After studying musicology, Petermann came to the Central House of Culture, where he was initially tasked with setting up a department for folk dance. This eventually developed through his dedicated collecting and research activities into the Tanzarchiv Leipzig. Thus, Petermann’s estate also reveals the history of the Tanzarchiv. His correspondence with the Central House for Folk Art, the Academy of Arts as well as dancers and dance institutions in Germany and abroad testifies to his important role in the political-cultural life of the GDR. The Petermann collection also provides insights into a creative, restless personality who was always developing new
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The Swiss Rudolf Liechtenhan was an internationally recognised ballet specialist. As a critic and dance publicist, he cultivated contacts with many dance personalities. He also worked as a dramaturge at various opera houses, for example in Stuttgart with John Cranko, in Hamburg with John Neumeier and finally with Uwe Scholz in Leipzig. The Tanzarchiv’s collection includes his ballet library and his collection of dance images.
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Born in Riga, the dancer, ballet master and choreographer Henn Haas studied at Vera Fokina’s ballet school and at the Trümpy-Günther School in Berlin from 1926 to 1932 and also took classes with Rudolf von Laban, Mary Wigman and Harald Kreutzberg. From 1938 he worked with his Theatre of Dance in Weimar and Erfurt. After the war, he took over the choreographic direction of the FDGB dance ensemble in the newly founded GDR and worked as a choreographer at the Landestheater Halle. In addition to numerous ballets, he also created choreographies for film and television. The collection contains newspaper articles,
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Throughout his life, Jean Weidt strove to give expressive dance a political dimension. With his company Die Roten Tänzer (The Red Dancers), he organised socially critical dance evenings in Berlin from 1929. Weidt was thus an important protagonist of the political theatre of the Weimar Republic. For him, dance was a mouthpiece for issues of the working class and the oppressed. In 1933 he emigrated to France and worked in Paris, Moscow and Prague until the end of the Second World War. He became internationally known with his group Ballets Weidt, for which he created, among other things, the choreography
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One of Mary Wigman’s most famous students was Gret Palucca, who soon achieved a similar level of fame as a solo dancer and also established her own school in Dresden in 1925. After the Second World War, she was able to re-found and expand her school and educate generations of dancers – despite constant conflicts with cultural functionaries of the GDR – not only physically but also spiritually and artistically to creativity and independence. As a founding member of the Academy of Arts of the GDR, she was its vice-president from 1965-1970, which is why Palucca’s actual estate is in
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Among Laban’s students was the German dancer and dance teacher Jenny Gertz (1891-1966), who became known mainly for her dance work with children. Gertz’s communist commitment led to the closure of her school in Halle/Saale by the Gestapo during National Socialism. She emigrated to Prague and later to England, where she continued teaching children’s dance. After the end of the Second World War, Gertz returned to Halle/Saale, where her pedagogical principles and methods were hardly recognised. Her estate at the Tanzarchiv Leipzig contains letters, manuscripts and teaching materials as well as photographs and short films. Research
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The founder of modern dance in Germany, Mary Wigman began her dance career in Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s school of rhythmic gymnastics in Hellerau. In 1912 she left Hellerau and became a pupil and collaborator of Rudolf von Laban in Ascona, Munich and Zurich. Wigman’s work as one of the best-known dancers and choreographers of expressive dance contributed greatly to the establishment of dance as an independent art form. In 1920 she opened her school in Dresden, which she continued to run until 1942. During the war she moved to Leipzig, where she continued to teach under increasingly difficult conditions. In the
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The German dance critic and theorist Fritz Böhme studied literature and art history in Berlin. As department head of the arts section of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, he published his dance reviews almost daily for years from 1919 onwards. In the Weimar Republic, Böhme was a driving force behind the establishment of dance congresses, dance journals and dance teaching forums. His main goal was the creation of a national dance academy and a national archive for dance history. His estate contains materials on the dance scene of his time: essays, manuscripts and lectures, Böhme’s correspondence, documents on contemporary dancer personalities,
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One of the most important holdings of the Tanzarchiv Leipzig is the estate of the dancer, choreographer and dance theorist Rudolf von Laban. With his “School for Art” on Monte Verità near Ascona, he developed ideas for a new movement pedagogy and a movement script from 1911 to 1917, which he further perfected at the end of the 1920s (Kinetography or Labanotation). Due to his artistic, theoretical and pedagogical impulses, he is considered a pioneer and co-founder of modern dance in Germany, where he also had a significant influence on amateur dance through movement choruses. In the 1930s, Laban also
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Overview of the collections In addition to a wide range of books and periodicals, the collections include numerous photographs, films, videotapes, DVDs, and sound recordings, as well as a large collection of programmes and posters and individual estates and bequests containing a wide variety of documents and media. The internationally prominent personal collections include: the estate of the dance revolutionary Rudolf von Laban (until his exile in 1938); partial collections on Mary Wigman and Gret Palucca; photos, documents, and masks of the “red” dancer and choreographer Jean Weidt; the estates of the dance teachers Jenny Gertz and Ilse Loesch; and
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