Finding Aid for Anita Zahn professional and personal papers, 1920-1991.

• Descriptive Summary
• Biographical History
• Scope and Content Note
• Organization
• Separated Material
• Container List
  • I. Correspondence
  • II. Professional papers
  • III. Personal papers
  • IV. Music scores:

Source

Purchase.

Access

The collection is open to research.

Restrictions on Use

For permission to publish, contact the Curator, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Library for the Performing Arts.

Preferred Citation

Anita Zahn professional and personal papers, (S) *MGZMD 120, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Anita Zahn (born in Germany in 1904) was among the nine students of the Isadora and Elizabeth Duncan School who were brought by Elizabeth Duncan to America at the outbreak of World War I in August of 1914. They performed in America until 1920 when they went back to Switzerland for the summer. Anita Zahn remained in Europe for two years, and in 1922 she returned to the United States. She taught at Carnegie Hall and gave performances with her group of young Duncan dancers. In the late twenties she became the director of the New York branch of the Elizabeth Duncan School, and later established her own, Anita Zahn School of Duncan Dancing, in New York. The school also had branches in Summit, NJ, Nuntucket (Siasconset), and Summer schools in New Jersey and East Hampton, Long Island. She also served as the faculty at The Spence School in New York for more than 20 years.

From the late 1920s through mid 1960s, Anita Zahn arranged annual spring recitals of her school in New York as well as numerous performances in various theaters and halls. Among the most distinguished productions were “The Children's Christmas Story” (1953) with Leopold Stokowski as the director and conductor and Robert Edmond Jones as the designer; and “Arouse and Beware,” a trilogy based on Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1936). She died in 1995.

The papers of Anita Zahn cover more than seventy years of her career as a dancer and school director and a member of the “Isadorables” circle. The collection consists mainly of clippings, programs and press material. Correspondence is fragmentary and does not give a full picture of Anita Zahn's professional or personal life. Of particular interest are materials related to Elizabeth Duncan School of Dance: correspondence with Elizabeth Duncan, diary notes on the 1920 season in Switzerland, clippings from European newspapers of the early 1910s and 1920s, and original programs of Isadora Duncan and Duncan school performances. The order within series is alphabetical.

• I. Correspondence
  • A. General
  • B. School
  • C. Personal
• II. Professional papers
  • A. Teaching material
  • B. Programs
  • C. Clippings, publicity
  • D. Scrapbooks
• III. Personal papers
• IV. Music scores

Separated from the collection:

• Emanuel Siblík. Antiké Krásno v Moderním Tanci. Od Platona k Duncanové.
• To be Catalaoged
• Photographs
• Portraits to be cataloged
• Books in German and English