Bessie Schönberg was born in 1906 in Hanover, Germany. Arriving in the United States when she was 17 years old, she began her undergraduate career at the University of Oregon in Eugene, but moved to New York in 1929 to study with Martha Graham. In 1931, she suffered a knee injury preventing her from pursuing her dance career and subsequently attended Bennington College where she received her BA in 1934. She immediately became a dance instructor at Bennington after graduating and taught there until 1938 when she began teaching at Sarah Lawrence College. She remained at Sarah Lawrence for 37 years until her retirement in 1975. Bessie, as she was known on campus, is credited with establishing the Dance Department at the College and received national attention for her dance composition classes. She became a part of every aspect of Sarah Lawrence not only dance instruction.
Bessie felt strongly that all of the performing arts should work together as much as possible since dance could not be separate from theatre which could not be separate from voice which could not be separate from music. To this end, she became involved in collaborative projects with the various performing arts departments. In each of these instances, she not only choreographed or directed the dance portion of the program, but designed the costumes, and directed the cast and musicians. She was remarkable in the way she became a part of everything around her.
Upon her retirement, she was appointed Professor Emerita and in 1993, the Bessie Schönberg Dance Theatre at the College was named in her honor. Throughout her post-retirement years, she was closely connected with the Dance Theater Workshop (which named its theatre in Chelsea for Bessie), The Yard, and Jacob’s Pillow. The distinguished New York Dance and Performance Awards were named the “Bessies” in her honor. After retiring, she continued to teach at the Juilliard School, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and the Dance Theatre of Harlem until her death.
Bessie Schönberg died at her home in Bronxville on May 14, 1997.
Throughout her teaching career, Bessie served as a mentor to innumerable dancers. She maintained a strong philosophy about teaching dance which is reflected, and best represented, by her own words from her oral history. The Sarah Lawrence College Archives celebrates Bessie’s 100th birthday with this exhibit providing a glimpse into Bessie’s long and distinguished career at Sarah Lawrence College through her oral history, photographs, and documents.
All audio clips are from the oral history interview conducted by Rose Anne Thom and used courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation.
Her educational and aesthetic vision has managed to embrace a respect and striving for the best artistic standards, coupled with a conviction that dance is but one way of knowing and doing within a larger pattern of living.
—Resolution adopted by the Board of Trustees, May 8, 1975
The Bennington School of the Dance was my going to school about learning how to teach, in a very practical, everyday way. I don’t think there is any better way of learning in our field than by doing. Practically everything that one really learns about dance is by being committed to it and involved and doing it. I think the teaching of dance, if one is ever to be any good at it, comes from just doing it, and doing it, and doing it…if one cares about the students.
—Oral history interview conducted by Rose Anne Thom used courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation.
Learning to dance initially means to be taught skills. Though the need for these disciplines are essential and imperative, it will remain a passive experience for the student unless he can be made to see that dance is a potent tool for his own imaginative artistic uses.
—“Dance Workshop” by Bessie Schönberg, published in “Education,“ November 1952
If you lie awake nights, you think of problems to present to your classes in terms of the students—the world they live in socially, emotionally, politically, economically—where they stand, what experiences are like for them. You don’t teach from your yesterday’s experience, but from their now.
—Sarah Lawrence Alumnae Magazine, Summer 1972
Listen to Bessie discuss how she learned how to teach at Sarah Lawrence College.
—Sarah Lawrence Alumnae Magazine, Summer 1972
I learned to teach at Sarah Lawrence. My older colleagues taught me much about teaching when I first came. It’s my brand, but it’s imbedded in my understanding of the educational philosophy of Sarah Lawrence.
—Sarah Lawrence Alumnae Magazine, Summer 1972
It was quite a fabulous faculty when I came to Sarah Lawrence… In the beginning, when I was a very young teacher at Sarah Lawrence, I was beginning to become deeply committed to the educational plan of the total college… As I became more acquainted with my fellow teachers…they became my teachers too. In fact, I sat at their feet.
—Oral history interview conducted by Rose Anne Thom used courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation
I claim always that most of what I learned about teaching, my students taught me. I would think that the biggest percentage of what I was taught came from them over the years.
