Mary Wigman

Mary Wigman (left)

Mary Wigman (13 November 1886 – 18 September 1973) was a German dancer, choreographer, and dance instructor. A pioneer of expressionist dance, her work was hailed for bringing the deepest of existential experiences to the stage. She became one of the most iconic figures of Weimar German culture and is considered one of the most important figures in the history of European dance.

Some of Wigman's works include Summer Dance, Dream Image, Witch Dance, Dance of Lorrow, Visions, Cycles, and the Bay, Festive Rhythm and Dance of Spring. Accompaniment often employed non-Western instrumentation; fifes and primarily percussion, bells, gongs and drums from India, Thailand, Africa, and China, contrasted with silence. She would often employ masks in her pieces, influenced again by non-western/tribal dance. She developed a system of modern stage dance (without pointe shoes), movement training and dance therapy.

Early days

Mary Wigman studio, West Berlin

Karoline Sophie Marie Wiegmann was born in Hanover, Germany. She came to dance comparatively late after seeing three students of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, who aimed to approach music through movement using three equally-important elements:solfège,improvisation and his own system of movements, eurhythmics. Another key early experience was a solo concert by Grete Wiesenthal.

In 1910 she enrolled at Dalcroze's School of Rhythmic Gymnastics at Hellerau, outsideDresden), where she studied for three years. Dance rather than music was her main aim: she felt restricted by the system, which caused her largely to reject music in favour of emotion as the generator of dance. She left for a wanderjahr in Italy.

In 1913 Wigman was introduced to Rudolf von Laban, an important innovator who was interested in the relationship between the moving human form and the space which surrounds it and who developed Kinetographie Laban and the notation system that came to be called Labanotation. Wigman began studying at Monte Verità. During the Great War she worked as Laban's assistant in Leipzig.

Career

Portrait of Mary Wigman dancing by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Wigman's first public production was the Hexentanz, performed without music, in late 1913. Following Laban's lead she worked upon an absolute dance technique based in contrasts of movement; expansion and contraction, pulling and pushing. During the following years she worked hard at her art and endured much hardship culminating in 1918 in a nervous breakdown: while recovering she wrote the choreography for her first group composition, The Seven Dances of Life and her career and influence began in earnest. She had several years' success on the concert stage, though her grand design, the 1929 Totenmal, was never produced.

In 1920 Wigman was offered the post of ballet mistress at the Dresden Opera House, but conflict cut this short. Instead she started a school in Dresden, a center for modern dance which became known as "Dresden Central School" or simply "Mary Wigman-Schule". Students worked at acrobatics, improvisation and emotional expression.

Her students and collaborators included Yvonne Georgi, Hanya Holm, Harald Kreutzberg, Gret Palucca, Max Terpis, Irena Linn, Elisabet Wiener, Sonia Revid, Margarethe Wallmann and Inge Weiss. This school existed from 1920 until 1942. Her schools in Germany continued to operate under Nazi rule in World War II where she obeyed the rule of government and fired all her Jewish dancers.

West Berlin 1959

Another student of the Mary Wigman-Schule was the famous opera-dancer Ursula Cain (*1927), who at the age of more than 80 years could still be seen on stage and TV dancing in cross-genre projects like Dancing with Time by Heike Hennig.

Mary Wigman toured the United States in 1930 with her company of dancers; a school was founded by her disciples in New York City in 1931. Her choreography inspired communist dance troupes in the 1930s in New York City Her work in the United States is credited to her protegee Hanya Holm, and then to Hanya's students Alwin Nikolais and Joanne Woodbury. Another student and protegee of Wigman's, Margret Dietz, taught in America from 1953 until 1972.

She taught again in Leipzig in 1948: from 1950 until her death in 1973 she taught at a studio in West Berlin. She died on 18 September 1973 in Berlin, aged 86.

See also

• Weimar culture
• Weimar Germany
• Isadora Duncan
• Ruth St Denis

Sources

Mary Wigman, dance studio, West Berlin 1959

• Newhall, Mary Anne Santos (2009) Mary Wigman. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-37527-4
• Manning, Susan (1993). Ecstasy and the Demon: Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman, University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-08193-5.
• Partsch-Bergsohn, Isa and Harold Bergsohn (2002). The Makers of Modern Dance in Germany: Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, Kurt Jooss, Princeton Book Company Publishers. ISBN 0-87127-250-4.
• Toepfer, Karl Eric (1997). Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in Germany Body Culture, 1910-1935 (Weimer and Now: German Cultural Criticism, No 13), University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-20663-0.
• Wigman, Mary (1975). The Mary Wigman Book: Her Writings, Olympic Marketing Corp. ISBN 0-8195-4079-X.
• Gilbert, Laure (2000), Danser avec le Troisième Reich, Brussels, Editions Complex, ISBN 2-87027-697-4
• Karina, Lilian & Kant, Marion (2003), German Modern Dance and the Third Reich, Berghahn Books, New York & Oxford, ISBN 1-57181-688-7
• John Martin, Workers League In Group Dances, The New York Times, December 24, 1934

External links

• Traude Schrattenecker, a student of Wigman's.
• Photographs of Mary Wigman
• Mary Wigman-Schule in Dresden
• Dancing with Time by Heike Hennig