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Migration and Memory:
The Dances of Gertrud Bodenwieser
BY CAROL BROWN
I’m speaking to you. Ready the space, make it possible, make it real.
Mark/sign/imprint/trace/seal.
Step together, stop, wind, unwind, step turn schlinger, breathe.
And speak to me in this silence.1
In the reaches of my memory a figure is held in language and gesture. She is re-membered in certain movements
and habits of style. She is distant and close, inside and outside, part omnipotent presence and part invisible trace; a
“dancemother” whose image was interiorized through the process of learning how to dance. Composed of fragments of
memory, mythology, and history, her story is less biography than biomythography, for I never knew her, yet I know her still.
My earliest knowledge of dance as an art form was inscribed through a
series of “quotes” from the past, for it was the Viennese Ausdruckstanz
choreographer Gertrud Bodenwieser (1890-1959) whose words and ideas
animated my dancing. I came to know Bodenwieser through the teachings
of her former dancer Shona Dunlop-MacTavish, with whom I trained in New
Zealand from 1972-85. When I moved to the UK in the late 1980s, curiosity
and a hunger for the familiar led me to meet with other former Bodenwieser
dancers now residing there: Hilde Holger, the late Bettina Vernon, Evelyn
Ippen, and Hilary Napier. All of these women, including Dunlop-MacTavish,
received their primary dance training with Bodenwieser, danced in the
Tanzgruppe Bodenwieser in Vienna (1923-38), and, with the exception of
Hilde Holger, danced in Australia with the Bodenwieser Viennese Ballet
(1939-58).2 Significantly, they also all developed independent careers as
dancer-choreographers and teachers in various parts of the world, including
Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, China, India, and England.3
I have listened to their stories, studied their personal archival collections of
photographs, programmes, and writings, and learned some of their dances.
More recently, and with the assistance of a Lisa Ullman Scholarship, I traveled
to Canberra, Australia to visit the Gertrud Bodenwieser Archives in the
Australian National Library. Alongside this activity and over a period of 15
years, I have been involved as a dancer in a series of reconstructions of Bodenwieser’s dances, The Demon Machine
(1924), Slavonic Dance (1939), and Joan of Arc (1946).
Now listen, I want the feeling of listening, of listening and leaping, of leaping into listening. Put rhythm, pulse, and humming
space into movement and remember, you must lift your chin and take your gaze outward in order to be seen.
The armkreis.4
Invitation to Bode nwieser’s first so lo concert in 1914 in
Vienna; Image by Franz von Bayro s.
D A N C E A D V A N C E
Migrati on and Memory : The Dances of Ge rtrud Bodenw ieser
By Carol Brown 2
I am not a dance historian but a working choreographer and dancer based in London. This activity of research and
retrieval has been in part a quest to make sense of the disjunctive experience of growing up in one part of the world,
the southern hemisphere, while learning to dance in the style of another part of the world, the Viennese style of
Ausdruckstanz. It has also been part of a genealogical quest, a process of re-membering an artistic legacy largely
invisible within dominant narratives of modern dance history.
To engage in genealogy involves recognizing the inscriptions of the past on the
present. Genealogies of performance can be said to excavate the lineage of
behaviors still at least partially visible in contemporary culture. Such an approach
is indebted to Michel Foucault’s notion of a “critical genealogy” as “writing the
history of the present.”5 Accordingly, history is concerned less with tracing origins
than tracing displacements. Genealogy in this sense is about engaging in a
choreography of memory and history at the site of the body in motion.
