MĪLA CĪRULE: A LATVIAN IN THE WORLD OF MODERN DANCE

Abstract

Mīla Cīrule (1891–1977) is one of the first Latvian dancers who went in for the genre of modern dance at the beginning of the 20th century. At the end of the 1920s the dancer earned her recognition in Germany and Austria, and her name was mentioned among the most striking modern dance choreographers in France in the 1930s; her contribution to teaching dance was also appreciated. Mīla Cīrule is the first Latvian dancer who has become internationally renowned in the field of modern dance. The aim of this research is to follow the development path of Mīla Cīrule’s creative work by gathering information and analysing artistic influences which have created the unusual creative personality aspects of the dancer. Mīla Cīrule was born in Riga; however, she started her dance career in Russia in Ellen Tels’ (Эллен Тельс) school. This school followed Isadora Duncan’s artistic criteria in their creative principles. In parallel with acquisition of free dance, the young dancer attended classical dance classes at soloist Mikhail Mordkin’s (Михаил Михайлович Мордкин) school of the Moscow Bolshoi Theatre (Большой театр). After meeting Mary Wigman and studying the philosophy of German expressionist dance, Mīla Cīrule rethought the principles and expressive means of her art; she refused unnecessary ostentation, and sought an individual way of expression. “Mīla Cīrule’s choreographies are high quality works of art which speak volumes about the choreographer’s rich world of ideas and a good sense of form, while her dance technique is always perfectly adapted to the contents of the staging production” [Dārziņš 1938]. In her staging productions Mīla Cīrule combined an expressive style with very well-considered and precise principles of form creation. In her creative work the brave reliance upon instinctively found movements of the Wigman School always complied with a strict sense of drama structure and subtlety of details that had been acquired from Ellen Tels’ aesthetics of the pantomimic staging productions. As an original and extraordinary personality, Mīla Cīrule is not similar to any artist of her time in her creative work. She adopted and accumulated everything she had learned at many dance schools, and she passed it through the prism of her personality.