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Finding a Place for Hanya Holm

Claudia Gitelman

Standard histories of modern dance have tended to regard Hanya Holm as an extraneous figure, crediting her with having adapted German meth- ods of dance training for American educational consumption and for in-

fluencing an array of students who became famous. History texts, which

group Holm with other artists who taught at the Bennington School of the Dance (1934-1942), marginalize her for the fluid scenario of her career after Bennington. Holm's complex career is intriguing for what it

suggests about issues of nationalism, regionalism, elitism, and popular culture in modern dance historical orthodoxy.

Holm can be seen as having had four choreographic careers. From 1935 to 1944, while she maintained a company, first under Mary Wig- man's name and then her own, she presented seasons in New York and undertook five national tours, winning the New York Times Award for best Group Choreography in 1937 with Trend and the Dance Magazine Award for Best Group Choreography in 1939 with Tragic Exodus. In Holm's second choreographic career, which began in 1941, she made works for advanced students and guest artists who attended her forty-three summers of instruction and dance production in Colorado; Glen Tetley, Alwin Nikolais, Ray Harrison, Fred Berk, Katya Delakova, Murray Louis, Joan Woodbury, David Wood, Don Redlich, Jeff Duncan, and Janet Col- lins are just a few of the well-known dancers who performed there.

? 2000 by Claudia Gitelman Published by Marcel Dekker, Inc. www.dekker.com

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Roy Harris, Arch Lauterer, and Hanya Holm in 1942, confer- ring on their two collaborations, What So Proudly We Hail and Namesake. Photograph by Loyde Knutson. By courtesy of the Hanya Holm family.

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FINDING A PLACE FOR HANYA HOLM

Holm's third, and overlapping, choreographic career was in com- mercial theatre. Beginning with Ballet Ballads, the play Insect Comedy, and Kiss Me, Kate in 1948, she choreographed a parade of Broadway musicals through the 1950s, peaking with My Fair Lady in 1956, and continuing into the mid-1960s. During that time she also choreographed a film musical and television specials and directed opera. Finally, in 1975 Holm returned to concert choreography in a wider arena and made four works for the Don Redlich Company, one of which toured the world with Mikhail Baryshnikov's White Oak Dance Project. Immigrant survival strategies may have been responsible for the range of Holm's achieve- ments.

Johanna Kuntze had entered the professional world of modem dance in Dresden in 1920, when, a twenty-seven-year-old divorcee responsible for an infant son, she petitioned the great German dancer Mary Wigman, for instruction. She was already licensed to teach the Dalcroze method of rhythmic training for musicians and dancers, and a year after accepting her as a student, Wigman appointed her an assistant teacher. Taking the stage name Hanya Holm, she danced in the company Wigman formed in 1923, not only performing, but also managing travel and bag- gage transport on the group's many tours. In 1929 Wigman asked her to assume co-directorship of her school. Independent projects outside the Wigman School were of a dance/drama nature, staging Euripides' The Bacchae in Holland and Stravinsky's L'Histoire du soldat in Dresden.

When she came to New York in 1931 to direct the newest in the network of Wigman schools, she probably knew that she would not return to Germany. While teaching and performing with Wigman she had lived through the hyperinflation of the early 1920s and experienced the political and economic chaos ignited by the crash of 1929. She had seen nationalistic displays in the beer halls of Munich while rehearsing Wigman's Toten- mal for the Third Dancers Congress of 1930 and was foresighted enough to think that such rowdiness and hate could consume Germany.

Professionally, Holm had worked so deeply in the shadow of Wigman that it was unlikely that she would be able to establish an independent career in Europe, as had some other Wigman students: the electric Gret Palucca, the intense Harald Kreutzberg, the driven Margarethe Wall- mann. But remaining with Wigman had become painful. Holm's three- year love affair with an intelligent, worldly industrialist had brought satis- faction, stability, and excitement, but when her lover became Wigman's

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financial adviser, he and Wigman discovered an instant, mutual infatua- tion. In his anguished letters to Holm (now in the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts) we hear through them her desperation as he pulled away. While her move to America pro- vided a clean break with some problems, it ensnared her in others.

Holm may not have expected the strength of competition she would face from American dancers who had made the leap into modern- ism when Wigman was already at the peak of her creative powers. The cachet of Wigman's name put Holm in the first rank of teachers and au- thorities on the new dance, but she had not had as much experience with concert choreography as her New World counterparts. Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Helen Tamiris had full concerts of solo and group works behind them; they had begun to build audiences, and they had parti- sans.