The ‘I’ stretches through the tendons and spilling, spinning, tripping, moves to an-
other place. Never to close the circle, keep it open, keep it whole. The schöpfkreis.6
Gertrud Bodenwieser, in setting her own body in motion, also set other bodies
in motion, and these movements were configured according to the evolving
paradigms of her practice as dancer, educator, and choreographer. This is
the story of her/my body. In the process of my “becoming dancer,” it was her
movement ideas, her language, and her philosophy that were translated to
me. Or were they? History is about the construction of narratives from the
present traces of the past. The transmission of dance knowledge between
generations is a malleable process through which traces of dances and their
movement fundamentals become reinscribed. The authority of these traces
must always be circumspect, however, because the dance artifact exists
only in the moment of its performance. As Ann Daly writes, dances are “by
definition in constant evolution over time and through space.”7
Does Bodenwieser’s movement writing still linger in the rippling action of the
spine, the welle (the wave)? In the openness of the pelvis as a leg circles in
a horizontal arc, the beinkries (leg circle)? In the circular movement of arms
whipping above the head, the schlinge (the loop of a knot)? Does my own
ongoing research into performance states and the body as a sculpture of
time and space signal a continuation or a break with her legacy? What traces
remain of her dancing?
Profile
In the brief history of modern dance, Bodenwieser acquired a reputation
as the source of a particular lineage of dance, the Viennese school of
Ausdruckstanz. Emerging in the period between the two world wars in
Central Europe as a radically modern and innovative genre, Ausdruckstanz
is generally regarded as a drive towards a more personal form of expression
in dance, literally dance of expression. Bodenwieser in Vienna was regarded as a key personality in this field
but, being an Austrian Jew, she was largely erased from the ocial canon of Central European Dance, which
emphasizes the triumvirate of Mary Wigman, Rudolf von Laban, and Kurt Jooss.8
Dancer Shona Dun lop in the role of Cain in Ca in and Abel;
1940; Sydn ey, Australia. Photograph er Unknown.
Exotische s (Exzentrisches) O rchester; Vienna, 1926;
Photographer un known.
D A N C E A D V A N C E
D A N C E A D V A N C E
Migrati on and Memory : The Dances of Ge rtrud Bodenw ieser
By Carol Brown 3
Gertrude Bodenwieser was born in Vienna, Austria in 1890 and died in Sydney, Australia in 1959. She was
strongly influenced by contemporary thinking on movement and the body and cites François Delsarte, Jacques
Dalcroze, Bess Mensendieck, and Rudolf von Laban as major influences.9 In keeping with contemporary modes
of representation, she viewed the dancing body as a vehicle for the expression of the sensory and psychic realms.
Later in her career, and through her dance dramas, she also recognized the power of the dancing figure as an
instrument of social critique.10
Images of Bodenwieser’s dances from the period before the
Second World War reveal a strongly sculptural line together with
an acuity of expressive intent not unlike the sculptures of Rodin.
But she was also strongly influenced by expressionism in painting
and had ties to the Viennese Secessionist movement. Artists she
collaborated with included Franz von Bayros and Felix Albrecht
Harta, who was a member of the Hagenbund group and under
whose auspices she performed her first solo recital in 1919.11 In
an evening titled “Dances-Grotesque,” she performed Silhouette,
Hysterie, Spanishcer Tanz, Cakewalk, Burletta, and Groteske. This
diversity of subject matter, which included impressionist works,
dances derived from popular culture, Freudian themes, the
burlesque, and the parodic was to characterize much of her
oeuvre. The critic Alfons Torok reviewed this performance within
the context of the expressionist movement in the arts. He wrote:
Everything that the artist oered us was new, unquestionably new.
We saw here for the first time what dance shows to advantage,
what has been characteristic of the painting, poetry and music of
the young for some time: the unconditional rejection of everything
handed down and the honest search for new, purely personal
expressive values.12
Working with a range of modern and romantic composers including Rachmaninov, Debussy, Reger, and Rubinstein
in her first production, it was evident that for her, music and dance were inextricably entwined. This was a key
dierence between her work and that of Wigman and Laban, for whom the Absolute Dance meant a liberation
from the requirement of music. Bodenwieser’s musicality was clearly influenced by the ideas of Jacques Dalcroze,
whose movement scales corresponded to musical forms and structures in a closely symbiotic way.
