Pola Nirenska (28 July 1910 — 25 July 1992), born Pola Nirensztajn, was a Polish performer of modern dance. She had a critically acclaimed if brief career in Austria, Germany, Italy, and Poland in the 1930s before fleeing the continent in 1935 due to rising antisemitism. She spent 14 years in the United Kingdom, primarily entertaining refugees, troops, and war workers. She emigrated to the United States in 1949 and settled in Washington, D.C., where she was widely acknowledged as the city's leading choreographer and performer of modern dance until her death.
Early life Nirenska was born Pola Nirensztajn on 28 July 1910 in Warsaw, Poland, which at that time was part of the Russian Empire. Her parents, Mordechaj and Ita ( Waksmann), were observant Jews. She had three siblings. The family was well-off, as Nirenska's father made men's neckties for a living. She exhibited a strong interest in dance from a very early age. Nirenska was nine years old when she received her first formal training in dance (at a summer dance camp for girls), and 15 years old when she choreographed her first work (a solo piece, performed in the family kitchen, set to Camille Saint-Saëns' Danse macabre). In her teens, she attended a Roman Catholic high school for the arts. She secretly took a class in ballet. Finding she did not like it, she switched to a class in modern dance.
When she was 17 years old, Mordechaj Nirensztajn came home from a business trip to Germany with information on several dance academies. Pola asked permission to attend one of these schools, and her parents refused. She locked herself in her bedroom for three days, refusing to eat or sleep until they relented. In return, she promised her parents that she would only teach and choreograph, not perform.
Dance training under Mary Wigman Her father sold a building which he had purchased in Berlin, and agreed to use the profit he made to finance her dance training. Nirenska was accepted at the Wigman School, a music and dance school established in Dresden by Expressionist dance pioneer Mary Wigman in the fall of 1920. Nirenska began her studies in 1929 at the age of 18.
The Wigman School offered a three-year program that included courses in anatomy, music, and pedagogy (the theory and practice of teaching) along with intensive instruction in dance. Students were also required to take courses in the liberal arts, such as art, philosophy, and religion, to study piano and accompaniment. Dance instruction covered the entire spectrum of dance, with a focus on composition (tänzerische Gestaltung), expression (Ausdruck), and technique (Technik). Both "technical skills lessons" and "class (compositional) lessons" used improvisation as the basic teaching method. Circling, locomotive scales, spinning, and vibration were some of the technical skills taught, while the interplay of energy, space, and time were explored in class lessons. To complete their studies, a student had to present a concert of group and solo works, as well as submit to a written thesis. When Nirenska enrolled at the Wigman School, there were about 360 students (several dozen of them professionals seeking additional training) and 14 teachers. Nearly all the students were women and middle-class, even though the school's cost was rather high. A certificate from the Wigman School was highly regarded in Germany, and many graduates went immediately into teaching or choreography (foregoing a dance career).
Pola Nirenska was one of the most prominent students at the Wigman School, but not the top student. She was not a disciplined dancer, and reacted negatively when punished. Wigman considered Nirenska "pudgy" and too much of a beginner. The top student was Rosalia Chladek, whose sparse movement was highly evocative. Nirenska's best marks were in her dance and percussion classes. Indeed, in her second year, Nirenska taught percussion classes on her own. Her capstone thesis was on "Women and the Arts", and she graduated with honors.
European career First professional tour and dismissal by Wigman
After graduating from the Wigman School in 1932, Nirenska joined Wigman's 14-member all-women modern dance group. Wigman had toured the United States in a critically acclaimed tour from December 1930 to March 1931. She made a second solo tour from December 1931 to April 1932. By mid-1932, the Great Depression had caused many students to drop out of her school and financing for dance performances had become scarce in Germany. In July 1932, American producer Sol Hurok traveled to Germany to interest Wigman in a tour of South America. Instead, Wigman proposed creating a 12-member group of her most advanced students and touring the United States with her new piece, Der Weg (The Journey). Nirenska was one of the 12 dancers admitted to the new troupe. Wigman began rehearsing Nirenska and the 11 other dancers in September 1932. Reaction to previews in Dresden and Berlin in December 1932 were mixed. The Wigman Dance Group arrived in New York City just before Christmas 1932. Audiences were disappointed, finding the 12 dancers who moved around Wigman to be not up to professional standards. Wigman herself appeared only sparingly in the piece. The tour ended on 5 March 1933. Hurok sent her last paycheck for the tour to Nirenska's now-impoverished parents in Warsaw.
Upon the troupe's return to Germany, Nirenska later said, Wigman immediately dismissed her Jewish students and fired all Jewish staff associated with her school. This included Fred Coolemans, one of her closest collaborators since 1927 and the individual who ran the Wigman School while Wigman was on tour. Adolf Hitler had come to power on 30 January 1933, and his supporters were in control of most of the critical government ministries. Whether Wigman acted out of her own anti-semitic views or under pressure by the Nazi regime is a matter of some dispute. Many sources claim Wigman was personally anti-semitic. Dance historian Marion Kant traces the emergence of Wigman's anti-semitism to the early 1920s. She continued to admit Jews as students to her school and as dancers in her troupe because, Kant concludes, Wigman believed they were "purified" by submitting to her purist dance ideology. Dance historian Alexandra Kolb calls Wigman an anti-semitic sympathizer. In their study of modern dance under the Nazi regime, Lillian Karina and Marion Kant conclude that Wigman's sudden anti-Jewish policy was unforced. They point to extensive evidence in Wigman's own papers, and note that Wigman's anti-semitic rules were implemented several months before the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda imposed anti-Semitic regulations in July 1933. Kolb, too, concludes that Wigman willingly collaborated with Nazi regime. Dance historian Isa Partsch-Bergsohn disagrees, saying Wigman only acted under pressure from the Ministry of Propaganda. The Library of Congress biography of Nirenska claims that Wigman found Nazi "soldiers" surrounding her school upon her troupe's return to Germany in March 1933, and that Wigman was forced to dismiss her colleagues and students. Wigman herself wrote to Nirenska in February 1951 and said that she had only dismissed Jews and joined Nazi cultural organizations because it was the only way she and her school could survive. Although Nirenska seems to have held ill feelings toward Wigman about the incident, there is extensive evidence that the two women maintained a close friendship. They exchanged letters before World War II, and many afterward. In this correspondence, Wigman was much more emotional and informal with Nirenska than with she was with her most frequent correspondent, Hanya Holm.
Later career in Europe
The Nazis' rise to power prompted Nirenska to leave Germany and settle in her native Warsaw, where she taught dance for a year at the Warsaw Conservatory and established her own small modern dance group. At the International Dance Competition for Solo Dancers in Warsaw in August 1933, she won the eighth-place prize. She received a first prize for choreography and a second prize for performing for her original solo work Cry, which she debuted at the International Dance Congress in Vienna, Austria, in early June 1934. (She never performed Cry again.) Wigman then invited her to stay in Dresden in the summer of 1934. When Nirenska saw a Nazi flag hanging outside Wigman's home and Wigman's secretary wearing an SS uniform, she left without seeing her former teacher. She received a grant from the Polish government to further her studies in dance. Nirenska relocated to Vienna, where she studied dance with Rosalia Chladek. Chladek's style was not to her liking, however, and she returned to Poland after a few months.
The International Dance Congress recognition led to a tour of Europe. Richard Pearson, writing 58 years later, said critics found her program of solo performances "brilliant" and dance critic Alan M. Kriegsman said her European years were distinguished.
The Theater in der Josefstadt brought Nirenska to Vienna in May 1935 for a series of concerts. Each performance consisted of 12 solos. Shortly thereafter, Angelo Sartorios, choreographer at the Teatro Comunale (the state opera house in Florence, Italy), asked her to perform as a soloist dancer in a production of the opera Aida. She taught dance classes for children, but the language barrier proved insurmountable; Nirenska called her classes "awful". Nirenska left Florence after just three months when the Mussolini regime invaded Ethiopia in October 1935 (causing strained relations with Poland). All her costumes were stolen during her flight to Vienna. She asked her father for financial assistance. He agreed, provided she never dance in public again. Nirenska declined.
Nirenska was alarmed by rising anti-semitism in Europe, and decided to leave the continent. Through the help of a friend, Nirenska was able to emigrate to the United Kingdom in 1935.
Career during World War II In the first four and a half years in Britain, Nirenska studied dance with Kurt Jooss and Sigurd Leeder, She choreographed several new solo pieces based on Polish folk dances, and gave recitals of these and other solo pieces. She performed one of these dances in the 1937 revue, It's in the Bag!, at the Saville Theatre. She modeled for fashion designers and for artists like the sculptor Jacob Epstein. After its founding in 1939 and until about 1942, Nirenska worked extensively with the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts. This new organization, which hired unemployed or poverty-stricken performers as well as exiles, brought cinema, dance, music, and plays to isolated places like mining village or where people needed relief from stress (like factories or air raid shelters).
In 1940, Nirenska learned that more than 75 members of her extended family were murdered in The Holocaust. Her parents and brother escaped death by fleeing to Mandatory Palestine. For the next six years, she danced extensively for military personnel and for the Polish government-in-exile, but choreographed no new pieces. Feeling that audiences had too much tension and tragedy in their lives, she only performed in light-hearted pieces during the war. She also danced in the 1942 revue Waltz Without End at the Cambridge Theatre in 1942. Nirenska later said that she danced more frequently during the war than at any other time in her life.
In 1946, Nirenska married John Justinian de Ledesma, a film and theater actor who used the stage name John Justin. She opened a dance studio and began creating new solo pieces again. Among the pieces she created were A Scarecrow Remembers (1946), which became one of her most noted creations. She went on a British-sponsored series of performances in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in March and April 1947.
Nirenska divorced Justin in 1949, and emigrated to the United States that same year.
American career Studying: 1949–1950