Another calculation Holm and Wigman could not have made in 1931 was the barbarism into which their homeland would sink, making a pariah of things German. First Jewish students, then liberals, and soon all politically alert artists began to shun the New York Wigman School until, in 1936, Holm found it necessary to cut ties to her source. The company that was touring as the Group of the New York Wigman School of the Dance became the Hanya Holm Company.

Holm had made friends by that time. John Martin championed her work and helped her to sanitize her background by extolling her Amer- icanness. The founders of the Bennington School of the Dance recognized her gifts as a teacher and felt that associating her with fascism was unfair; they invited her to be one of the "Big Four" around whom the summer curriculum was organized. A student and friend, Martha Wilcox, paved the way for the debut of the Hanya Holm Company. A benefactress made it possible for her to bring her son out of Germany. In 1936 Holm became a United States citizen.

By the mid-1930s dancers and critics were inventing an American genesis for modern dance and denying influence from exchange with Eu- rope. Motives behind this nationalistic urge of the dominant American dance community were many. First, no doubt, was an artistic confidence that led to a vision of uniqueness. Second was the well-worn battle with ballet, in some eyes a decadent form of the European aristocracy. The fascist ascendancy in Europe, which caused enrollment in Holm's school to fall before and even after she broke her business ties with Wigman,

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did not figure overtly in maneuvers to nationalize modern dance, for the modern dance establishment also wished to distance itself from a group of radical dancers who were using their platforms and stages to fight social injustice and denounce fascism.

The strength of anti-German feeling in dance in 1936 bubbled into the mainstream press in a diatribe by Ted Shawn, who, ironically, denounced his own former students-Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman-as well as Holm when he wrote that "although they have been thoroughly grounded in the rich and inclusive styles which I taught them, [they] have remained strongly on the side of the German extreme left wing-dynamism, distortion, 'abstract' and 'absolute' dance being preached by them, with a parallel denial of all else in the dance as having value." With the phrase "extreme left wing" Shawn was not writing about politics; his lengthy article was critical of his former students' devotion to individual expression. In rejecting the German dance for its aim to "evolve movements from an inner, dynamic, kinetic impulse," he rejected all that his own students were striving for, their own contemporary and national voice. He also confirmed that, in his view, American dance had accepted too much influence from the dance culture of Europe.

Wigman's three United States tours from 1930 to 1933 had been preceded by visits of the German dancers Eugene von Grona, Harald Kreutzberg, Yvonne Georgi, and Hans Wiener (later known as Jan Veen). Many others came later to perform and teach. Americans traveled to Eu- rope to see dance and to study. One motive for the founding of Bennington was admiration for European dance congresses and the desire to provide domestic competition with German schools and summer courses; just before Holm set out for New York, Americans had composed fully half of the summer course at the Wigman Central Institute in Dresden.

But many American dance artists rejected the suggestion of Euro- pean influence. In an essay published in 1935 Martha Graham criticized those who went abroad "to acquire an alien manner and form," writing, "We cannot transplant the foreign dance-forms, and we fight in a vain effort to breathe life into them." She argued that enthusiasm for German dance was "misdirection." 2 Graham' s need to dispute European influence is evidence that it was prevalent.

How was Holm's crafting of an American identity influenced by the hostility she confronted in the 1930s and how did she respond as an

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Hanya Holm (far right) and her company, probably in Dance of Work and Play in 1938. Photography by Ralph Samuels. By courtesy of the Hanya Holm family.

artist? Her first strategy was to place the sunny side of her personality center stage. While Graham and Humphrey, the two leading women fig- ures in American modem dance, appeared austere, calculating, and aloof, Holm was affable, guileless, and charming. Her speech and the early es- says she wrote were humble and patient in tone. Suggesting, never criticiz- ing, she presented herself as a learner with the responsibility "to under- stand as well as to instruct."3 Edna Ocko, the leading dance journalist of the radical press during the 1930s, said in 1996, "No one accused Hanya of being a Nazi but she was in a difficult position. She had split loyalty to German and American dance and she had to be careful not to offend."4


Holm did her best to take a nonthreatening stance toward American dancers.

Holm first put dancers on stage not in choreographed pieces, but in lecture-demonstrations that used Rudolf Laban's movement analysis and Wigman's stage sense, and also capitalized on American vitality and exuberance. Dancers explored relaxation in swings and the elasticity of jumps, investigated gravity by plunging to the floor and springing from it; they shattered space in crescendos of skips and leaps cued and accom- panied by Holm, who sat surrounded by her famed collection of percus- sion instruments. The dancers also performed studies they had created themselves, for her training demanded discovery.

