Jean Weidt

Jean was a German dancer and choreographer. He first danced with a youth folk dance troupe and later studied with Leeder and Olga Brandt-Knaack. He gave his first solo concert in Hamburg in 1925, including the first version of his signature piece, The Worker.

In the same year he formed his own company, with which he moved to Berlin in 1929 where it became known as the Red Dancers.

The political content of his works grew stronger with the rise of fascism and he was briefly arrested in 1933.

In 1938 Weidt established "Ballet 38" in Paris, becoming by now one of France's top dancers and choreographers, and heading up what he himself later identified, according to his son Andreas, as the country's "Undisputed Number 1" of the modern French dance scene.

The French and British governments declared war on Germany in September 1939 in response to the implementation of a German-Soviet agreement to partition Poland. It was not immediately clear to the inhabitants of Paris and London what war with Germany would involve, but for Jean Weidt, and for thousands of others who had moved to France or Britain as refugees from political and / or race based persecution in Nazi Germany, the period of waiting was relatively short. Weidt was identified as an enemy alien, facing arrest and internment. He was able to avoid arrest in Paris by escaping to (French) North Africa and ended up in Casablanca, but after the invasion of May 1940 and the installation of a new government in France, Casablanca came under the control of the Vichy government, and Weidt spent several months in a concentration camp in Algeria.

In November 1942 following the Anglo-American military occupation of what was known at the time as French North Africa Jean Weidt volunteered to join the British army, now taking an active role in the fighting against Nazi Germany in North Africa and, subsequently, in Italy.

He then lived and worked in Moscow, Prague, and Paris, continuing to choreograph work with intense political and humanitarian concerns, such as The Cell (1947).

From 1948 to 1950 he directed the Dramatic Ballet at the Volksbühne in E.

Jean Weidst was married to the painter and graphic artist Ursula Wendorff-Weidt. Through the marriage he acquired as a step son the photographer-artist Michael Weidt. In 1956 the couple had another son together.

In 1988, the year of his death, Jean Weidt was made an honorary citizen of Rangsdorf, a district of Teltow-Fläming a short distance to the south of Berlin where by this time he lived.