Pola Nirenska

Short Biography

Pola Nirenska, a noted teacher and choreographer who danced with Mary Wigman, died on Saturday after a fall from the balcony of her apartment in Bethesda, Md. She was 81 years old.The death was ruled a suicide by the Montgomery County Medical Examiner.Miss Nirenska was a major force in dance in Washington, as a teacher, as director of a company whose dancers included Liz Lerman and Sharon Wyrrick (later choreographers in their own right), and as a creator of impressively fashioned dances filled with often raw emotion. Her last piece, presented at Dance Place in Washington in 1990, was inspired by Holocaust victims she had known and was called "In Memory of Those I Loved . . . Who Are No More." Little Early Training"Her dances are strong and stark, like massive three-dimensional sculpture in volume and weight, " George Jackson, a Washington-based dance critic, said after Miss Nirenska's death. "Her figures are larger than life, but with very distinct personalities."Miss Nirenska, who was born in Warsaw, insisted on a dance career as a child. She had very little early training, but graduated with honors from a music and dance school in Dresden, Germany, run by Wigman, the influential German Expressionist choreographer. Miss Nirenska performed with Wigman's company during its 1932-33 tour of the United States and Germany. She then embarked on a career as a solo dancer, teacher and choreographer, working in Warsaw, Vienna and Italy. In 1934 the International Dance Congress in Vienna awarded Miss Nirenska a first prize for choreography and a second prize for performing.At the start of World War II, Miss Nirenska, who was Jewish, immigrated to England, where she gave solo recitals, choreographed musicals and entertained the troops. She also worked there with the choreographers Kurt Jooss and Sigurd Leeder and modeled for the sculptor Jacob Epstein.Miss Nirenska left for the United States in 1949. She studied in New York with leading American modern-dance choreographers and teachers, among them Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, Jose Limon and Louis Horst. She moved to Washington in 1951 and established a career there as a teacher at local ballet and modern-dance schools and at her own studio, and as a highly regarded choreographer with a company of her own.Her marriage to Count John Ledesma, an actor and military pilot, ended in divorce. She is survived by her second husband, Jan Karski.