A Lifetime of Dance: Bessie Schoenberg

ie0re interview A LIFETIME OF DANCE Bessie Schoenberg Bessie Schoenberg was an early member of Martha Graham's dance company in the 1930s. She taught in the Dance Department at Sarah Lawrence College from 1945 to 1975 and is recognized throughout the world as a pioneer in the teaching of Dance Composition. She taught composition at The Place (London) in 1978. This interview was taped by Meg Eginton and John Howell in February 1979. JOHN HOWELL How did you first become interested in dance? BESSIE SCHOENBERG: I've always danced, that's all I remember. It seems that it was slightly an agony within the family that I was always dancing in a non-dancing family. Mind you, it was a very musical family. Whether as a child I thought that I should dance In the way that one thinks of a dance profession I can't even remember. To me it was simply a way of being. JH: Did you take lessons? 106 BS: We had some kind of rhythmic gymnastics at high school. I achieved something of a position for myself there because I remember that I was asked to make dances for what we now in America would call assembly programs . JH: Where was this? BS: In Dresden. I transferred from a private school into a public high school because it was of a better scholastic caliber.The wind blew quite differently in a public high school, it was a very modern institution, and I was, like very often in my life, at the right place at the right time. Just luck. The school decided that for the upper three years students would have a choice to be either in a group of Romance languages, natural sciences, or the arts or general studies. Of course there was nQ question as to what my choice was going to be. And there the visual arts and music were strongly emphasized , more than say theatre or dance, although some of that came into it, too. That is when my longing to study dance began. JH: Was the dance you got in those schools an educational policy or was it influenced by any of the early modern dance that had been going on? BS: This is a little bit earlier than Wigman. Both Wigman and Graham we consider as starting in the twenties. My school years were during the First World War. MEG EGINTON: So it was an outgrowth of the physical education program ? BS: Yes. You see, Swedish gymnastics and German exercise had a tremendous influence. You did climbing on things along the walls, and swinging from ropes. You also had a section of dance probably more rhythmic, that's why I say rhythmic gymnastics. I was always considered somewhat strange in what I came up with, probably because I was doing things that came from me rather than from any learning. There was a family discussion that I should go to the opera ballet school and then that was ruled out, strictly because young people who went to the ballet school were certainly lower class and that was not to be considered. JH: Was that true? BS: Absolute rubbish. I'm sure it was nothing but sheer upper class prejudice . So then along floated Dalcroze, And that was considered acceptable because it was such an outlandish thing, who would do it anyway? You see it was just a few crazy people and after all, it was under the aegis of music. So this is how I got my start, and of course I loved it. I couldn't go to Hellerau, that was too far to go and so I went to Dalcroze classes in the city, which were done in the empty dining room of a vegetarian restaurant. And in my physical memory I always have these memories of cold cabbage connected with going one, two, three, four. They were heavenly months, but alas, only moriths because in my enthusiasm I would take everything that I learned and carry this back to 107 school. I would gather everybody around me at intermission and teach them what I had just learned. Until one day when I came home I...