Quartet for the End of Time

This article is taken from "Minnesota Dance", the periodical of the Minnesota Dance Alliance, March/April 1990 Vol. XI No. 4

"Remembering Margret Dietz"
written by Judith Mirus in collaboration with Irina Lasoff

Margret Dietz had a great influence on the Minnesota dance scene. Though her time in Minnesota was brief (1966 – 72), the strength of her teaching and her gifts to dance continue to enrich the lives of those she touched. Margret was my teacher for ten years, and also my very good friend — she challenged me, sustained me, and sometimes, leaned on me. JM

 

Biographical Information:
Margret Dietz was born June 3, 1913, in Berlin, Germany. At the age of nine, as a young piano student waiting for her turn to perform, she accidentally wandered into a rehearsal studio where Mary Wigman was dancing. Immediately she knew she wanted to be a dancer. Unfortunately, a crippling joint infection delayed the beginning of her study of dance for nine more years. During this time, she studied costume and stage design, history of music and dance (under Curt Sachs), and philosophy (under Paul Tillich). When the bone disease was finally cured, she went to the Mary Wigman Schule in Dresden, where she studied from 1932 – 39, eventually becoming Wigman’s teaching associate. From 1939 – 53, she taught in the Wigman school, performed as a member of Wigman’s Dance Group and also as a soloist, and directed several performing dance groups in Berlin.

In 1953, she accepted an invitation to teach dance at the University of Illinois. She taught there for three years, then at the University of California/Santa Barbara for four years. From 1953 – 57, she was a faculty member of the celebrated Connecticut College Summer Festival of Dance, along with Lucas Hoving, Daniel Nagrin, Ruth Currier, and Charles Weidman. She traveled to Berlin to assist Mary Wigman in 1959 – 61, then returned to the United States to DePauw University for five years, and in 1966, moved to Minnesota.

 

She chaired the Dance Department at the University of Minnesota, and was a guest teacher at Nancy Hauser’s Guild of Performing Arts. In 1969, Margret Dietz, along with four younger dancers — Judith Mirus, Linda Osborne, Terry Stoner, and Marie Winkler — formed a dance company called CHOREOGRAM. In June, 1972, in the first week of the third annual Choreogram summer dance residency at the College of St Benedict in St. Joseph, Minnesota, Margret Dietz passed away.

 

I invited Irina Lasoff, who worked closely with Margret and with Choreogram, to share with me in "Remembering Margret Dietz".

 

JM: Since it has been more than seventeen years since Margret’s death, there are many people in today’s Minnesota dance community who probably do not know anything about her. Where should we start in talking about this special person?

IL: When you say seventeen years, I can’t believe it. She’s still so vivid in my mind. I’ll see a dance concert or a play or read a book, and think, "Well, Margret, what do you think of that?" It’s very hard to separate her personality from her work as a teacher and as a choreographer — with Margret everything was all bound up together.

 

JM: That was both one of the most difficult things to sort out after she died. Everyone had a unique relationship with Margret. As we continued with the company and the school, it was hard to separate out the things about her teaching (which we were all still trying to follow together) from the individual personal memories.

 

IL: I think the Hitler years formed Margret to a great extent. She was just twenty years old when Hitler came to power. She chose to stay in Germany because her parents were there — her father was in a concentration camp for a number of years — and I think to maintain her integrity, she had to constantly restate it in some way, so that she often felt embattled. Margret was not an easy person. There was a core of rigidity in her — but at the same time there was such a clarity of thought and purpose, and such a strength… tempered by kindness!

 

JM: The day I met Margret, on my first day at DePauw University in the early 60’s, was probably THE most fortunate day of my life. Up to that time. I wasn’t really looking forward to my adult life. Then I began to have a daily exposure to Margret. She was the first teacher to demand of me that I not just settle for what I could do well and easily. Her attitude was, "Yes, that was good, but it was not all that you are capable of." It took me a long time to really learn to dance, but the challenge she offered and the many new worlds she uncovered, that captured me.

IL: I remember very vividly the first class I took with her. It was at Nancy(Hauser)’s studio on Prior Avenue. It was and evening class, and the lighting in the studio was very dim… and Margret came in, and she started to talk, and it was as if all the lights became a little brighter. She had that quality — she always brought an intensification of an atmosphere with her. I still remember what she taught — she taught circles… and she varied them with vibrations. Now, we had done circles and vibrations a lot… and I don’t suppose that Margret taught them so differently — I think it was just her personality. That’s what I mean when I say the person is hard to distinguish from the teacher. The material was very simple, but she demanded total commitment to a phrase, and it didn’t matter whether you had been dancing for ten years, or whether you had never danced — she could forgive errors in steps or in techniques but…

 

JM: … but if you weren’t paying attention, or weren’t putting out 100 percent… that was unforgivable.

 

IL: Unforgivable! She demanded that you be connected to yourself at all times.

 

JM: I remember how Margret’s classes always unfolded so effortlessly and yet so miraculously. They moved seamlessly without a break, you just didn’t notice when you had entered something else…

 

IL: That was part of her brilliant, logical mind!

 

JM: Whether she had planned it that way, or whether it was just her intuition, they were always so integrated… and so organic… from beginning to end.

 

IL: Most of her movement — compared to what people do now — was simple. Dancers were not as technically advanced then. If she had lived longer, it would have been interesting to see how her classes would have changed…

 

JM: What things come to mind when you think of her as choreographer?

