, but above all transformed the scope and teaching of modern dance for generations of Americans. Her methods drew out critical thinking about the body in space.

Hanya Holm, born Johanna Eckert, was grounded in years of Dalcroze Eurhythmics in the early 20th century. Initially intended for musicians, this method had expanded to dancers, actors and in therapy with the intention of awakening the physical, aural, and visual images of music in the mind, time, space and energy as well as speech and movement. Emile Jaques-Dalcroze believed that learning through multiple senses was fundamental to all meaningful learning.

Holm was inspired to take her years of training in expressing music through purposeful movement, sound, thought, feeling, and creativity to the next level after seeing a performance by the German expressionist dancer May Wigman perform.

Wigman herself was a student of Rudolf von Laban who believed that dance started from within and created the universally accepted method of dance notation, Labanoatation and the effort-shape analysis of movement.

Holm moved to Dresden to attend the Wigman School and in short order joined the dance company, taught and became co-director over ten years. For the benefit of the world of dance, Holm accepted Mary Wigman’s 1931 offer to direct a New York Wigman School.  Holm’s classes balanced dance pedagogy, improvisation and composition with teaching anatomy, theory and notation. This eventually became the gold standard of dance education across the United States and I personally cannot image being who and where I am today as a dancer and teacher without this framework in dance education.

Five years later, the school’s name had to be changed to the Hanya Holm Studio owing to the rise of German fascism necessitating distance from German ties. Her husband was a German sculptor who, when Hitler came to power, sided with the Reich, effectively ending his marriage to Holm. Their son Klaus eventually became a Broadway lighting designer.

Bennington College, Vermont invited Hanya Holm, along with three other pioneer modern dance choreographers, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, to teach in a summer school of dance starting in 1934, which revolutionized the accessibility of modern dance to hundreds of aspiring dancers and physical-education teachers.

This was the first opportunity for students to “cross camps”, to encourage male students like choreographers Alwin Nikolai and Merce Cunningham, support new choreography while the pioneers of modern dance developed their revolutionary techniques. Except Holm who, instead of creating a personal vocabulary to teach students said, “You are your master and student; you must search within your own body.” She used space, time and energy explorations to expertly guide students. Her unique approach to dance training and technique shaped generations of dancers including Alwin Nikolais, Mary Anthony, Valerie Bettis, Don Redlich, Alfred Brooks and Glen Tetley.

Trend, created for 33 dancers at Bennington, won the New York Times Award for best choreography in 1937. A social critique of conformity and oppression, students danced as a Greek-style chorus while Holm and 5 other soloists symbolized individualism.

When the summer festival and Bennington School of the Dance had to close as WWII loomed, Holm directed the Colorado College Dance Festival, a six-week summer program that ran from 1941 to 1983. I remember seeing off my 16-year-old big sister at the train station as she left for a summer with Hanya Holm before later seeing her off in Vermont at Bennington College, one of only two colleges offering degrees in dance.

The fact that Holm did not impose a personal movement vocabulary did not mean she did not demand full body control along with awareness.

The brilliant choreographer who studied under her, Alwin Nikolais said, “The first thing that comes to mind when I think of Hanya is discipline. If your feet in fourth position were not perfect you got a string of German oaths like you never heard before. We improvised a great deal. A lot of the process had to do with implanting something in the mind and making the body as the slave of the mind to emanate that thought, illuminate it. Hanya had a whole bag of wonderful tricks to make this happen. One very dramatic one was lining us up 10 feet from a cement wall and telling us to put in our minds that we could run up the wall. Don’t decide when, just put in your mind so strongly that this is what you are going to do and the moment will come when you will go. And I’ll be damned, up the wall we went.”

At Colorado she designed exercises to develop strength and flexibility along with physical therapist Joseph Pilates (yes, that Pilates!). Her technique extended from the Wigman- Laban- Dalcroze philosophies of the body in relation to space and emotion. To do this, she used improvisation to give dancers the freedom discover and flow through space in ways that cannot be replicated in the next class as it is not dependent on a specifics.

Glen Tetley, “The genius of her teaching is that she wanted you to think, discover, explore. After technique class we had a theory class. You could take two hours on one point, like turning or one arm swing. Only when the body becomes tired do you release and let go to do the movement properly. There was time to talk about these things philosophically. There was feeling of a university of dance, a wonderful concept but in a professional setting, not academic. We were taught Labannotion, music and some history of dance.”

Mary Anthony, a national treasure and legend of modern dance, shared: “Coming into the dance studio of Hanya Holm was like coming into a cathedral where she would surround herself with her tomtoms and her gongs. She would just start a rhythm and say, start across the floor to one dancer and calling out directions to everyone to join in. The classes were so fabulous that we could only shriek with joy at the end.”

I had the unforgettable opportunity of attending a few of Mary Anthony’s classes along with my sister Marilyn in the late ’60s. And, in the interconnection of all things, my Odissi student of ten years, Patrick Suzeau, Co-artistic Director with his wife Muriel Cohan of the COHAN/SUZEAU Dance Company and Professor in the University of Kansas Dance Department, prominently appears in the documentary on Mary Anthony “a Life in Dance” when he was studying with her as a young dancer in NYC.

The interconnections are quite logical when one understands that the individual-based physical, intellectual and emotional development of the creative performing artist in modern dance training in the United States was largely based on methods used by Hanya Holm. This supports the multi-level exploration that facilitates a Patrick or myself following a journey of discovery that led to India.

Following the connections from this end, Indian modern dancer Bharat Sharma (we learned Mayurbhanj Chhau together in mid 70’s) travelled to New York to study Modern Dance in all the great techniques: Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Murray Louis-Alwin Nikolais and others. On return, he told me he felt most connected to Nikolais.  This is most logical, given that his father, Narendra Sharma, created legendary Bhoomika modern dance productions after training at the Uday Shankar Centre at Almora. Mary Wigman had trained Zohra Sehgal in Dresden for three years before joining Uday Shankar and teaching at Almora. As mentioned earlier, Nikolais was from the same gharana via Hanya Holm.

Holm’s dance work Metropolitan Daily was the first modern dance composition to be televised. She was one of the first modern dancers to choreograph for Broadway and her Labanotation score for Kiss Me, Kate (1948) was the first choreography to be copyrighted in the United States.

In an era where American women had limited career opportunities that provided the kind of intellectual exploration and creativity of Hanya Holm’s approach to teaching dance, modern dance entered a golden period where universities accepted that this had the academic rigor to merit inclusion in higher education. Holm was strict; she expected greatness from her students which would come from a willingness to work hard. Holm told students “You have a perfect right to branch out, if you have the stuff in you, if you discover your own richness, if you have something to say.”

The writer is a respected exponent of Odissi,
Manipuri and Mayurbhanj and Seraikella Chau whose four-decade career in India was preceded by 17 years of modern dance and ballet in the US and an MA in dance from the University of Michigan. She can be  contacted at sharonlowen.workshop@gmail.com.