Hanya Holm: When Modern Dance Came to Colorado

Hanya Holm performs Dance of Work and Play, circa 1937

Hanya Holm's dance career began in Germany, where she studied with, taught for, and eventually co-directed for Mary Wigman, the leading German modern dancer in the 1920s. Holm became Wigman's chief instructor in 1928.

Sol Hurok, a dance impresario who hoped to promote a Wigman company in America, offered to finance Holm’s move to the United States in 1931. Holm, who was unnerved by the rise of Adolf Hitler, eagerly accepted his offer. She would spend the early 1930s teaching the Wigman technique at her New York-based school, renaming it in 1936 (with Wigman's permission) to the Hanya Holm School of Dance.

These early years in America would influence Holm's move away from the darker, angst-ridden, European Wigman technique to a freer, more American style of modern dance.