| JULY 2002 |
43 Summers of Dance
Hanya Holm Brought Poetry in Motion to Colorado College
By Mark Arnest
In the history of dance in Colorado, the diminutive figure of
Hanya Holm makes a grand jeté over everyone else. Holm, a German
immigrant, helped ignite the first explosion of American modern
dance in the 1930s as one of the "big four," along with Martha
Graham, Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman.Holm ran the summer dance program at Colorado College for 43 years, beginning in 1941. Literally hundreds of her students went on to careers in dance -- some, including Alwin Nikolais and Don Redlich, founding important companies. Later, as a Broadway choreographer, she had a string of successes including Cole Porter's "Kiss Me Kate" and Lerner and Loewe's "My Fair Lady" and "Camelot." She stayed active in the dance world until just a few years before her death in 1992, at age 99.
Holm's years at Colorado College are the subject of Claudia Gitelman's Dancing with Principle: Hanya Holm in Colorado, 1941-1983. No one could be better qualified than Gitelman to research such a work: first a student of Holm's, then her assistant, and now a dedicated researcher who interviewed more than 50 of Holm's students and colleagues.
The picture of Holm that emerges from the interviews as well as from the many "Hanya-isms" recorded by her students is that of a person who saw the dancer's life and the dancer's art as inextricably linked. To Holm, dance linked body, mind and spirit in a magical experience made possible only by years of disciplined effort.
At the same time, Gitelman shows us the seeming paradoxes in Holm's character. She was a serious dance theorist with a special gift for comedy. She was a strong personality who disliked having her authority questioned, yet she thrived in collaborative ventures. Gitelman acknowledges Holm's cruel streak, which generally fell more heavily on her female students.
Occasionally, Gitelman appears to try to justify this trait, as when she writes "Anger, which often accompanied her demands for perfection, increased her authority in the eyes of her students and created camaraderie among them." But she also acknowledges that, for a few students, Holm's approach was destructive.
The book's factual errors are few and trivial, along the lines of claiming that Oliver Kostock made up the word "Xochipili," the title of one of Holm's 1948 dances (it's the name of the Aztec god of dance). A more serious problem is the book's organization: Gitelman shoehorns all her research into a chronological format. A 1940s colleague's observation on Holm's personality will be separated by dozens of pages from a complementary observation by a 1970s student.
Indeed, Dancing with Principle is most illuminating when
Gitelman abandons the chronicle of Holm's activities in Colorado
and explores her work, personality, aesthetic outlook, and teaching
philosophy. The people who met Gitelman's cast of characters
will recognize them in her succinct descriptions: long-time
accompanist John Coleman was indeed "intense," Kostock "lovable,"
Summer Session director Gilbert Johns "charming." And Gitelman
gives us illuminating asides such as former Colorado College
dance teacher Norman Cornick's description of Holm's choreographic
method: She depended on dancers to manufacture the actual movement. She would explain the idea behind a piece, and she would take a long time to paint verbal pictures of what she wanted. Then she'd put on the music and ask the dancers to improvise. She'd pick the things she liked from what they did.
This methodology suggests Holm's choreography may have lacked the intensely personal characteristics found in the work of some of her colleagues. But it also enabled Holm to create works in which the dancers felt a strong personal investment, and to excel at a range of styles that would bewilder most choreographers.
Gitelman believes that Holm's summers in Colorado gave her the tools she needed -- the collaborative experience and the "American" visual vocabulary -- to tackle Broadway. It's hard to imagine any other avant-garde choreographer of the period getting the sort of review the New York Times gave to Holm's "Kiss Me Kate" dances: "unpretentious in the extreme, never stepping outside the structure of the scene, never begging for applause, but invariably contributing charm and value by heightening the motor rhythms of the situation and building them easily and ingratiatingly to a climax."
The closing chapters are sad. Gitelman writes of her shock at hearing Holm's long-time assistant, Kostock, say in the late 1970s that "Hanya has lost empathy for the human body." With enrollments falling and costs rising, CC President Gresham Riley abruptly terminated the summer session in 1983, which scandalized the dance world and deeply wounded Holm, then 90.
Gitelman's book is an essential source on Holm's life and work, although she occasionally misplaces information: we find her succinct description of Holm's artistic heritage near the end, where it relates to one of her final student dances, though it would be much more useful to have read it near the beginning:
In German-derived dance theory, the human figure is in constant dialogue with its spatial environment. Every gesture and move reflects the dynamic of space, and as dancers respond sensitively to space they take on resonance and quality. When space is reconfigured with columns, ramps, platforms, other stage devices, and light, the interrelationship of dancer and space becomes insistent and powerful.
Students from four decades of Holm's summer sessions still treasure Hanya-isms like this one: "An atom takes up very little space but it can set the world afire; so can you." Holm's own intensity fueled the creative movement in modern dance for decades, and Gitelman's memoir of those years is as clear-eyed as it is affectionate.
Dancing with Principle: Hanya Holm in Colorado, 1941-1983 is 204 pages (including appendices and index), 20 pages of black and white photographs. University Press of Colorado, 2001. Appendices list the programs of Holm's annual dance concerts and all the students who studied with her in Colorado, by year.
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