Bodenwieser carved out a distinctive style of modern dance. Her work was characterized by fluidity, the use of
sculptural forms, tableaux vivants, and visionary content. Key components of her style were spannung (tension)
and entspannung (relaxation). As she describes it:
The new dance…wishes to embrace all the human feelings, not only harmony, lightness and charm, but also passionate
desire, immense fervor, lust, domination, fear and frustration, dissonance and uproar. The new dance does not content
itself with being enchanting and entertaining only; it wishes to be stirring, exciting, and thought-provoking.13
Following the success of her solo career, Bodenwieser formed her own company, the Tanzgruppe Bodenwieser, in
1923. This company toured successfully throughout Europe and to North America and Japan in the period between
the two world wars. As an educator, Bodenwieser was professor of choreography from 1926-38 at the Vienna
State Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, where she was responsible for developing an innovative training and
Dancer Hilary Na pier, photograph by Ma rgaret Michaelis ; Sydney,
Australia, nd.
D A N C E A D V A N C E
Migrati on and Memory : The Dances of Ge rtrud Bodenw ieser
By Carol Brown 4
education in modern dance which included gymnastics, improvisation, art history, dance history, and design. In
the context of Ausdruckstanz, Horst Koegler wrote that Bodenwieser was “the most important and creative
personality produced by Vienna in this field.”14
Her most significant works were generally considered to be her dance dramas, large group ensemble works with
clearly defined themes and narrative structures. In 1936 a review appeared in Der Wiener Tag of Bodenwieser’s
Festival Recital. The reviewer describes the impact of the dance drama Die Mesken Luzifer (The Mask of Lucifer):
Die Mesken Luzifer portrays on the stage what Kant calls the radical-evil, in a threefold appearance, as Intrigue,
Terror, and Hate. One feels actually transported into our own times. Lies, slander, oppression, terror, hate, and
viciousness explode from this group of young dancers. Magnificent as the movement is, suddenly reinforced by
the sharp cries of their voices, as opposing groups hurl at each other their lashing slogans: “Rasse gegen Rasse!”
[race against race], “Masse gegen Masse!” [mass against mass], “Klasse gegen Klasse!” [class against class].
Magnificent too, when one group of human beings again and again subjugates the other, ad infinitum, until at the
end, Lucifer puts his foot on the necks of all.15
This work, performed in 1936, must be viewed as a critique
intended to jolt audiences into consideration of the impending
convulsions of Nazism and totalitarianism. The perspicaciousness
of Bodenwieser’s artistic vision was a quality frequently
commented upon by her dancers.
Rupture
In 1938, forced to flee from Vienna, Bodenwieser boarded a
train with a group of her dancers, her pianist, Marcel Lorber, and
some extras or “hangers on,” as Hilary Napier described them to
me, those fortunate enough to falsify their involvement with the
Tanzgruppe Bodenwieser as an exit strategy out of Austria and into
Colombia where they toured for the best part of a year. This point
of departure, this radical displacement, was also the beginning of
the history of the artist in exile. Divorced from the cultural milieu
that had fueled and sustained her practice, Bodenwieser’s artistic
identity shifted. She was forced to perform the role of a survivor
and partake in the trac of “souvenir culture.” Unlike many of her
contemporaries, Bodenwieser had never entirely dismissed the
value of certain traditions of dance culture. Ballet was part of her
syllabus and the Viennese waltz was practiced as a technique and
compositional form. As a touring artist no longer moored to trends
and developments of modernism in Europe, her repertoire increasingly came to emphasize the performance of the
readily identifiable over the startlingly new. Undoubtedly, the contingencies of survival made accessibility the key to
longevity. As Dunlop-MacTavish’s autobiography attests, the experience of performing in the center of a bullring in
Colombia for an audience of thousands required strong performances and a bold spectacle.16
The convulsions of Nazism, the Holocaust, and the Second World War eradicated much of the evidence of
Bodenwieser’s work and reputation within Europe. It is to Australia, where Bodenwieser settled with her remaining
dancers in 1939, that one finds most evidence of her choreography, teaching, and life and where she is remembered
still in the work of those influenced by her.
