peopleofthebarre:Dancer Tatjana Barbakoff photographed in 1926. Nini and Cary Hess.Tatjana Barb
peopleofthebarre:Dancer Tatjana Barbakoff photographed in 1926. Nini and Cary Hess.Tatjana Barbakoff was a Jewish-Chinese-Latvian dancer of the 20th century, particularly known for her work in the Ausdruckstanz/Expressive Dance movement, her time as a student of Diaghilev ballerina Catherine Devilliers, and her presence in the theaters of Weimar Germany.Born Cilly Edelberg in Libau (Liepaja) Latvia on August 15, 1899, Barbakoff was the daughter of a mother of Chinese descent and a Russian-Jewish father, who saw to it that she was educated in ballet and Chinese classical dance. As a teenager, she moved to glittering Weimar Berlin, where she became a fixture in the literary cabarets and private theaters of the city. In theaters such as the famous Schall und Rauch, she honed a particular form of Ausdruckstanz, the politically inflected expressionist dance movement style, inspired by classical ballet and Chinese dance, as well as Russian folk traditions. She became noted within avant garde circles and toured her own solo shows across Germany, connecting with visual artists such as Otto Pankok and Gert Heinrich Wollheim as colleague and muse. She resumed ballet training with Diaghilev dancer Catherine Devilliers by 1927, around the time she began to dance with the private theater San Materno, run by the Jewish dancer Charlotte Bara. It is during this period that Barbakoff’s fame reached its peak, and her image was distributed in more popular venues than German artistic society – she found many spots in the highly popular photo-albums distributed by cigarette manufacturers of the time. Her success was not to last, and in 1933 she was forced to flee Germany in response to the rising tide of Nazism. Initially, she found great success in Paris, but she was captured as a result of the Vichy capitulation to the Nazis in 1940, detained, escaped and went into hiding, and was arrested again in Nice in 1944. The Nazis murdered her at Auschwitz in February of that year. She was 45.Curator Guenter Goebbels of the Verborgene, or Hidden, Museum in Berlin, which “deals exclusively and programmatically with the public presentation and scholarly evaluation of the life’s work of female artists who – for whatever reason – have been all but forgotten,” is largely to credit for the preservation of this pioneering dancer’s legacy. Over the course of 20 years, Goebbels tracked down images, sculptures, and texts about Barbakoff, culminating in a 2005 exhibition. Furthermore, her colleague Julia Tardy-Marcus established the Tatjana Barbakoff Dance Award in 1986, and noted German choreographer and dancer Oxana Chi was inspired by her to create the filmed dance piece/documentary/autoethnography Dancing Through Gardens. Read more: JWA biography, NPR review of the Verborgene Museum exhibit, about Dancing Through Gardens (and an interview on its creation), Albert Einstein’s print of Barbakoff by Jewish artist Max Pollack -- source link
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