Australia Dancing - Bodenwieser, Gertrud (1890

Bodenwieser, Gertrud (1890 - 1959)

Clif Peir: Portrait of Gertrud Bodenwieser, c. 1950

Gertrud Bodenwieser, dancer, teacher and choreographer, was born in Vienna on 3 February 1890, the younger daughter of Theodor and Maria Bondi. She was trained in classical ballet by Carl Godlewski, but soon came to develop her own method of performing and teaching 'free' dance. By 1917 she had adopted the surname ‘Bodenwieser’. She married theatre director Friedrich Jacques Rosenthal on 27 June 1920.

Bodenwieser gave her first public performance as a dancer at the Wiener Konzerthaus, Vienna, on 5 May 1919. Between 1920 and 1938 she taught at the Akademie für Musik und Darstellende Kunst (the Vienna State Academy for Music and Drama), where she was appointed a professor in 1926. From 1925 to 1939 Bodenwieser and Tanzgruppe Bodenwieser toured extensively in Europe, also visiting New York and Japan.

Following the Nazi invasion of Austria in 1938, Bodenwieser and her husband fled to France. While Bodenwieser went on to join some of her dancers in Colombia, Rosenthal stayed in France, where he was later arrested and interned in the concentration camp at Auschwitz, Poland. It is believed that he died in 1942. During her tour with her company in South America she found herself unable to return to Vienna, and arrived in Australia via New Zealand in 1939. She immediately established a company in Sydney, variously called the Bodenwieser Ballet and the Bodenwieser Viennese Ballet. From 1940 to 1954 the company toured Australian cities and towns, as well as visiting New Zealand, South Africa, Rhodesia and India.

During her career, Bodenwieser choreographed approximately 300 dance works, including dance-dramas and comedies, group dances and solo dances, as well as dances for operettas and plays. Over 100 of these were composed in Australia, including some which looked to Australia as a source of inspiration such as Waltzing Matilda and Central Australian Suite. Many of her works dealt with social issues including her well known Demon Machine, which she choreographed in Vienna in the early 1920s, which won a Grand Prix in Florence, Italy, in 1931 and which remained in the Bodenwieser repertoire throughout her life. Other works, such as The Blue Danube, were lighter in tone.

Bodenwieser played a significant role in the development of modern dance in Australia with her studio in Sydney helping to produce some of Australia’s best-known modern choreographers and dancers, including Anita Ardell, Keith Bain and Margaret Chapple. Bodenwieser also worked with the New South Wales Art Council and the Mobile Theatre Unit. She died in Sydney on 10 November 1959. At the 2001 Australian Dance Awards she was posthumously inducted into the Hall of Fame.

Further information about Bodenwieser and the Bodenwieser Ballet in Australia, with online resources including a brief film clip of Coralie Hinkley performing in Bodenwieser's Central Australian Suite, is contained in the National Library of Australia's exhibition Dance people dance. See 'The search for identity' and explore the 'More' links.

Bibliography:

A list of Bodenwieser's choreography from 1919 to 1959 is in Shona Dunlop MacTavish, An Ecstasy of Purpose: The life and art of Gertrud Bodenwieser (Dunedin: Shona Dunlop MacTavish, 1987), pp. 164-173; see also 'Choreochronicle', Bettina Vernon-Warren and Charles Warren (editors), Gertrud Bodenwieser and Vienna's contribution to Ausdruckstanz (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999), pp. 177-185; Gertrud Bodenwieser, The New Dance (Vaucluse, N.S.W.: Printed by Rondo Studios for Marie Cuckson, [196-]); and Carol Brown, 'Acts/Becoming: The Dance Practices of Gertrud Bodenwieser', Heritage and heresy: Green Mill papers, 1997 (Braddon, A.C.T.: Australia Dance Council, c1998), pp. 27-33.

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Internet - Google
Articles - New York Public Library Dance Collection
Pictures - Picture Australia