Poster ar t advertising New Zealand tour, 1947; courte sy of the personal
collection of Hila ry Napier (UK).
D A N C E A D V A N C E
Migrati on and Memory : The Dances of Ge rtrud Bodenw ieser
By Carol Brown 5
Shirley McKechnie has described Gertrud Bodenwieser’s impact upon Australian dance as “profound and long-
lasting.”17 Yet her distance from Europe and North America made this legacy largely invisible outside of Australia.
In April, 1998 I traveled there to research this impact.
Bodenwieser at the Beach
Bodenwieser’s story is one of transmigration, of exile and survival,
of movement from center to periphery, from Austria to Australia.
Things got lost in the process but, like the pieces of a jigsaw
puzzle, the residual traces of her life, its pattern, are found in a
series of boxes marked MS 9263 in the Manuscripts Room of the
National Library of Australia in Canberra.
The fragments of her life that remain include photographs,
writings, notes for dances, interviews with former dancers, and
a few early film clips. In sifting through what remains, I realize
that my image of Bodenwieser is somehow iconic, a fleshless
abstraction, and that here in some of the personal details and
anecdotal stories I begin to know her as a person. There are
recollections of her walking to her small studio in Pitt Street,
Sydney. She wore black, had a monocle over one eye, and tied her
black hair in a chignon. In her handbag she carried her polyester
dancewear, black bib trousers, a white shirt, and black pumps. In
class, her dancers wore tunics with colored sleeves and danced
with bare legs and feet. She is called “Madam Bodenwieser” or
“Frau Gerty.” They bow to her at the beginning and end of class
and pay by placing their money in a glass jar at the end of the
piano. She enjoyed playing bridge.
My excitement at getting to know her as a person is, however,
mixed with a feeling of slight disappointment. In examining the
images of her work, it becomes clear that the really distinctive style
evident in the shapes and forms of her period in Vienna becomes
gradually diluted at a distance. The sense of a schism or rupture becomes more complete as her original Viennese-
trained dancers are replaced by young Australian dancers whose strong able bodies seem to lack the sophisticated
nuance of expression of their predecessors, and whose endeavors appear to be oddly imitative rather than innovative.
Images from her Viennese period revealed Bodenwieser’s dancers to be ecstatic, theatrical, and sensual
performers, giving form to dances that appeared to be carved in flesh in a moment of rapturous engagement. The
dancers’ strong curvilinear forms draped the space, evoking the sensuous and psychic life of a Klimt and were
cut in dramatic narrative like a Kokoschka. They are startling and uncanny. In Australia, this emphasis upon the
grotesque, the parodic, the eccentric, and the bizarre, so inspired by expressionism in the visual arts in Europe, is
gradually superceded by allegorical dance dramas drawn from biblical and historical themes, and dances which
focus on themes from the emergent culture of colonial Australia, for example, Cane and Abel (1940), Grecian Suite
(1950), Waltzing Matilda (1954), and Trilogy of Central Australian Suite (1956). Images from these and other works
in the period following her arrival in Australia reveal a softer, less angular line, a more flowing, less compact use
of energy, and an expansive use of space. They appear to be less concerned with embodying psychological states
than with illustrating a theme or representing a story.
Photograph from Ac ts of Becoming, ch oreographed and performed by
Carol Brown. Photo graph by Sally MacQ uarrie.
D A N C E A D V A N C E
Migrati on and Memory : The Dances of Ge rtrud Bodenw ieser
By Carol Brown 6
I wonder if it is too painful to go beyond this level of literality. Bodenwieser lost not only her cultural standpoint
through the Diaspora of the war, but her family to the horrors of the Holocaust. Amongst her archives is a series of
letters between her and the Red Cross. They detail how her husband and artistic collaborator, the theatre director
Frederic Rosenthal, was captured by the Nazis in France and transferred to Auschwitz in 1942 from where he was
never recovered.1 8
Memento mori: In a clear plastic envelope I find a white lace handkerchief with the word “GERTY” lovingly
inscribed in one corner.