Holm's first choreography for her lecture-demonstration programs was Dance in Two Parts: A Cry Rises in the Country; Toward New Destinies, followed by Primitive Rhythm and Salutation. All three group works were in the repertoire when she began to present fully choreographed concerts in 1936, to which she added City Nocturne and Festive Rhythm. The solos Drive, Saraband, In a Quiet Space, and Four Chro- matic Eccentricities were less successful than her group dances. Holm's own movement quality was light, skimming, quick, and delicate. While thrilling in the classroom, it did not match the strength and intensity of the American and European artists who were concertizing in seasons heady with risk and ambition.

The photographic record of early group works shows dancers sweeping across the stage. Geometric formations and stolid body shapes seem not to have been in her choreographic tool kit. Holm's dancers wore generous skirts that flew around them to enlarge the open, athletic lyricism of the choreography. She saved stark, close-fitting jersey tubes for later comic works; there were to be several in Colorado, and later Capers, the last work she gave the Don Redlich Company.

The Denver audience that saw the 1936 debut of the company she called her own responded exuberantly to Holm's "finding of joy in America." Apparently they were relieved at being allowed to laugh and enjoy kinetic virtuosity as well as ponder deep intentions. Holm built her program, the first half of which a critic called "taxing," to end with the rambunctious Primitive Rhythm and Festive Rhythm. Denverites found satire in City Nocturne and "roared with laughter." The local reviewer suggested that audiences in Holm's six sold-out houses were in a receptive mood as they entered the theater because they had previously seen "none

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of the abortive attempts to create an essentially American dance."5 Holm's outsider status gave her the ability to see with an objectivity difficult for natives, and perhaps she recognized excesses in her new dance environment, leading her to program accessible work along with dances on more difficult themes.

In the next several years writers increasingly criticized the cultist nature of modern dance and cautioned against its sealing itself off. Marga- ret Lloyd wrote in 1938 that "unless the modern dance appeals directly to the layman, without cult or pretense, without artificial bags of information to plow through, it is not fulfilling its obligation or possibilities as art. "6 The dance critic Walter Terry used one of his columns in the New York Herald Tribune to deplore cultism and fanaticism that were "holding back the modern dance." He criticized artists who had no regard for the

understanding and enjoyment of their audiences.7 John Martin identified in Holm's first program the principles dis-

tinguishing Wigman's and Holm's dance creation from those of American

pioneers who were developing strongly personalized vocabularies as

teaching tools and creative foundations: "There are no bits of technique transferred bodily from the practice room, no combinations of isolated

gestures." 8 He reinforced the point when he reviewed her second program. He found her choreography, although motivated by a central principle, to be "without set vocabulary, and [it] ranges freely in response to inner direction, always with authority because so closely related to natural func- tion."9

Margaret Lloyd saw a difference, too. Examining Holm's lecture- demonstrations and her classes, she marveled at "an approach unlike any other" for exhilaration achieved by kinesthetic means, without emotional

underpinnings.'? Like her mentor, Holm neither formulated a lexicon of movements for use in teaching and choreographing nor found it necessary to move directly from an emotional state. A theory of space and dynamics gave the artist tools with which to craft motion ideas that alone carried the subject. When Joseph Arnold Kaye awarded Holm the Dance Maga- zine Award for Tragic Exodus in 1939, he acknowledged that craftsman-

ship. The dance had "emotional appeal and topical significance," he said, without submerging itself in its subject."

During the mid-1930s Holm watched as her family, her child- hood, and all that had formed her as an artist became engulfed by fascist hate and aggression in Germany. Her direct connection to the disasters

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A rehearsal of Trend at Bennington. Photograph by Thomas Bouchard. ? Diane Bouchard. By courtesy of the Hanya Holm family.

of Europe may be the crucible out of which she created Trend, a moder dance masterpiece. With the resources available to her at Bennington in the summer of 1937, she created a wide-angle vision of social destruction and rebirth. From the degradation of conformity comes catastrophe and ultimate annihilation, but out of that is born a fragile consciousness of unity in life. Women who danced in Trend report that Holm was deeply concerned about affairs in Europe. All artists were, but Holm's connection was personal. She had rescued her son just before he could have been drafted; she felt wretched about not being able to help Wigman, her artistic mother. The finality of separation from her homeland was traumatic.

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Trend had two performances at Bennington and two in New York, but its cast of thirty-three made it too large to tour and Holm made another program of shorter works. Two premiered at Bennington during the 1938 session, the robust Dance of Work and Play and Dance Sonata. Other new works that season were Dance of Introduction and Etudes. Her second tour was another success. In Chicago, Cecil Smith wrote, "Miss Holm has always been the finest choreographer among modem dancers, and now that she is gaining a theater sense Martha Graham will do well to look to her laurels."12 In 1939 Holm added Metropolitan Daily to her concerts; it stayed in the repertoire for many years and was the first modem dance to be televised in the United States. Metropolitan Daily was a lighthearted, sometimes hilarious gloss on the foibles of city dwellers, and it also contained "Want Ads," a poignant duet suggesting the distress of worldwide unemployment.

