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5. Hanya Holm and an American Tanzgemeinschaft
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5. Hanya Holm and an American Tanzgemeinschaft Tresa Randall Hanya Holm arrived in the United States in September 1931 to open the New York Wigman School, created under the patronage of impresario Sol Hurok. On the heels of Mary Wigman’s first, highly acclaimed U.S. tour from 1930 to 1931, interest in the Wigman method was high among American dancers, and a small staff from the Wigman Central Institute in Dresden, led by Holm, were sent to New York to capitalize on it. According to Wigman’s biographer Hedwig Müller, Wigman was invigorated by the opportunity to conquer America.1 Hanya Holm—her loyal follower, a true believer in the Wigman cause—was willing to take on the challenge of spreading the Wigman influence in the New World. Holm’s initial voyage to the United States, then, was undertaken neither as an immigrant in search of a better life, nor as an artist in search of greater freedom. Rather, I contend, Holm traveled to the United States, in part, as a businesswoman but, more urgently, as a missionary. In the American dance history literature, Holm is most often referred to as one of the “four pioneers” of American modern dance and as a brilliant choreographer of American musical theater. Her canonization as one of the four pioneers, though, has been a tenuous one; she does not fit well into nationalist narratives of American modern dance and has received less critical attention than her contemporaries Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey. For several decades, analysis of her role in American dance history emphasized her Americanization , or how she adapted her approach to dance to reflect the American temperament—a narrative first established by critic John Martin in the late 1930s and reinforced by Holm’s biographer Walter Sorell, among others.2 As Susan Manning has demonstrated, this narrative served to elide the German influence on American dance and thus bolster claims of its Americanness.3 In the late 1930s, the Americanization narrative about Holm served specific i-xii_1-284_Mann.indd 79 4/5/12 3:29 PM 80 tresa randall political ends: it enabled Holm to survive the political controversy surrounding Wigman’s collaboration with the Nazis, and it enabled the American modern dancers to claim modern dance as a native American art form during a time of rising nationalism. Holm herself proposed that “the spirit of America” had become the inspiration for her work in the late 1930s, and she did certainly change her approach to dance after her emigration, in order to better reflect the American temperament , sense of space, tempo, and concept of modern dance. After all, she explained, “The dance, like any cultural expression, when brought from one country to another must undergo some changes.”4 However, I argue that Holm had a rather different understanding of this adaptation process than dance history has most often described. As I will explain, it was not a repudiation of her German modern dance approach, but, in significant ways, its fulfillment. Her concept of dance mandated that she engage directly with “the people” to create a new community of dance (Tanzgemeinschaft) in the United States. In the late 1930s, Americans celebrated how Holm had captured the spirit of the American folk in her work;5 they may not have realized that this was what her concept of dance required her to do (Figure 5.1). Figure 5.1. Hanya Holm in Sarabande. Photo: Anonymous. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. i-xii_1-284_Mann.indd 80 4/5/12 3:29 PM [3.238.233.189] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:50 GMT) Hanya Holm and an American Tanzgemeinschaft 81 Nationalist accounts ofAmerican modern dance have largely set the terms by which we have been able to understand Hanya Holm’s work. This essay offers a new way to conceptualize Holm’s approach to dance and the trajectory of her American career by outlining the aspects of her philosophy and worldview that guided her responses to America and her cultural migration. Hanya Holm was a key figure in the transmission of modern dance across national borders in the 1930s, a history that has only begun to be written.6 The politics of this era of German-American interchange in dance are complex and highly fraught, and Hanya Holm’s role in the deployment of national agendas is no exception. It is important to remember that even though...