Bodenwieser had moved from being a radical artist to becoming part of an emergent dance culture and something
of a pioneer of modern dance in Australia. This necessitated a dierent relationship to culture. Although the
work continued to be part of a European art mindset, the conditions of culture gave it a very dierent shape. The
newness of the art form to Australia meant that audiences had to be developed. Without the support structures to
enable her to focus on creation, Bodenwieser was required to teach dance classes, in schools, factories, and in her
own studio, and by this method cultivate modern expressive dance as a new art form, one that was legitimized as
part of the emergent cultural foundations of a colonial society.
Photographs, previously taken in a way that emphasized the sculptural qualities of her choreography, come to look
posed against backcloths. The images of Margaret Michaelis are an exception to this. In a series of photographs of
Bodenwieser’s dancers on the beach in Sydney, she captures the vitality and flowing lines of some of Bodenwieser’s
most accomplished dancers, Hilary Napier and Shona Dunlop-MacTavish. These images also capture the
contradictions of a cultural translation in moving from landlocked Vienna to Sydney at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
Reviews in local papers during the company’s tours throughout Australia become descriptions of the physical
characteristics of the dancers rather than discussions of the work in relation to Kant, Nietzsche, or Freud. From
dances of extreme states, and with the loss of the cultural milieu from which these stemmed, she seems to arrive
at a kind of manufactured desire, performing Europeanness as a crowd pleaser. Costume drama in the form of
narrative and character-based dance replaces the cold line of her previous cubist-inspired impressionist concert
dances and her movement studies based on themes of disturbed states such as Hysterie (1919), Dekadenz (1928),
and Tanz der Hexe (1935).
Did she grow tired or was this about the contingencies of survival, about “making do”? Her dance company,
renamed the Bodenwieser Viennese Ballet, toured extensively throughout Australia under the auspices of the
early Arts Council of Australia. In their tour season February-April 1951, the Bodenwieser Ballet gave forty-four
performances for over 30,000 viewers. Frequently, the company performed a matinee as well as an evening
performance in the same day, and each performance was at least two hours long. The dancers had very little to
survive upon, and eked out a living by taking odd jobs around their classes and rehearsals.
Disjuncture. Broken history and a broken life. Her life and work in pieces before me. She is positioned at the juncture: Between
one side of the world and the other; absent and present; between pre and post. I am writing in a room full of manuscripts. I
am re-writing. An abbreviated life. Dances slip into fingerprinted stories. Familiarity of vocabulary. I cannot return to. She is
slipping from view. I have held her once. In my bones but I cannot remember the German that formed these movements.
Bodenwieser’s good students have sought to hold on to her legacy and have lovingly preserved what remains.
Beneath the anecdotes and the ephemera of her life are their stories, woven into their telling and representation of
“Gerty.” I find myself becoming curious about their own self-eacement in privileging Bodenwieser’s voice. Words,
Migrati on and Memory : The Dances of Ge rtrud Bodenw ieser
By Carol Brown 7
tributes and adulations weigh her dancers down; in speaking her story they neglect to tell their own. Looking after
the past, holding on to it, is considered anathema to a contemporary independent dancer, yet for many of these
older women, trained in modern dance, their close association bred a fierce loyalty and lifelong tutelage.
Endings
I was once asked by a well-known British choreographer, who is
it, that invisible presence sitting in the corner of the studio as you
rehearse? This all-seeing eye, this omnipotent presence watching
your every move and perhaps shaping them too as censor and
sage, was considered by this choreographer to be an essential
part of being a dancer/choreographer. At the time, I thought of
Bodenwieser, sitting on a stool in the studio, peering through
her monocle and speaking in staccato English, “breathe and
reach through the space.” Holding on to the idea of Bodenwieser
is both a genealogical process and a form of identification, a
passport for navigating my way in the world as I move between
the contemporary dance cultures of New Zealand and Europe.
