Mary Wigman
Mary Wigman was a German dancer and choreographer who pioneered expressionist dance, dance therapy, and movement training without pointe shoes. She is considered one of the most important figures in the history of modern dance. She became one of the most iconic figures of Weimar German culture and her work was hailed for bringing the deepest of existential experiences to the stage.
Early life
Karoline Sophie Marie Wiegmann was born in Hanover, Province of Hanover in the Kingdom of Prussia. Wiegmann was the daughter of a bicycle dealer. Already as a child, she was called Mary, "because the Hanoverians were once kings of England and the House of Welf pride never quite got over the decline of the Kingdom of Hanover to a Prussian province.Development of expressionist dance, early career
Wigman spent her youth in Hanover, England, the Netherlands and Lausanne. Wigman 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—Dalcroze eurhythmics. Wigman studied rhythmic gymnastics in Hellerau from 1910 to 1911 with Émile Jaques-Dalcroze and Suzanne Perrottet, but felt artistically dissatisfied there: Like Suzanne Perrottet, Mary Wigman was also looking for movements independent of music and independent physical expression. After that, she stayed in Rome and Berlin. Another key early experience was a solo concert by Grete Wiesenthal.File:Mary Wigman.gif|thumb|Mary Wigman in Monte Verità on Lake Maggiore, enrolled at the Rudolf von Laban School for Art, between 1913 and 1918
The Jaques-Dalcroze school's practice made dance secondary to music, so Wigman decided to take her interests elsewhere. In 1913, on advice from the German-Danish expressionist painter Emil Nolde, she entered the Rudolf von Laban School for Art on Monte Verità in the Swiss canton of Ticino. Laban was significantly involved in the development of modern expressive dance. She enrolled in one of Laban's summer courses and was instructed in his technique. Following their lead, she worked on a technique based on contrasts of movement; expansion and contraction, pulling and pushing. She continued with the Laban school through the Swiss summer sessions and the Munich winter sessions until 1919.
In Munich, Wigman showed her first public dances Hexentanz I, Lento and Ein Elfentanz. During the First World War she stayed in Switzerland with Laban as his assistant and taught in Zürich and Ascona. In 1917, Wigman offered three different programs in Zürich, including Der Tänzer unserer lieben Frau, Das Opfer, Tempeltanz, Götzendienst and four Hungarian dances according to Johannes Brahms. In 1918, Wigman suffered a nervous breakdown. Wigman performed this program again in Zürich in 1919 and later in Germany. Only the performances in Hamburg and Dresden brought her the big breakthrough.
Weimar Republic period
In 1920, Wigman was offered the post of ballet mistress at the Saxon State Opera in Dresden, but, after taking up residence in a hotel in Dresden and beginning to teach dance classes while awaiting her anticipated appointment, she learned that the position had been awarded to someone else. In the same year, Wigman together with her assistant Bertha Trümpy, opened a school for modern dance on Bautzner Strasse in Dresden. During Wigman's time in Dresden, Wigman had contacts with the city's lively art scene, for example with the German expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Rivalry and competition between Wigman's new school and the old schools of dance in Dresden would emerge, later especially with former students and teachers of the Palucca School of Dance. From 1921, the first performances took place with Wigman's dance group. Film recordings of the dance group made in 1923 in the Berlin Botanical Garden with excerpts from Szenen aus einem Tanzdrama were used in the 1925 German cultural silent film Ways to Strength and Beauty. For a long time, the school on Bautzner Strasse in Dresden was a rehearsal stage for the Saxon State Opera in Dresden. When the school moved under the name Semper Zwei next to the opera house, the state capital of Dresden bought the property and in 2019 gave it to the association Villa Wigman for Dance, which uses it as a rehearsal and performance centre for the independent dance scene.Wigman's most famous male student was Harald Kreutzberg, but there was also Ernest Berk who worked in the UK from 1934 until the mid-1980s. Famous students included Gret Palucca, Hanya Holm, Yvonne Georgi, Margherita Wallmann, Lotte Goslar, Birgit Åkesson, Sonia Revid, and Hanna Berger. Dore Hoyer, who further developed the expressive dance of Wigman and Palucca, worked together with Wigman on several occasions but was never her student. Student Irena Linn taught Wigman's ideas in the United States at Boston Conservatory and in Tennessee. Ursula Cain was also one of Wigman's students.