In 1939 and 1940 Holm made Tragic Exodus and They Too Are Exiles, works responding to world tragedy as Hitler marched across Eu- rope. While the first, a meditation on loss and displacement, was univer- sally admired, the second received a mixed response. Walter Terry found it unconvincing,13 but Edward Barry praised its reference to people living under the lash of tyranny: "Besides the dignity and strength befitting its subject, the piece had a freedom and momentum calculated to increase greatly its impact ... it became human and direct and moving."14

The creation of Holm' s next work brought her more publicity than ever before and also garnered her first truly negative reviews. The Golden Fleece, an Alchemist Fantasy was the brainchild of the surrealist Kurt Seligmann, who concocted a scenario based on a fourteenth-century legend. He also constructed costumes that were irresistible to photographers and descriptive writers, but that proved ruthless to dancers and buried Holm's choreography. "A Cosmic Oven," "A Self-Grinding Mill," "Bushel of Wings," and the other constructions made the dancers illegi- ble under top-heavy headgear and padded limbs. Seligmann constructed the costumes on the dancers, insensitive to their pain as he pinned, tied, painted, and glued. Many left the company after the ballet was toured. (Five years later George Balanchine had the confidence to hack away at Seligmann's costumes for his ballet The Four Temperaments, and he later dropped them altogether.)

Despite the critical failure of The Golden Fleece, 1941 was a year of opportunity for Holm. She accepted the invitation of Colorado College

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The Hanya Holm Dance Company in Parable-with reference to the popular incident of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, 1942. The Wise Virgins (top row) are Mildred Kaeser, Molly Howe, and Reba Koren; the Foolish Virgins are Mary Anthony, Joan Palmer, and Hanya Holm. Photograph by Loyde Knutson. By courtesy of the Hanya Holm family.

to stable her company there in the summers and to create a Program of Instruction and Dance Production that would be entirely her own. Holm's assistants represented her at Bennington for the last two years of the school's existence; her own program in Colorado endured until 1983.

The president of Colorado College, Thurston Davies, was estab-

lishing a center for the arts in the Rocky Mountain region. His close friend Martha Hill, co-founder of Bennington, advised him to invite Holm to direct the dance component because, she said, of the anti-German senti-

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ment Holm was battling in the East.'5 Hill's concern was, without doubt, sincere, but she may also have seen an opportunity to clean house at Ben- nington. In offering Holm a new path, she fell in with the project to con- struct an American heritage for modern dance and to abandon foreign influence.

Professional rivalries at Bennington and East Coast anti-German sentiment gave Holm good reason to accept the offer of Colorado College. However, establishing an artistic base in the middle of the continent took courage and the ability to recognize that the United States is a collection of regions. She also knew that she would have to work collaboratively, for part of Davies' bargain was that she create a new work with the composer-in-residence, Roy Harris.

In 1941 Holm made From This Earth, the first of four ballets on American themes with Harris, deftly massaging her sponsor's expecta- tions of a rugged piece about Colorado mining into a story of Everyman.16 The next year Arch Lauterer, the stage architect, designer, and theatre visionary, joined Holm and Harris in Colorado, designing two pieces of Americana, the dance suite What So Proudly We Hail and Namesake, a theatre dance of his own conception. All three works succeeded when shown in New York, helping to confirm an American identity for Holm.

Early in 1943 Holm turned to the European canon with the frivo- lous Parable-with reference to the popular incident of the Wise and Foolish Virgins. During the summer she undertook a large-scale retelling of Greek tragedy with Orestes and the Furies. It succeeded with her regional audience but failed in New York and may have been a factor in the decision to dissolve her company, which gave its last performance February 5, 1944, at Hampton Institute in Virginia. On the program was another use of Greek legend, Vigil, in which Holm compared the doubts and emotions of Penelope with those of contemporary women in wartime.

