Dancers: Mura Ziperovitch (Mura Dehn)

Max Pollak

Dancer-turned-documentarian Mura Dehn was born Mura Ziperovitch in 1905 in Russia, and was placed in ballet classes as a young child. However, it wasn't until she began taking modern dance from famed choreographer Ellen Tels that she became passionate about the dance art form.

By 1925 she had moved to Paris to pursue a dance career. While there, she was introduced to the performances of Josephine Baker, whose "jazz dancing" was wildly popular in the metropolitan city. This experience changed the course of Dehn's career, and in 1930, after her marriage to artist Adolf Dehn, she moved to New York City to be nearer to the birthplace of jazz. She soon found work as a dancer at the Savoy Ballroom, and began working with choreographer Roger Pryor Dodge. Her connection to the famed venue would be central to her life, first (and only briefly) as a performer, and then as a documentarian, when she began filming the people who came the ballroom every night to dance.

Dehn recognized the significance of Black American music and dancers and, having witnessed the erasure of the work of her European friends with the onset of the Second World War, was eager to document this new wave of expression for future generations. Over the course of several decades she filmed, edited, and compiled the reels of film she took at the Savoy beginning in the late 1930s to the 1980s, as well as what little footage and ephemera she could find from 1900 to the time her arrival in the US. She released The Spirit Moves: A History of Black Social Dance on Film, 1900-1986 in 1987.