Ludolf Schild Collection

In her Modern Dance in France (1920–1970): an Adventure, Jacqueline Robinson mentioned Ludolf Schild (1913–1949) as one of those artists ‘who implanted themselves in French soil [and] served as rich fertilizers, or even grafts’. Linking him to Jean Weidt and Heinz Finkel, other pioneers of ‘expression dance’ from Germany in the 1930s, she emphasises the huge influence they exerted.

It would be difficult to appreciate Ludolf Schild’s influence today if it were not for the writings of the journalist and dance critic Lise Brunel, who was one of a small group of dancers who worked with Schild at Studio 121 at the Salle Pleyel between 1945 and 1948. She was at pains to emphasise what she owed to him and what an exceptional person he was, one for whom the language of the body could not be divorced from the mind and whose dancing ‘takes root very deeply in each person, in a sense of overall physicality, both emotional and intellectual, accompanied by something sensitive and metaphysical’ (Catalogue de la Biennale de la danse, Lyon, 1986). The recent precious donation to the CN D by the artist’s son, Michael Schild, of the archives relating to Ludolf conserved by the family will enable researchers to deepen their knowledge of this dance artist who, although he died young, had a productive, complex and unique career, starting in Hamburg and then going to Paris, then Algiers – at the time one of the three ‘French départements of Algeria’ – before returning to Paris. Numerous documents (private journal, correspondence, photographs, press articles, programmes, posters) provide information about the man’s life, the dancer’s performances and the choreographer’s works – in particular Mystère (1941), Tableaux d’une exposition (1941), Les Sept Figures de la vieille (1943) and Don Quichotte (1945) – his role in Algerian cultural life then in post-war Paris, his company Les Ballets Français Modernes, and his collaborations, particularly with the illustrator and costume designer Jean Aubert. But thanks to the presence in this archive of numerous texts by Schild and by dancers and witnesses to his work (personal and theoretical notes, choreography notes, notes about classes and improvisation, letters and accounts), it will be possible to learn about his training in Hamburg, centred on the principles of Laban and Wigman, followed by the development of his own ideas on dance and more widely his vision of the world and life, and finally the contribution of his teaching – a ‘comprehensive’ teaching that was ‘very balanced between technique, theory, relationship to space, rhythm [and] creativity’ (Lise Brunel).