Kurt Jooss
Kurt Jooss | |
|---|---|
choreographer | |
| Years active | 1920–1968 |
| Known for | Founding Tanztheater |
| Notable work | The Green Table |
Kurt Jooss (12 January 1901 – 22 May 1979)[1] was a famous German ballet dancer and choreographer mixing classical ballet with theatre; he is also widely regarded as the founder of Tanztheater. Jooss is noted for establishing several dance companies, including most notably, the Folkwang Tanztheater, in Essen.
Life and career
Jooss was born in
Jooss and Cohen shared the belief that choreography and musical composition should evolve together to give expression of the dramatic idea in unified style and form. In 1925 Jooss and
In 1927 Jooss and Leeder's work
Jooss disliked plotless dances and preferred themes that addressed moral issues. Naturalistic movement, large-scale unison and characterisation were used by Jooss to address political concerns of the time. His most important choreographic work, The Green Table (1932), had won first prize at an international competition for new choreography held by the Archives Internationales de la Danse in Paris in 1932. It was a strong anti-war statement, and was made a year before Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany. The Green Table is considered his most popular piece.
In 1933 Jooss was forced to flee Germany when the Nazis asked him to dismiss the Jews from his company and he refused. Jooss and Leeder (and doubtless Fritz Cohen and other members of his original company) took refuge in the Netherlands before resettling in England. After touring in Europe and America, Jooss and Leeder opened a school at Dartington Hall in Devon. A piece he choreographed at this time was a light-hearted one (in comparison to The Green Table) named "Ball in Old Vienna (1932)".
In 1934, whilst in England Jooss added new works to his repertoire, including Pandora (1944), contained disturbing images of human disaster and tragedy, which was later interpreted by some as foretelling the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan a year later.
With his company, the Jooss Ballet went on world tours until his company disintegrated in 1947.
Jooss left England in 1949 to return to Essen, Germany. Jooss continued to teach and choreograph for 19 years. One of his students from this period was the choreographer Pina Bausch.
He retired in 1968 and died in Heilbronn, West Germany, 11 years later, aged 78, from injuries sustained in an automobile accident.
Kurt Jooss works are still performed today, especially The Green Table. Anna Markard (Jooss' daughter) supervised companies that perform his works until her death, conserving authenticity of the author of Dance Theatre.
References
- ^ a b Kurt Jooss. Internationales Biographisches Archiv (July 1979). munzinger.de
Further reading
- The New Ballet: Kurt Jooss and his work. AV Coton, 1946.
- The Dance Theatre of Kurt Jooss. Edited by Suzanne K. Walther. Routledge, Choreography and Dance Studies, Volume 7, 1994, ISBN 3-7186-5532-2
- Kurt Jooss: The Evolution of an Artist, Suzanne K. Walther
- The West German dance theatre,
- Jooss the teacher, Anna Markard
- Dance of Death: Kurt Jooss and the Weimar Years, Suzanne K. Walther
- Kurt Jooss, The Green Table. Anna Markard; edited by Ann Hutchinson Guest. Routledge, ISBN 0-415-94255-1
- "The Some of the Parts: Prosthesis and Function in Bertolt Brecht, Oskar Schlemmer, and Kurt Jooss", Kate Elswit. Modern Drama, Volume 51, Number 3, Fall 2008, pp. 389–410, University of Toronto Press
- "The Micropolitics of Exchange: Exile and Otherness after the Nation", Kate Elswit. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, edited by Randy Martin, Rebekah Kowal, and Gerald Siegmund. Oxford University Press, 2017.
External links
- Kurt Jooss’ Green Table Restaging and Dance Symposium in Taiwan, 2010
- "Lecture on a Jooss Ballet" (by Bengt Hager), The New York Times,15 April 1992
- Kurt Jooss Ballets – "Vintage Photographs of 3 Jooss Ballets" – Exhibition at Gendell Gallery
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