Karen Kurnaedy talks with us about "Our Love Affair with Dance"
An interview with Karen McKinley Kurnaedy
Mascall Dance Society Board member Karen Kurnaedy is about to publish a new book, Our Love Affair with Dance, which looks at the international life and work of her teachers and mentors, Magda and Gertrud Hahn, two sisters who began the first Modern Dance school in Vancouver.
The Hahn Sisters Photo courtesy of Karen Kurnaedy
Susan: How did you come to write this book?
Karen: It actually emerged from a small chapter in my dissertation, where I gave bare-bones facts of the Hahn sisters’ lives.
Susan: What was the dissertation’s focus?
Karen: The title was Uncovering the Essence of What Animates Us Beneath the Dance. It's about the spiritual nature of dance. It's nothing to do with religion. I follow that same topic in this book. One of my writing teachers at university said that we write our own story, over and over. We write about what we believe in, what we think, and what is important for us.
The book takes off from those bare-bones facts, combining historical information from the sisters and photos with my research and some pedagogy. And although the introduction to Our Love Affair with Dance sounds like a straightforward biography, in a lot of ways the book is actually creative non-fiction.
Susan: What would you say is the balance of fact to fiction?
Karen : Half and half, maybe.
Susan: Can you tell us something about your approach to creative non-fiction? How did you work?
Karen : Well, for instance, I'll take a photo, and I'll write what I thought they were thinking or what was going through their minds, or their life at the time. I do that intermittently throughout the book. I knew them so well. I could hear their voices in my head. They were like my two grandmothers.
I'm in a weekly writing group (Zoom) that works on "writing through the body". The group leader Ingrid Rose takes us through breathwork, humming, becoming aware of how we are made up of water, and so on, and gradually you open these channels in your body - then we write. And we share pieces of writing. I've run several parts of my book past people this way.
Susan: Can you describe entering writing flow through this somatic means?
Karen: I’m lying on the carpet with the computer on, and Ingrid takes us through “a dive”, where we follow her direction through physical progressions of breathing, humming, etc. and it leads to writing. I’ve done somatic work over the years, so the ideas are not new to me - it’s exciting to explore as a writing tool. The group has really inspired me. It includes women writers from California, New York, various places, and are mostly poets, which is interesting.
Lately, I’m finding myself connecting with people very closely aligned with my interests in a way I've never experienced at other times in life. Through my historical research on the Hahn sisters, for instance, I was recently contacted by a German professor with a mutual interest in their period in India; our e-mail exchange has since been joined by a recent PhD. graduate. I'm thrilled to continually find I've got a lot of material to send them. Both studying the work of Menaka, a leading South Indian dancer of the period the sisters spent in Bombay - and for them, the information I can share is like hitting the jackpot!
I'm very fortunate in the material the sisters left to me. Neither had children. They wanted their story to be remembered.
Magda and Gertrud: the Bombay School, and in performance, circa 1930s
Susan: How is the sister’s surname pronounced?
Karen : Their names were Gertrud and Magda Hahn, (pronounced Han). And my guess is that they added "ova" to emphasize that they were Czech. The sisters spoke German. They were born in Bischof-Teinitz, in Bohemia, the Sudetenland, which was annexed into Nazi Germany in 1938. Gertrud married an Indian man, which was unusual then. The name Hanova first appears in Gertrud’s performance posters and programs in India, when she arrived in Bombay and began performing, in the early ‘30s.
Susan: You’ve remained in contact with them since you first began studying with them?
Karen: Yes, the relationship was long and influential in my life. In 1965 at age eleven, I began studying at The Hanova School of Modern Studies in Body Sculpture and the Classical Dance – absorbing the influence of Duncan, Dalcroze, Laban, Wigman, and Shankar.
Susan: An incredible slice of dance history!
Karen: I agree!
Susan: Tell us how your studies with the sisters unfolded.
Karen: There were gaps when I didn’t live in Vancouver of course. At 18 I went traveling, then married, had children - lived in Kelowna, then Edmonton. Finally, I couldn't stand the Alberta cold. I returned to Vancouver in 1990 and got work as a teacher in Coquitlam, near my mom and my dance teachers again.
At age thirty-six I resumed studies with the sisters and performed with them. They were in their 80s and still with it. I started spending a lot more time with them socially. They became more like mentors than dance teachers. I went places with them. I did things with them. Every time I went there, we'd look at their photo albums and I'd ask questions. They had a certain reserve, a bit like they were royalty, and as a child, I was too in awe to ask many questions. But as an adult, I grew to know them and began to become comfortable asking more in-depth questions. They really wanted some way of giving their story to others, some sort of book written about them.
Magda (1905-1992) and Gertrud (1903-2002) had long lives. I knew them very well. When I write about what they thought, I feel tickled that I could sort of capture their way of thinking about things! I mean, does anyone really know anybody? They were half a century older than me. They studied with Max Terpis, Mary Wigman, Menaka, and Rudolph Laban. They had dance schools in Karlsbad (1922-1932), Bombay (1932-1949), and London (1950-1957), and Vancouver (1957-2000). They were the grandmothers. Of their experience as Jews, for example, they seldom spoke. They always said they weren't religious or political. Gertrud would often say with a twinkle, “we worship Terspichore, the muse of the dance.”