But is this genealogical quest, necessary as it is, not also a
kind of lifelong tutelage, a being-held-in-the-gaze of Madam
Bodenwieser? Must I commit matricide to continue?
As a dancer-choreographer living in the present, I take on a
composite identity. There is something still of Bodenwieser in
my movements, but there are other movements belonging to
other bodies, the bodies of “my” dancers, the bodies known
and unknown but witnessed and nudged against in the studio, in the street, in the witnessing of an event, in a
photograph, in an image held in the bones. I am continually quoting a whole series of strangers and there is no
authenticity to any of this. It is in working through these dierences, between the “I” and the “not-I,” between
present and past that the writing of movement occurs. Though I continue to think at times in an originary way as
though Bodenwieser was somehow the “mother of invention,” I recognize that she is part of a backstory, something
hidden from view but there, a co-presence but not a co-author. This debt to the past is a form of identification; a
cross-generational signal of desire for authentication and the fixing of a tradition that is inherently unstable. It is
also a way of continuing to signify the occupation of center stage by a woman.
Were I to reinhabit these movements would I be performing a kind of pastiche, a postmodern quotation of a certain
cultural style? Or would I be keeping in circulation a tradition of dance which, by virtue of its ephemerality, would
otherwise be hidden from view and eectively lost? In her own lifetime Bodenwieser moved through a series of
dierent phases of artistic activity. Just as she teased her audiences with her dance parodies and grotesque dances
that played with the traditions of the past, so she reshaped her oeuvre in response to the changing circumstances of her
life. She eectively undid the past, not just in relation to her own history but also in relation to the traditions of dance
that preceded her. The challenge is to continue to ask questions of the past, to be aware of the peristalsis of movement
memory that may be intergenerational, and to recognize the potential of the theatre as a museum of the body.
The experience of exile and survival created an aura of scarcity around Bodenwieser’s work. The reverberations
of this were felt by her students and dancers, many of whom have worked hard to hold onto this tradition through
their teachings and reconstructions of her dances and writings, some of them even competing for ascendancy
Carol Brown and Lisa Tornn. Lond on, 1999; Photog raph by Mattias Ek .
D A N C E A D V A N C E
Migrati on and Memory : The Dances of Ge rtrud Bodenw ieser
By Carol Brown 8
as the authentic arbiter of that style. In the solo Acts of Becoming (1995), I have attempted both to pay homage
to this inheritance, and critically engage with it, through setting in motion an interaction between Bodenwieser’s
movements and texts and my own inventions. It finishes with the words:
And why stop? You must keep going. Remember your body is not the same today as it was yesterday. Be what you are
becoming and not what you might have been. The impuls.
1. Text spoken by the author as par t of the solo perfo rmance Acts of
Becoming, an homa ge to the artistic legacy of Ge rtrud Bodenwieser.
First pe rformance Per forming Arts Technology Studios , University of
Surrey. 14 Mar. 1995.
2. Hilde Holger was in the Tanzgruppe Bo denwieser from 1926-29;
Bettina Vernon dan ced in Bodenwies er’s company from 1936-4 4;
Evelyn Ippen from 193 4-44; Hilar y Napier 1937-47 and Sho na Dunlop
MacTavish from 1935- 48.
3. For a fuller expla nation of these women’s involvement in th e
company, se e Shona Dunlop- MacTavish, An Ecstas y of Purpose: the
life and ar t of Gertrud Bod enwieser (Dunedin: S.D. M acTavish, Les
Humphrey and Ass ociates, 1987), and B ettina Vernon-Warren a nd
Charles War ren, eds., Gertrud B odenwieser and Vie nna’s Contribution to
Ausdruckstanz (Amsterdam: Harwo od, 1999).
