Gabo Falk

Biography

Gabo Falk, born 1896 in Stockholm, was a dancer, choreographer and a pioneer within the development of expressionist dance in Sweden in the early 1900s. She is also seen as one of the greatest dance artists of that era. She developed a Swedish teaching method for children's dancing which still has a place today in children's dance instruction. Her father, Ferdinand Falk, was a cantor for the Jewish congregation in Stockholm whilst her mother, Ida Rosenberger-Falk, was a singer who had married young and then devoted herself to her family. Her mother came to play a large role in the direction Gabo Falk's life took. She was the driving force who assembled a large enough group of dance students to enable the organist Anna Behle to open a dance school, called Anna Behle's Plastikinstitut (institute of movement), in Stockholm in 1907. Several performing artists sought dancing classes as a form of inspiration for their own artistry, including Siri Derkert and Einar Nerman. Gabo Falk had great opportunities to see what was happening within expressionist dance in Europe - she saw Vaslav Nijinsky dance "L'aprèsmidi d'un faune" in Paris. By the time she was 18 years old she was fully-trained and ready to appear on stage. At that time she made her only film role as Princess Lara Rispala in Fritz Magnussen's "Jungeldrottningens smycke/The Queen of the Jungles Jewelry"(1918). A year later Gabo Falk married the estate-owner Axel J. Runestam and this brought an end to her career as a dancer. She died in a car accident in Denmark 1975.