For the remainder of the decade Holm' s Colorado programs were described in The Dance Observer, even though she did not bring them to New York. In 1944 George Beiswanger reviewed What Dreams May Come, in which Holm seems to have dealt with her anguish about the failure of the preceding year, moving through nightmarish incidents in which she tried, but never succeeded, to attract the attention of an audience.'7 The next year Holm and Harris returned to American themes, but instead of treating the gay and lusty, they collaborated on three war poems from Leaves of Grass. Reviewing for The Dance Observer, Doris Baker

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Hanya Holm's Xochipili, produced in Colorado in 1948, with scenes and costumes by Ricardo Martinez. The "Men of Earth" are Leo Duggan, Marc Breaux, Oliver Kostock, and Glen Tetley. Photograph by Fritz Kaeser. By courtesy of the Hanya Holm family.

found Walt Whitman Suite a thrilling and beautiful work of heroic stature, while of Holm's 1946 premiere, Windows, Baker wrote that "Miss Holm proved her great skill as both dramatic dancer and choreographer."18

The first summer after the war saw Holm's summer enrollment more than double and many professionals, including a number of war veterans, come for study. To celebrate, she explored partnering tech- niques. In New York she formed the Hanya Holm Workshop Group and created Ozark Suite, which was premiered on an orchestral program at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1947. The three-part work was performed through the 1948-49 season, once on a benefit for The Dance Observer

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and then on the New York Dance Theater series in shared programs, first with Merce Cunningham, Doris Humphrey, Jose Limon, and Jane Dudley, then with Charles Weidman, Eve Gentry, Sophie Maslow, and Limon, and finally with Limon, Maslow, Weidman, Humphrey, and Valerie Bettis. Ozark Suite always met with good reviews, which noted its cast of glamorous Broadway dancers, Annabelle Lyon, Joan Kruger, Bambi Linn, Zachary Solov, Ray Harrison, and Glen Tetley among them.

Holm's studio had begun to attract the attention of dancers in the professional world of ballet and musical comedy. In 1.993, a year after Holm's death, Sybil Shearer wrote of her admiration for Holm and of suggesting classes of her favorite Bennington teacher to a friend, Anna- belle Lyon, a dancer in Ballet Theatre who was frequently on Broadway. Lyon, wrote Shearer, "came under the spell of this wonderful free movement and Hanya's enthusiasm for it." Lyon passed the word to other dancers and Shearer claims that in two years "250 dancers from Broad- way were pouring through the doors of the Hanya Holm studio." 9 It is believable that the excitement of dancers led to Holm's first Broadway opportunities; Ray Harrison, who had danced in Ozark Suite, was the partner of Arnold Saint Subber, co-producer of Kiss Me, Kate.

When it opened in December 1948, Kiss Me, Kate salvaged the flagging reputation of the composer-lyricist Cole Porter and gave Holm's name national recognition. An explosion of rave reviews often mentioned the choreography: "joyous," "has imagination," "infinite variety," and "animated and virtuosic" were descriptors the critics used. None of them mentioned Holm's German origins, and the irony of her success in a form that is an American invention was, of course, lost to all. America, confi- dent and expansionist after economic and military victory in Europe and Asia, was not in an asking mood about its identity.

Two major New York dance critics credited Holm's success to her skill at subsuming the dance to the service of the other art forms and to the total project. Walter Terry wrote, "There is no ballet as such in Kiss Me, Kate, but there is dancing, all of it firmly integrated into the show to contribute to the achieving of a total theatrical impression. The dancing gives flow to the musical, it provides the means for transitions in pace or in mood or in style, it accounts for the production's necessary flashes of physical virtuosity."20 He counted classical ballet, modern dance, jitterbugging, soft-shoe, acrobatics, court dance, and simple rhyth-

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mic playfulness in "an amazing array of styles," all employed without interrupting the course of the show.

John Martin remarked on the excellence of Holm's research and her faithfulness to the style of the production. He wrote that she had "not been tempted to superimpose herself upon the production, but has given her attention wholly to bringing out and pointing up what is inherent in it." 21 One can read in a comparison to Agnes de Mille, the most dynamic of Broadway choreographers, who, some felt, did "superimpose herself."

Revisiting the show a month later, Martin remarked at how grace- fully Holm had stepped into a new field: her dances "have about them the ease and finish of a veteran. What is equally noteworthy, they have retained the taste, the formal integrity and the respect for movement of the human body which belongs to the concert stage."22 His remarks show that Holm had succeeded in a quintessentially American popular form without losing her credentials as a concert artist, and they also reveal that, for Martin, dance was compartmentalized and that the concert stage was the form against which others were measured.

Martin reinforced his view in a series of articles in 1953 in which he considered the "state of health" of modern dance. In June he lamented that Tamiris and Holm had turned to films and Broadway, "a secondary medium," while extolling Holm' s "incomparable knowledge of the body in relation to dance movement.'"23 In July he criticized young choreographers, who, he wrote, "are presenting us with their classroom exercises," and he called for Holm's return to choreography.24 Martin's comments, while flattering to Holm's artistry, show his prejudice against popular theatre forms.