4. Text from Ac ts of Becoming.
5. Miche l Foucault, Discipline an d Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tra ns.
Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1978) 31.
6. Text from Ac ts of Becoming.
7. Ann Daly, “Dance History and Feminist The ory: Reconsidering
Isador a Duncan and the Male Gaze,” G ender in Perform ance: The
Presenta tion of Dierence in th e Performing Ar ts, ed. Laurence Senelick
(Hanover : University Press of New Eng land, 1992) 245.
8. Contemporar y commentators freque ntly made comparisons
betwee n Gertrud Bodenwieser and Mar y Wigman. See T. Sperlinger,
“The Ce ntral European School of Dance,” Th e Dancing Times 219 (Dec.
1928): 317-324.
9. Gertrud Bode nwieser in Marie Cuckson , ed., The New Dance .
(Vaucluse: Rondo Studios, 1970) 79.
10. Bodenwiese r’s dance dramas were group works whic h followed
narrative structures carried over several scenes . They include The
Masks of Lu cifer (1936) and Cain and A bel (1941), both with music by
Marcel Lorber, and Er rand into the Maze (1954), music by Menotti.
11. Performance at the French Room in the Vienna Konzerthaus as part
of the New Union for Painting, Graphic and Plastic Art exhibition cited
in Gunhild Oberzaucher-Schüller, “A Driving Force towards the New.
Bodwenwieser-exponent of Ausdruckstanz,” Vernon-Warren and Warren 21.
12. Alfo ns Torok, “Dance Evenings,” D er Merker 11 June 1919 in
Oberz aucher-Schüller, Vernon-Warren and Warren 21.
13. Ger trud Bodenwieser in Cuckson 79
14. Hor st Koegler, “Dance in V ienna” Ballett In ternational 5 (1982): 12.
15. Rev. of Die M esken Luzifer, Die Wiener Tag 21 J une 1936, trans. Emmy
Taussig, Ger trude Bodenwieser Archive MS 11/5.
16. For a fu ller explanation of Bodenwieser ’s tour of Columbia se e Shona
Dunlop -MacTavish, Leap of Faith: My Dan ce through Life. (Dun edin:
Longacre Press, 1997).
17. Shirley McKe chnie, “From Gertrud Bodenwieser to Meryl Tankard.”
Ballett I nternational/ Tanz Aktuell 1 1 (Nov. 1996): 37.
18. D eclaration of D eath, Doctor O tto Hech t’s Chambe rs 18 July 1949,
pape rs of Gertrud Bodenwie ser (National L ibrary of Aust ralia, 13/ 3
MS 9263).
Footnotes:
Dance Adv ance | The Pew Center fo r Arts & Heritage | 1608 Walnut Street , 18th Floor | Philadelphia , PA 19103
phone: 267.350.4970 | fax : 267.350.4998 | ww w.pcah.us/dance | danceadvance@ pcah.us
Dance Adva nce is a program of The Pew Center fo r Arts & Heritag e.
© 2010 Dance Advance
Carol Brown, choreographer, dance r and writer, currently lives in New Zealand wh ere she teaches ch oreography at the N ational Institute of Creative Arts
and Industries , University of Auc kland. A version of “ Migration and Memory: The dances of Ger trud Bodenwie ser” was presen ted by Ms. Brown as par t of
a perfo rmance program in P hiladelphia at the Kumquat Dance Cen ter in the winter of 200 0. At that time Dance Advance exp ressed interest in posting a
version of her lecture on its web site Archives and this article is the result of that request. Carol B rown has engaged in a n umber of project s in Philadelphia
suppor ted and enabled by funding from Dance Advance , including the making of seve ral works for Group Motion Co mpany (The View from H ere 2000,
Strata, Sprawl a nd The Idea of Sea 2001 ), an inter-disciplinar y collaboration with Nicole and Jor ge Cousineau and Gin MacCallum (Crevice 20 04) and a
professi onal developmen t workshop for choreographers in 2005 .
Biography of Carol Brown:
