By Tim Rubidge
Tim is an independent dancer, choreographer and theatre maker. He participated in Creative Sanctuary, an online event from Insiders/Outsiders that was presented as part of the Platforma festival 2023 produced by Counterpoints Arts. In this personal essay Tim reflects on his many connections with Dartington Hall to set the scene for his conversation with commissioned artist and dancer Maria Tarokh.
What might connect humanity, the flow of a river, and a bridge across time that connects one generation with another? What might a connection of one that history remembers and one that is creating new and courageous work look like right now?
The river is dance and dancing, with choreographers as navigators. The bridge is Dartington Hall in Devon, which over the years, has been home to artists, thinkers, poets, musicians and environmental activists. Dartington is a place and a location. It is also a state of mind and heart and, on occasions, it becomes a spiritual quest through progressive education and the explorations of human values through arts practice.
Dartington Hall – with its extensive gardens and grounds, and wonderful medieval buildings – was bought and established with its progressive ethos by Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst in 1925. Between then and now is a long narrative arc but the bridge I am most interested in is the one that connects my three years of training with the dance pedagogue and teacher Sigurd Leeder – one of those arts refugees fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s who found a home at Dartington – with Maria Tarokh, dancer and choreographer, and daughter of a British mother and Iranian father. Maria recently premiered a new full-length work CROWN//تاج by Company Scheherazade, of which she is Director, at Dartington in October 2023. CROWN//تاج is a work that combines Persian and contemporary dance with Sufi movement to tell a story of displacement, identity and body sovereignty.
So, in crossing this bridge one meets common themes of then and now, involving being displaced by oppression, threat and an unwillingness to obey dictatorial authority. And if the passion and desire to continue devising new and courageous work is abundant then a safe haven for doing so provides a situation for both exploration and stability.
With this is mind it’s useful to devote a few lines to the founding of Dartington in 1925. Leonard Elmhirst had already met and worked with the Kolkata born Rabindranath Tagore – Bengali poet, writer, philosopher – Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. He was a contemporary of Gandhi and shared a vision for universalism, peace and community. Tagore travelled widely and first met Leonard Elmhirst in New York in 1913 – they became firm friends and Tagore often visited the nascent Dartington Hall. Again, this shared vision became a cornerstone of Dartington’s emerging ethos.
Little wonder, then, that by the mid-1930s Leonard and Dorothy were opening their doors to a number of German and European artists under threat by the rise of the Nazis. By the time my teacher Sigurd Leeder was 25 years old he had already developed a personal and professional relationship with fellow dancer Kurt Jooss. They devised and performed a programme of expressive, enigmatic and satirical solos and duets, in the vanguard of German expressive dance – an endeavour to discover new artistic truths in the wake of the post-First World War depression. They were contemporaneous with the Bauhaus movement, the Blau Reiter, painters like Kandinsky and Paul Klee. In 1927 they were invited to establish the first dance department at the Folkwang Schule in Essen – now the Folkwang University.
With the rise of the Nazis in the early 1930s it was a very tense time. Jooss devised the very influential and anti-war ballet Green Table – and given the times it was seen as both courageous art and a profound statement. The Nazis had demanded that Jooss dismiss all Jews from the Ballet Jooss company. But they were not going to dismiss anyone. They were tipped off that their arrest was imminent, hastily packed and in the night crossed the border into Holland and by passenger ferry arrived at Harwich on the east coast of England. From there they made their way to Devon and Dartington Hall. Until 1940 these were busy and fruitful years with performances and teaching – and it established the Jooss-Leeder School of Dance at Dartington – which they ran until 1940 when internment for British-based German nationals became law.
More than once Leeder told me that with all the upheavals that occurred in his life, he remembered his years at Dartington with great affection. The sense of displacement and renewal was palpable… together with feelings of solidarity and friendship with both old and new colleagues in an inspiring physical and social environment.
(By the early 1970s Leeder was teaching at his own studio school in Switzerland. He was 70 years old and I was 23 when I enrolled. I had been introduced to him by Hadassah, an earlier student of his in London and who had come alone from Vienna on the kindertransport in 1938 aged 12. Meaning that another element of displacement is braided into this story.)
Crossing the bridge towards Maria’s story it feels important to mention that from the mid-1970s, and for something like a dozen years or more, other dance influences blew in – this time from America. Mary Fulkerson, a leading figure in dance at Dartington College of Arts, paved the way along with others (like Steve Paxton and Nancy Topf) to turning Dartington into an exceptional innovative centre for experimental dance, including foregrounding Release technique and Contact Improvisation.
Mary Fulkerson once said:
“I believe in the vast and real forces that affect lives today – and that these forces may be turned towards the good. I believe that each person who dances or creates dance is capable of incredible statements that fill the world with light.”
Which brings us to Maria Tarokh who had written:
“I like to find the connections between genres and cultural forms, I think all things are connected in some way or have points in common. Finding the connections help to make actions and movements relatable to the audience, they can see themselves in the emotions, because the emotions a displaced person may experience are in fact part of the collective human experience, but we have to see it to believe and feel it.”
When I wrote to Maria, she went on to say:
“I think as an artist it’s important to draw upon what is authentic to you and your experience. Part of the rationale for including multiple genres is that as a mixed race person, this is authentic to me. I am not solely a contemporary dancer or a classical Persian dancer – they are both part of my identity. However, it was important to me not to fuse the genres too much, I wanted to remain truthful to their individual brilliance and show them side by side.”
CROWN//تاج is performed by three dancers and two musicians playing traditional Iranian instruments. Maria says:
“All of the dancers have experience of displacement, either as 1st or 2nd generation and we used this experience to inform their responses to the development process. I am very grateful to them for being so willing and open to putting their souls on stage.
It was always my intention to focus on the strength, resilience and joy that is part of the experience of being displaced but is very rarely shown on stage. I think that as a society we have a tendency to focus on the negative aspects of this experience but in fact there is a real strength and resilience to going through displacement.”
CROWN concludes with the three dancers – accompanied by hand-drum – donning the traditional tennuri skirt of the whirling dervish. They turned and turned and turned… I asked Maria about the significance of this closing the performance. She told me that the performance was “about taking the audience on a journey – and the whirling is the end of the journey.” Whirling is a mystical expression and a physically active meditation. “It takes the dancers to a place of ecstasy and joy… we don’t adorn the whirling in any way and the hand and head movements are traditional to female Sufi whirling traditions from Iran”.
Maria brought our email conversation to a conclusion by saying that her “intention overall was to show the power of ritual in bringing us together… and that displaced people can find power in community.” Looking at the flowing river and across the bridge one can see that Dartington Hall has always felt it to be a prime concern to cultivate a sense of artists’ community. It was a priority for the Elmhirsts – the founders – it certainly was for those seeking a safe haven from Nazi oppression in the 1930s; and it has been for Maria Tarokh in its support for her work and the venue for her recent premier.