In 1957, they’re living in London. Magda decides that she's going to move to Vancouver because at a party, she meets people from Vancouver and they don't think there's any modern dance there yet, only ballet schools. So, Magda gets on a boat and moved to Vancouver. Such confidence. She was 52 when she arrived and she knew no one. The Y hired her right away. She was savvy and made sure she got herself in the paper all the time. After a year, Gertrud closed their London school and joined Magda in Vancouver.
They were so vibrant.
The Hanova School had a production group. We trained and were invited to perform all around the city in the early ‘70s, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Unitarian Church, and so on. (In a video of myself dancing at 40, I jump backward and touch my head with my feet at that age! We were well trained.)
I did study with others. Yet I found that very often, the underlying thrust was to have the student be like the teacher. I’d just end up going back to the Hanova School because I felt better dancing with them. I felt more. It was something different with them. You were you, with them. You could dance as you wanted to dance, but with their guidance and mentorship.
My teachers weren’t competitive. They copied no one. They had no interest in trends. They really stuck to what they believed in, a mix of Laban, Wigman, Indian dance, and Yoga. They were keenly interested in art and attended dance performances frequently. They had their own way of looking at things and their whole life and teaching in Vancouver was concerned with helping each student at their school experience the joy of dance.
And so in any work they choreographed with you, you were kind of in there with them, choreographically. They had remarkable influences, and from Wigman absorbed the conviction that the dancer must choreograph their own work. And they made it so personal for you and highlighted what you could do well. You usually chose the topic yourself. And you just loved doing it with them. Then twice a year there’d be a performance of some kind, so you always got to perform.
It was lifelong. When I was 60, I danced at my mother's eighty-second birthday.
Susan: Can you see the influence of a Quaker background on your life and art practice?
Karen: Yes, I think so. Like my family. My husband's an Indonesian Muslim. My eldest son is married to a Punjabi-Canadian woman, my youngest son is married to a Japanese woman. We just all laugh it up and have a great time together. Our family’s diversity is a joy. My mother created an atmosphere of acceptance of others, an avid reader with a great appetite for people and knowledge. Trying to get to know a person before you make any judgments about what they look like and things like that are so deep in the Quaker ethic. In the Meeting, there are no titles or hierarchy. If I’m 10 and I meet an 83-year-old, we speak on an equal footing, no Mr. or Ma’am. We are all allowed to be connecting with our higher power in the way we want to. Marriages don’t have a minister or anyone in power over you, women are not lesser, and so on.
Susan: Did you consider a professional dance career?
Karen: I’m often asked that. Certainly, some of the Hanova school students went on to professional careers in dance. I went a different way. And looking back on my life, I see that had I danced professionally at that point in history, I couldn’t have the family I do. I've three truly great sons who’re just hilarious. I've been happily married for twenty-five years to a fabulous husband. We have a great life together with our family. And I think everything I've done has been a lesson that's taken me to where I am now – I like who I am and can move through life and can see many things differently than when I was younger. And throughout life, I have never stopped dancing. I taught, studied, performed…My husband and I love music and dancing and have been avid social dancers for twenty years.
My mom was my example. She loved dancing. Her body was big, an earth goddess, and she didn’t care. She just danced. Later, she became a storyteller. She took folk dancing, Hawaiian dance. She and her friend knew one hundred Greek dances. They'd go to Greece all the time and just learn more. And, you know, they just did what they wanted. And they imprinted on me that if you want to dance, just go dance. You don't have to be a professional.
Susan Are you excited to publish the book?
Karen Absolutely. I’ve had a lot of help. My graphic designer husband scanned all the photographs to professional standards for the book. My former supervisor, Celeste Snowber, gave me invaluable publishing advice. I didn't write the book to make money. It's about history. If we forget all the stories of people that have come before us, it's so easy for young girls and women to forget what life used to be like.
Susan We’ll be updating readers as soon as the book is available. Best of luck with it, Karen, I can’t wait to read it, myself.
Karen Thanks!
Karen Kurnaedy
Photo by Irwin Kusdaradjat Kurnaedy
Karen McKinlay Kurnaedy (she, her, hers) is a second generation settler of Scottish heritage. She is a dancer, writer and educator. Her dance training began in the 1960s at The Hanova School of Modern Studies in Body Sculpture and the Classical Dance, (the first modern dance school in Vancouver) where she was forever imbued with the spirit of Duncan, Dalcroze, Laban, Wigman and Shankar.
Karen’s work as a writer includes publishing several essays, articles and books about dance and dance education. Her new book, Our Love Affair with Dance is almost ready for release. She received her Bachelor of Education from the University of Alberta and earned a Master of Arts and a Doctorate in Philosophy from Simon Fraser University.
Her teaching experience includes 30 years in the Coquitlam School District, being a Faculty Associate and instructing in the Graduate Diploma program at Simon Fraser University. Her interests lie in promoting and implementing new ideas for education, the arts, dance history, dance, and education.