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Ernest Berk
German-born composer, dancer, dance choreographer, mime artist and percussionist Ernest Berk was born in Cologne on 12 October 1909 and studied music at the Rheinische Musikschule. His dance teachers were Mary Wigman and Chinita Ullmann.
He ran his own dance company and worked for the Salzburg Festival. His choreography was influenced by the Dresden expressionist school, and he was strongly influenced by left-wing politics.
After the Nazis came to power in Germany, he was banned from performing, and moved to the UK in 1934. There he produced ballets for West End theatre, Glyndebourne and Covent Garden, and worked as a choreographer for the first year of the Edinburgh Festival. He created another dance company, the Modern Dance Group, based in London. Later, with Nesta Brooking, he formed the Dance Theatre company, and later still, the Dance Theatre Commune with British dancer Alisa Park.
As a composer, he was interested in electronic music and musique concrète, and worked from a home studio he created in Camden, North London, and later at a studio in Dorset Street, London W1, producing over two hundred works, including many for his own theatre productions. He created some of the first electronic works to come from the UK.
Ernest Berk returned to Germany in the mid-1980s and taught improvisation and music therapy in Berlin. He died on 30 September 1993, aged eighty-three.