This film screening and performative lecture by Claudia Kappenberg examines the possibility of transmission via film of the legacy and dance practice of Austrian Jewish choreographer Hilde Holger (1905 Vienna 2001 London). In the 20s and 30s Holger was a prominent dancer in Vienna and developed a vision of modern dance that was underpinned by an affective expressive pedagogy‚ a ‘total education for the body, heart and mind‘. (Holger, 1970) Fleeing Austria in 1939, she worked for ten years in Bombay (Mumbai, India) and settled 1948 in London, teaching in the basement studio of her house in Camden Town until her death in 2001. Always rooted in her Viennese heritage Holger saw dance a means of resistance and survival, and as a means of practicing a shared humanity wherever she was.
As one of her last generation of students Kappenberg has accumulated an extensive archive of audio visual material from the 1990s and beyond, developing a series of videos and screen based installations which seek to foreground Holger’s inclusive, co creative and empathic approach and ethos. Collaborating with dance scholar and educator Thomas Kampe, the project draws on the notion of anarchiving (Massumi and Manning, 2016) as a process and as an ongoing engagement with a nearly lost Viennese dance pedagogy. The research asks, how film and screen based installations can react activate and transmit this practice and its diverse resonances to contemporary audiences; can installation function as a kind of “awesome double” (Moore, 2000) which early film constituted for audiences of the early 20th century, and recall the fascination with the true materiality of body and self? And how can digital media help to articulate all that which is half lost, partly preserved or otherwise distorted in an archive spanning eight decades of the last century?
20260730T110020260730T1230America/Argentina/Buenos_AiresSCREENING: Dance into film: the transmission of a historical, embodied sculptural practice to forge resistance and resilienceSV302MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
