The Use of Percussion in the Modern Dance Pedagogy of Franziska Boas

Changing Tensions: The Use of Percussion in the Modern Dance Pedagogy of Franziska Boas ____________________________________ A Thesis Presented to The Honors Tutorial College, Ohio University ______________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Music ______________________________________ by Morgan Sieg April, 2020 1 This thesis has been approved by The Honors Tutorial College and the School of Music __________________________ Roger Braun Professor, School of Music, Thesis Adviser ___________________________ Dr. Christopher Fisher Director of Studies, Music ___________________________ Dr. Donal Skinner Dean, Honors Tutorial College 2 Table of Contents Who Was Franziska Boas? 4 Boas & Percussion 17 Boas’ Percussion Compositions 29 Writings About Percussion 34 Boas’ Impact 37 Appendix 39 Works Cited 55 3 Who Was Franziska Boas? When researching music for modern dance in the middle of the twentieth century, it is nearly impossible to take an in-depth look without stumbling across the name Franziska Boas. She is mentioned briefly in many oral histories, memoirs, and historical reports. Despite the reputation she gained in her time as a brilliant percussionist, progressive dance teacher and choreographer, and social activist, and despite the number of her contemporaries who studied with her, worked with her, and learned from her ideologies, very little information is widely accessible about her life and work. Franziska Boas was born in 1902. She was the youngest daughter of Franz Boas, the famous anthropologist. In 1919, she enrolled at Barnard, where she pursued and completed degrees in chemistry and zoology. It was at Barnard where Boas was first exposed to modern dance through the university dance club, a student organization that was led by Bird Larson. She joined the club as a person who could “do cartwheels in a rhythm,”1 and she took dance classes to fulfill her physical education requirement. But, she quickly became more and more involved with the dance club. She and the other students worked with Bird Larson to develop their technique by increasing their knowledge of human anatomy. Larson, like many other modern dance choreographers and teachers at that time, was constantly updating, changing and experimenting with new techniques and ideas, and at the end of Larsons’ life, she had begun incorporating percussion into her classes, following in the footsteps of Mary Wigman, one of the first modern dance teachers and choreographers. 1 Franziska Boas, Interview with Franziska Boas, 1969, Jerome Roberts Dance Division, The New York Public Library. 4 In 1923, Boas spent a year in Europe studying visual art, but she also saw a great deal of dance, and noted the use of percussion by the Wigman school. After she finished at Barnard, Boas taught dance at Larson’s school following Larson’s death until 1931. Then, she went to study at the New York Wigman School run by Hanya Holm and played percussion in the school’s demonstration group. Boas went on to write and play percussion in many important pieces of early modern dance repertoire through the Bennington School of Dance, while also working as the percussionist at Holm’s school. Simultaneously, Boas opened her own dance school in New York in 1933. She taught at her school and a myriad of others until 1949 when she left New York to run the physical education department at Shorter College in Rome, Georgia, where she started the dance department and continued teaching percussion classes. She taught dance and percussion technique through improvisation, teaching students to use creative dance to communicate their own ideas, develop their own technique, and to use their own vocabularies and organic movement to make art. Following Larson’s teaching, she made sure her students studied anatomy, and understood the way that their bodies moved and worked, and then to be creative and artistic while developing flexibility and strength. This teaching philosophy contrasts her contemporaries like Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey because of the emphasis Boas placed on her students’ individuality and creativity, rather than teaching her students to emulate the movement of the master. 5 Boas’ upbringing left her with a strong set of humanitarian ideals. She founded one of the earliest interracial dance companies and dance schools. She brought instruments and music from all over the world into her classes and ensured that her students knew their countries of origin and how she acquired them. She also spent most of her life in open lesbian relationships, and she fought for womens rights while studying at Barnard. She worked with Dr. Lauretta Bender at Bellevue Hospital, studying the impact of movement education on children in the psychiatric wards. This study helped lay the framework for using dance and creative movement in therapeutic settings. When she left New York and went to Rome, Georgia, she worked against segregation.2 A key part of Boas’ curriculum, and her personal income was her work as a percussionist in dance. She taught percussion at the Bennington Summer School of Dance, Hanya Holm’s school, the Boas School, and gave countless workshops and lecture demonstrations. Throughout the 1940s, she maintained a touring percussion demonstration group, giving classes and performances around the country. She composed music and helped teach generations of dance teachers to accompany their own classes with percussion. Her roster of students include Valerie Bettis, John Cage, Alwin Nikolai, and many others. In this thesis, I will explore her work with percussion, her use of percussion music with her choreography and teaching, and her work as a percussionist while she 2 Allana C. Lindgren, “Dance as Social Activism: The Theory and Practice of Franziska Boas, 1933–1965” (Dissertation, Canada, University of Toronto, 2005), https://proxy.library.ohio.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.proxy.library.ohio.edu/docview/30537 3978?accountid=12954. 6 lived and worked in New York, teaching at Shorter College in Rome, Georgia in lecture demonstrations across the country, and at the Bennington Summer School of Dance. For this project, I traveled to Washington DC and New York City to conduct archival research for this study. My travels included research at the Library of Congress, The New York Public Library of the Performing Arts, and the Columbia University Library. I used the materials in the Franziska Boas collection at the Library of Congress, the Hanya Holm Papers, Eleanor King Papers, the John Cage Papers, and the Audio/Visual Digital Collections at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’ Special Collections Reading Room, as well as interviews from the Bennington School of Dance Oral History Project, and publications by Boas, Dr. Lauretta Bender, and other contemporaries. I received help and advice from Dr. Allana Lindgrin, Dr. Joseph VanHassel, Professor Alan Otte, and Professor Roger Braun, my thesis advisor. My findings were extensive, and will likely yield additional post thesis writing and research. My goal is to explore Boas’ use of percussion in her teaching by providing more specific examples of what she taught, played, and wrote than has previously been written about. To that end, I will contextualize Boas’ work by exploring the work of her contemporaries, and explore the facets of her career that closely involved percussion, including her percussion publications, her percussion classes, her percussion compositions, how percussion influenced her work in dance therapy, and how she used percussion to promote the themes in social justice that she strongly advocated for throughout her career. 7 Boas and Modern Dance Franziska Boas is a unique person to study because of her influence and work in so many different fields, all of which were extremely new at the time of her professional practice. She wrote several formative articles about using percussion in collaboration or as accompaniment for modern dance. Franziska Boas was a composer, accompanist, choreographer, dance therapist, and dance ethnographer working in modern dance from the 1930s until the 1980s. Modern dance is defined as a style of western art dance that began as a rejection of ballet, and eventually developed a distinct style that was multi-faceted, using concepts of body, space, and sound in ways that had not been used in musical or dance settings before. Modern dance began in Germany and the United States at the end of the 19th century, with Isadora Duncan’s rejection of ballet shoes, corsets, and fixed vocabulary, as well as Ruth St. Denis and others’ adaptation of movements from folkloric dance traditions from around the world into their choreography. The more natural movements, use of solo dancers, and the adaptation of music that wasn’t written specifically as music for a ballet contrasted classical ballet traditions. Much like the avant-garde in music and visual art employed different ideologies dependent on geographical location, European, American West Coast, and American East Coast dance developed different qualities and theoretical frameworks. However, as travel and communication improved, these differences became less distinct and a unified concept of modern dance became more ubiquitous throughout the western world. 8 The second period took place in the 1930s, when choreographers like Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey adopted pedestrian movement, or movement used in everyday

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