—Oral history interview conducted by Rose Anne Thom used courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation
I was after an ideal of making clear to the student, by action rather than words, that movement had to be learned in a very disciplined way; but had to lead to something which one expressed with the controlled movement one had learned, and that something of that should take place in every class certainly that I would teach. I learned through this trial and error method…to hit on what I’ve learned to think of as the theme and variation teaching method which I followed. I learned to use less material and use it more fully.
—Oral history interview conducted by Rose Anne Thom used courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation
I think the only right we have to say that we work in the arts with the students is to give them an opportunity to really work in the arts. They, themselves work in it. Give them an opportunity to experience excitement, disciplines, hopefully real joys, and allow them to fail. Let them experience that failing is something that is part of learning. Stand by when they do, but don’t necessarily bail them out. Let them experience what it is. Let them find out that part of learning is not always upward and forward, but has real problems and sometimes some dark hours. But don’t overbear on the frightening aspects of all this. Try to be simple. Stay matter-of-fact, cool, if possible, objective, and, if possible, humorous. I don’t mean to make the whole thing a joke—far from it—but to allow an occasional lightheartedness to bridge unhappy situation. A laugh, a kind word, a joke about something sometimes bridges the sort of near heart failure of a classroom far more than endless explanations of what had happened, and the student will regain the equilibrium much faster.
—Oral history interview conducted by Rose Anne Thom used courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation
Movement is an unconscious part of man’s existence; in general it is the part of our behavior which we take for granted. We are more conscious of its absence than of its existence. Movement is the manifestation of non-verbal existence of man.
—“Dance Workshop” by Bessie Schönberg published in “Education,” November 1952
When I suggested teaching composition choreography and having student performances shortly after arriving at Sarah Lawrence in 1938, everybody laughed. It had never occurred to college students, or to faculty, that they could be creative in this way. Our earliest composition classes attracted barely five students.
—Source unknown
One thing I can say in the outset is that in talking about teaching composition, I’m talking about the part of dance that interests me most deeply, and has probably for many, many years now… The exploring of what to do with dance and with movement should be simultaneous with learning how to move. The idea that you put off doing something with your craft until your craft is more sophisticated, until you have more control over it, I think is nonsense.
—Oral history interview conducted by Rose Anne Thom used courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation
I have stressed how important I feel it is for taking thought out of the head and into the body. To teach kinetic thinking. To teach kinetic awareness. To let the dance student have a kind of second-nature awareness that the elbow thinks, the knee thinks, the shoulder thinks, the sternum thinks, the tailbone thinks, and is much more reliable than the head in a given situation and for certain needs… The teaching, therefore, becomes, as the year progresses, as much a teaching of the self as a teaching from teacher to student… The dancer is made by the dancer, himself or herself, in the long run, against the advice, the challenges, the patience, the encouragement, of the teachers. Teachers don’t make dancers. The dancer whom we admire in the end has done most of the work himself and had to. The overcoming of fear, the becoming free, becoming able to command your skill, is something the person has to arrive at. You can guide to that point, but this can only be done by the person himself, I believe.
—Oral history interview conducted by Rose Anne Thom used courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation
Like all performing arts, dance is communal by nature. Intensity, conflict, drama in the theatre as well as in dance, comes from the interrelation of performers present simultaneously in the stage space.
—Sarah Lawrence Alumnae Magazine, Summer 1972
When you work on the skills of an art, whether you practice piano or whether you paint, you do it fully. You do it deeply. You do it to the best of your ability.
—Oral history interview conducted by Rose Anne Thom used courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation
Listen to Bessie explain the importance of group rehearsals.
I believe we succeeded in developing dance studies at Sarah Lawrence not as a dance academy, which in my view would have been a disaster, but primarily as a means of helping an individual develop as a person and strengthen her artistic growth.
—Sarah Lawrence Alumnae Magazine, Summer 1972
The fun lies in doing and participating, not in watching. The reward is not a contract at the Met, but strength, health, a better posture and more poise.
—The Campus, October 24, 1945
Her going leaves us diminished, but the foundations she has built assures us rich promise for the future. They are a fitting monument to an indomitable spirit, an inspiring teacher and a gracious woman.
—Resolution adopted by the Board of Trustees, May 8, 1975