Litz Pisk was a choreographer, movement director, printmaker, and author.
You move into space and discover your freedoms within its dimensions by advance, retreat, curving, circling, and also by taking any objects, such as a chair, a pillar, or a tree into your awareness. You open out and meet the other creature, the other person, the many others. You make their existence present in your own and widen the possibilities of communication.
Born to a progressive middle-class family in Vienna, Pisk’s artistic practice stretched across movement teaching, stage design, drawing caricatures, and costume design.
She had a successful career in Vienna, working with Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. Ahead of her departure to England in 1933, she was to design the first production
of Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. In London, she taught at RADA and the Old Vic Theatre School, and in Corsham at the Bath Academy of Art. After taking a class in pottery at Camberwell School of Art, she began to teach pottery there, and would later teach pottery at the South West Hertfordshire College of Further Education.
She authored the book The Actor and His Body, which was first published in 1975. The book guides the reader through Pisk's own philosophy of movement training and acts as a guide for self-practice in movement and dance.
She retired with her life long friend and companion Barbara Coombe, who she had met at Corsham, to their cottage in St.Ives, Cornwall. A personal archive of teaching and exhibition documents is held in The Morrab Library.
References
Pisk, L. (2017) The Actor and His Body. London: Bloomsbury
'Gulls Landing'. A painting by Litz Pisk. From the collections of the Hypatia Trust.