 

IL: Elegance… refinement. I’m thinking of a particular solo dance of hers — it had a great dramatic and lyric quality. And then there was "Quartet" — that first dance she did for the premiere of Choreogram — that was absolutely a jewel. One time I was sitting beside Margret as she watched you all dancing it, and she said, "I just don’t understand how I could have done anything so perfect!" And she was quite right — it was perfect! It required perfect spacing, that was absolutely right at all times.

 

JM: The four of us always had to be symmetrically spaced front to back and side to side all through the dance… it required meticulous attention.

 

IL: Precision! Fantastic precision!

 

JM: We each had to constantly be adjusting our own personal dynamic to fit with the other three dancers… which is something that I had no clue whatsoever how to do at that point in my life! At the same time, there was a lot of footwork that really took some rhythmic attention and articulation. That opening phrase, which was repeated many times throughout the dance, coming in from the four corners with those foot patterns, was very complex…

 

IL: And yet the audience didn’t see something that was complicated. It saw a dance that was… full of air. It felt as if it would be so easy to dance. It had such freshness! Margret’s feeling for space was a "design" feeling, as opposed to a feeling of "weight" in space.

 

JM: Yes, weight was not really a part of Margret’s technique at all.

 

IL: That surprised me. I would have liked to have known what was Mary Wigman’s feeling for it. In Nancy Hauser’s teaching, which also comes from Wigman, weight was such an important part. I always found it fascinating that two such strong teachers should have such differences in relation to the same technical principle. In performing circles, for instance; to Margret precision was of utmost importance; to Nancy the centrifugal force was the main thing.

 

JM: That was confusing for several of us when we were taking classes from both of them during the same session! Later, I began to realize that was one of the strengths of the Wigman approach — the freedom of the individual to find a personal expression related to the material being presented.

 

IL: We haven’t yet mentioned what was one of Margret’s greatest strengths — the teaching of choreographers. I’ve never seen anyone else able to penetrate so well what it was that the student choreographer was trying to say, and to show them how to say it better. There is a tendency, I think, in teaching choreography, to simply change what the young choreographer has done to what the teacher would do — and that happened occasionally with Margret — but I never saw a choreography class of Margret’s without learning something important.

 

JM: When she did use an idea of her own as the base for suggesting what to do, it was usually because a student didn’t yet have a clear focus. By suggesting something very strong of her own to students, it gave them the experience of pursuing something that had the possibility for development. Whereas, if left to their own devices, they may never have felt the magic of having a dance in progress suddenly begin to come alive. When I brought compositions to her, I always had the feeling that her critique was coming to my own dance. I never felt she was trying to, uh…

 

IL: … manipulate the piece?

 

JM: Yes! Did you ever have that feeling?

 

IL: Well, I did have one "run–in" with her when I was doing the "Frescoes" piece for the five of you. I brought one section and she said, "No, that will not do". She wanted it changed in a certain way. And I didn’t agree. I waited until after the rehearsal to talk to her about it. We talked back and forth for quite a while — the conversation was on a surprisingly objective level — and finally, she said, "Well, if you really can’t do it my way, then find a third way."

 

JM: Because she couldn’t accept your way, either?

 

IL: She couldn’t accept what I had done, and I couldn’t accept what she wanted done. I went back to work, thinking "there has to be more than one way to skin a cat." I produced an alternative version and she accepted it. What I learned from this is that there is more than one good way to express an idea — something that I had not realized before!

 

JM: That is a perfect example of what it was to work with, and learn from, Margret. I was in my twenties then — not very sure of my own point of view and still making lots of "life decisions". Every rehearsal and every one of her classes taught me about life. Like that experience of yours — it is a valuable piece of wisdom to know that finding a second solution to a problem does not mean that strength or quality needs to be sacrificed.

 

IL: When she was teaching, Margret used a certain phrase quite often — she would say (after giving someone a brilliant bit of advice), "Now, remember, this is not a recipe." Just another of her guiding statements which can apply to a great number of things.

 

JM: Margret could be quite demanding in many ways, and yet those of us who knew her personally outside of the studio, knew also how vulnerable she was. Many who only knew her at the studio never suspected a moment of vulnerability of fragileness — until she had her heart attack. After that, of course, people were more aware that there were other things…

 

IL: I’ve often thought about her vulnerability. She had such imagination, and sensitivity, and yet she had lived through so much. All those years of living under the Nazi regime, and working in the underground resistance during the war — what all that must have done to this person with such empathy. For her to have had the moral strength to be courageous — the fantastic thing to me is that she came out of it without losing her generosity and her spirit.

 

JM: I think that making a commitment to future generations was the only way she survived. Evidently that was also her father’s experience. I understand that he died within a very short time of being released from the concentration camps.

 

IL: Yes, he died within the year.

 

JM: Just making it through, was the reason to live — to make it out of the camps, to prove that the Nazis could not triumph. Her optimism about the future was how Margret made it through the war — and was how she lived the rest of her life after the war and once she got to America. I think a negative approach would have killed Margret.

 

IL: She once told me that she considered nihilism the easy way out.

 

JM: Since we have the perspective of many years to speak from now, what do you think has been the legacy of Margret Deitz to dance, and to those who know her?

 

IL: She was thoroughly a professional — in her teaching, in her choreography, in her own performing — yet she influenced professionals and non–professionals alike. In fact, I don’t think we have mentioned her work with people who took her evening classes and her Movement Choirs — people of many different ages and abilities. She inspired performances from everyone!

 

JM: Near the end of her life, Margret said that Dance was her way of saying "yes" to life. From this came everything else — her demand for commitment from everyone who danced, her love for every moment of a rehearsal or backstage preparation, as well as for the act of performance. For a person who often declared herself to be "without ambition"… she certainly accomplished a great deal, don’t you think?