There is evidence that Holm saw the Broadway musical as a folk art that was important for America's artistic development.25 Her first com- mercial venture, "The Eccentricities of Davey Crockett" in Ballet Bal- lads early in 1948, was conceived as serious dance-opera. Jerome Moross and John LaTouche, the composer and lyricist, planned a progressive fu- sion of text, music, and dance through the show's three segments, so that by the last, "Davey Crockett," action and character moved free of logical space and time. It is as a folk genre that Holm approached musical shows when she threw herself into the pressured high-stakes arena of professional theatre. Ballet Ballads, then the Karel and Josef Capek play The Insect Comedy, produced by Jose Ferrer for City Center Theater Com-

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pany, and Kiss Me, Kate all opened in 1948. She also contributed to a nonmusical play by Hallie Flanagan Davis, and early in 1949 she arranged dances for a musical version of Blood Wedding at New Stages. Mean- while, she was directing the Theater Wing's Dance Division, an institution set up to retrain veterans who had been dance professionals before their induction. In 1949 and 1951 she supervised road shows and a London production of Kate.

In 1950 she staged musical numbers for Alfred Drake's musical version of Carlo Goldoni's play The Liar and choreographed her second Cole Porter show, Out of This World, directed by Agnes de Mille. Holm proved herself more than competent in meeting the demands of the Ameri- can musical comedy. She developed a reputation for clever, imaginative detail and continued to apply the style-or, rather, the much-praised lack of style-identified by reviewers of her 1948 successes. She devised ways for dance to burst from book and song in seemingly spontaneous fashion.

In 1952 Holm won high praise for these skills in My Darlin' Aida. Arthur Todd wrote, "Miss Holm's sixth major venture on Broadway again demonstrates this choreographer's taste, integrity and innate theatrical craftsmanship." He found the dances "brilliantly conceived and executed and, more importantly, the dance action completely integrated with the book."26 Holm had inserted into the story of Aida, here set on a Southern plantation, a number without music but based on body rhythms and sounds the dancers created with household implements. It was a device similar in technique, though not in mood, to a section in her 1946 concert dance Windows, made in Colorado.

In 1954 Holm successfully brought off the Moross-LaTouche dance-opera The Golden Apple, her favorite Broadway creation. That year she also staged L'Histoire du soldat at the Aspen Music Festival. In 1955 she choreographed Marc Blitzstein's short-lived Reuben, Reuben and in 1956 succeeded with three high-profile ventures in three different genres: she choreographed My Fair Lady on Broadway, directed the world premiere of the opera The Ballad of Baby Doe at the Central City Opera House in Colorado, and choreographed the film musical The Vagabond King.

The intensity continued unrelieved. In 1957 she did an NBC television production of Pinocchio, and directed the musical Where's Char- ley? in London and The Dance and the Drama for the Canadian Broad-

casting Company. In 1959 she staged the opera Orpheus and Euridice at

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the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver and in 1960 choreographed two more Broadway shows, Christine and Camelot. In 1963 came another television special, Dinner with the President, and in 1965 her last musical, Anya. She and her assistant, Crandall Diehl, also restaged dances for productions of My Fair Lady in London, Australia, Israel, Stockholm, New York's City Center, and elsewhere.

While Holm worked as one of the most sought-after choreographers in New York, she continued to create concert works in Colorado, masterfully using the resources of dancers who enrolled in the course each year-seasoned professionals as well as neoprofessionals and college students. She drew from all of them more than they knew was within them. She redirected many lives through a teaching style grounded in the basics, a rhetoric of responsibility for choice in art and life, and an opportunity to submit to the discipline of professional theatre before a sophisticated regional audience she had nurtured.

Despite Holm's demanding workload in professional theatre, and its attendant tensions and fears, she produced two or even three dances for each of her annual Colorado concerts. If not major works, they were substantial. As she was doing on Broadway, she tackled a range of forms: romantic duets in 1952 and 1955; intense character studies in 1953; ex- plorations of romantic angst in 1952 and 1954; restless, anxious work in 1955; story pieces in 1951 and 1957; open, welcoming gambols in 1951 and 1953; courtly suites in 1950 and 1956, and hilarity in 1955; in 1957 and 1958, she restaged Ozark Suite there.

In the 1960s and 1970s Holm gave her teaching assistants and advanced students more responsibility for choreographing the annual Col- orado concerts. However, in 1961 she produced a full program of varied works that featured Vera Zorina as reader and Janet Collins as leading dancer, supported by other guest artists and students. In 1965 and again in 1980 huge festivals were sponsored by Colorado College, which, together with the Colorado Springs community, cherished its famous and charming summer resident. The festivals gave the artists who performed or brought their companies-Nancy Hauser, Valerie Bettis, Alwin Niko- lais, Murray Louis, Don Redlich, and Elizabeth Harris-a chance to tell the press how much they valued their beginnings with Holm. Bettis told the New York Times, "She gave us a foundation to move in any direction we liked." Hauser added, "We were not taught restrictive patterns, but the art itself." Harris said, "She never made it a cult." 27 In Dance Maga-

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...-J3'- ?? '";}

Valerie Bettis, Awn Nkolas.... and Hanya Hom at the 1. . 965

schneider. By courtesy of Bonnie Olson.

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Valerie Bettis, Alwin Nikolais, and Hanya Holm at the 1965 tribute to Holm at Colorado College. Photograph by Ben- schneider. By courtesy of Bonnie Olson.

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zine Nik Krevitsky wrote, "The evening was filled with convincing evidence that Hanya Holm ... has prepared her students and then released them to fulfill their own potential, to become independent artists and to develop the security of their own uniqueness."28

Such comments from her modem dance students and the many observations of reviewers of her choreography for the concert stage and on Broadway suggest one reason why Holm's place in the historical record is an uneasy one. Brand-name recognition, now understood by every mar- keting specialist to be of supreme importance, was missing from Holm's work. She built her choreography from a natural movement base, from what the situation required, and from the abilities and temperaments of the dancers she used. Her teaching was not based on rote learning of patterns but on leading students to understanding and discovery. This lack of fixity is a trait that some observers have taken to be a lack of vision. She neither pursued one signature style throughout her career, as some modern artists did, nor limited herself to one genre, but eagerly undertook opera direction and invested seriously in the popular culture of musical comedy, film, and television.

In 1965, at the time of both the first Colorado tribute to her and the opening of Anya, her last Broadway musical, Holm was seventy-one years old. She became involved with three other Broadway ventures, two of which did not go beyond the planning stage, and while she did set dances for the third, she withdrew before the show opened. Another choreographer took Here's Where I Belong to Broadway, where it opened and closed the same night.

In 1971 the Colorado Opera Festival was founded in Colorado Springs. Three polished productions where given each summer with East Coast directors and soloists drawn primarily from the New York City Opera. Holm directed a production each year through 1976 and choreographed Aida in 1977. In 1976, 1979, and 1981 she choreographed major works for her own annual concerts. All were very different in style and intent.

The four works she choreographed for the Don Redlich Dance Company from 1975 to 1985 also varied widely in style. They were the stark and fragmented Rota, the lyric and witty Jocose, which in 1994 entered the repertoire of the White Oak Dance Project, and Ratatat, fun, rhythmic, and presentational. When Redlich gathered these together for a concert of Holm's work at the Joyce Theater in New York in 1985, Holm added the humorous Capers to the program.

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The Don Redlich Dance Company in Holm's Rota, 1975, with (left to right) Barbara Roan, Don Redlich, Jennifer Donnahue (top), and Billy Siegenfeld. Photograph by Lois Greenfield. By courtesy of Don Redlich.

Margaret Lloyd's Borzoi Book of Modern Dance, written in the late 1940s, set the pattern of "ho-hum" treatment of Holm's concert choreography in history books, while also advancing her reputation as a reve- latory teacher. Interestingly, Lloyd wrote excitedly about Holm's choreography of "The Eccentricities of Davey Crockett," which had premiered within a year of the book's publication. Lloyd describes the three-part, three-choreographer dance-opera with relish and pronounces Holm's choreography, which she was careful to call moder dance, "the most solid and imaginative of the three [sections]."29 Apparently, Holm's first venture on Broadway was greeted without reservation by some.

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In 1978 the Capezio Dance Award celebrated her dual contribu- tion to modern dance and American musical theatre. In a lengthy piece for Dance News, Tobi Tobias contrasted Holm's choreography with that of other early modern dancers, which, Tobias noted, centered in the charis- matic performing of brilliant soloists, while "Holm's dances tended to be more distanced and objective, reflecting a more logical, less passionate view of the world." Noting Holm's "gift of humor" and her inquisitive- ness and flexibility, she concluded that "it is not as astonishing as sober- minded acolytes of the time found it, that she should have turned her choreographic talents to musical comedy."30

Until recent years, dance scholarship has found it necessary to impose order on modern dance, which puts a premium on change and renewal, by constructing lineages and family trees, and historical orthodoxy has treated dance genres categorically. Holm roamed freely across dance and theatre genres, contributing to the apotheosis of the American book musical with a pluralistic appropriation of dance forms and styles. She defied East Coast chauvinism by working at a regional center and may have been patronized because of it. Before that, in her early years in America, she had held her own in a narrow, competitive field but did not invite cultism. She negotiated difficult political terrain without com- promising loyalties.

Holm's situation necessitated that she be a team player. She is often compared, unfavorably, with Graham, Humphrey, and de Mille, who refused to compromise artistic vision. These giants of American dance, although they, too, were rebels and groundbreakers, worked within the security of American pedigrees and understood instinctively the syntax and grammar of their society. Holm came alone as an adult to a new land with an imperative to succeed, but she had to do so on terms that were unknown to her. She used her immigrant status to advantage; with a clarity and objectivity to which she was privileged because of her outsider position, she saw her new country whole, its needs, strengths, and direction. Like many successful immigrants, she used her vantage point to negotiate an alien culture and seize its opportunities.

To achieve an amazing range of successful choreography in four different careers, Holm called on inner resources forged during the difficult days of her stewardship with Mary Wigman and the complex and often hostile professional environment she faced as an immigrant in America. She was organized and knew how to keep order and to check

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impulses, yet she was also an improviser who cherished the moment and trusted spontaneity. She thought deeply and could articulate original, pro- found ideas, yet she loved nonsense and hilarity. She was a strict authori- tarian who knew when to be a team player and defer to the authority of others. She succeeded not once or twice but many times, in diverse enter- prises that should open a place for her in scholarship about the role of theatre dancing in the construction of American culture. Now that a re- freshing new generation of scholars is looking at dance in a cultural context, there is hope that they will find a place for Hanya Holm, an artist who defied categorization.

Parts of this essay were prepared for an introduction to the Cata- logue of the Florida State University Hanya Holm Costume Collection, authored by Tricia Young. It is to be published in 2000 by the Department of Dance, Florida State University.

Notes

1. Ted Shawn, Boston Herald, May 10, 1936. 2. Martha Graham, "The American Dance," in The Modern Dance

(1935), ed. Virginia Stewart and Merle Armitage (reprint, Brooklyn: Dance Horizons, 1970), p. 54.

3. Hanya Holm, "The German Dance in the American Scene," in The Modern Dance (1935), ed. Virginia Stewart and Merle Armitage, p. 80.

4. Edna Ocko, telephone interview by the author, March 2, 1996. 5. "Alberta Pike Says-," Rocky Mountain News, November 21,

1936. 6. Margaret Lloyd, Christian Science Monitor, August 16, 1938,

quoted in Sali Ann Kriegsman, Modern Dance in America: The Ben-

nington Years (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), p. 77. 7. Walter Terry, New York Herald Tribune, September 15, 1940. 8. John Martin, New York Times, August 16, 1936. 9. Ibid., February 26, 1938.

10. Margaret Lloyd, The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance (1949) (reprint, Brooklyn: Dance Horizons, 1987), p. 160.

11. Quoted in Lloyd, Borzoi Book, p. 166. 12. Cecil Smith, Chicago Daily Tribune, October 24, 1940.

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13. Walter Terry, New York Herald Tribune, January 8, 1941. 14. Edward Barry, Chicago Daily Tribune, January 11, 1940. 15. Martha Hill, telephone interview with the author, September 3,

1993. 16. I discuss Holm's massaging of chauvinistic and patriotic themes,

expected by her Colorado sponsors, into a universalism consistent with her humanistic values in my paper "Appropriating America: Hanya Holm and the American Dream," delivered at the 1996 con- ference of the Society of Dance History Scholars and published in the Proceedings.

17. Beiswanger fully described What Dreams May Come in The Dance Observer, August 1944, p. 100. He found the work "an excellent one."

18. Doris Baker, The Dance Observer, November 1946, p. 113. 19. Sybil Shearer, "My Hanya Holm," Ballet Review, Vol. 21, No. 4,

Winter 1993, pp. 4-7. 20. Walter Terry, New York Herald Tribune, January 9, 1949. 21. John Martin, New York Times, January 3, 1949. 22. Ibid., January 30, 1949. 23. Ibid., June 28, 1953. 24. Ibid., July 5, 1953. 25. I discuss Holm's choreography for Ballet Ballads in the context of

her appropriation of American subjects and theatre genres in "Ap- propriating America." I am indebted to Sharry Underwood's "Bal- let Ballads," Dance Chronicle, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1983, pp. 279-327, for information on the musical.

26. Arthur Todd, The Dance Observer, December 1952, p. 153. 27. Donald Janson, New York Times, August 8, 1965. 28. Nik Krevitsky, Dance Magazine, September 1965, p. 98. 29. Lloyd, Borzoi Book, p. 156. 30. Tobi Tobias, Dance News, March 1979, pp. 1 and 10.

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