On tour, Wigman travelled throughout Germany and neighbouring countries with her chamber dance group. In 1928, Wigman performed for the first time in London and in 1930 in the United States. In the 1920s, Wigman was the idol of a movement that wanted dance free of being subordinate to music. Wigman rarely danced to music not composed for her. It was often only danced to the accompaniment of gongs or drums and in rare cases without any music at all, which was particularly popular in intellectual circles.
Selected works choreographed and dance school success
Wigman ceaselessly created and choreographed new solo dances, including Tänze der Nacht, Der Spuk, Vision, Tanzrhythmen I and II, Tänze des Schweigens, Die abendlichen Tänze, Visionen, Helle Schwingungen, Schwingende Landschaft and Das Opfer. Group dances were titled Die Feier I, Die sieben Tänze des Lebens, Szenen aus einem Tanzdrama, Raumgesänge, Die Feier II and Der Weg.In 1930, Wigman worked at the Munich Dancers' Congress as a choreographer and dancer in the choir work Das Totenmal created by in honour of the dead of World War I. By 1927, Wigman had 360 students in Dresden alone, and more than 1,200 students were taught at branches operated by former students in Berlin, Frankfurt, Chemnitz, Riesa, Hamburg, Leipzig, Erfurt, Magdeburg, Munich, and Freiburg, including from 1931 one in New York City by former student Hanya Holm. The engineer and Siemens manager helped Wigman part-time with the administration of this large organization and also became her life partner between 1930 and 1941. Wigman has been photographed dancing and in portraits by many well-known photographers, including Hugo Erfurth,, Albert Renger-Patzsch and Siegfried Enkelmann. The commemorative stamp of the German Federal Post shown here is based on a photo by Albert Renger-Patzsch. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner created the painting Totentanz der Mary Wigman in the mid-1920s.
United States tour
Wigman toured the United States in 1930 with her dance company, and again in 1931 and 1933. A Wigman school was founded by her disciples in New York City in 1931 and her work through dance and movement contributed as a gateway for social change with the New Dance Group in the 1930s, this group was started by students from Wigman's New York school. Wigman's work in the United States is credited to her protegee Hanya Holm, and then to Holm's students Alwin Nikolais and . Another student and protegee of Wigman, Margret Dietz, taught in America from 1953 to 1972. During this time, Wigman's style was characterized by critics as "tense, introspective, and sombre," yet there was always an element of "radiance found even in her darkest compositions."Dance under National Socialism
The seizure of power by the National Socialists in 1933 had an immediate effect on Wigman's school through the new law against racial overcrowding in German schools and universities of 25 April 1933. Wigman initially obtained an exemption by allowing her "5% pupils of non-Aryan descent" for the course from September 1933. However, in the course of the following years, a number of Wigman's students were forced to emigrate, such as the Jewish Berlin prima ballerina Ruth Abramovitsch Sorel and member of Wigman's dance company Pola Nirenska, whom Wigman had organized to perform at a school audition in 1935 and teacher for a summer course, whereupon Wigman was accused of "friendliness toward Jews" in 1935 and 1937. The Wigman school became a member of the Militant League for German Culture in 1933. Wigman took over the local group leadership of the "Department of gymnastics and dance" in the National Socialist Teachers League in 1933–1934, but noted for example "Local group meeting – sickening!" in her diary. With Schicksalslied and Herbstliche Tänze further solo dances were created.The Nazi press had criticized some of the 1934 dances by Wigman and other choreographers, for being insufficiently or unimpressively German, the 1935 Rogge and Wernicke works were lauded as appropriate examples of "heroic" German bodily movement, but Goebbels apparently disliked Amazonen for being too Greek in its iconography. In 1936 Wigman choreographed the Totenklage with a group of 80 dancers for the Olympic Youth Festival to mark the opening of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.
In 1942, Wigman sold her school in Dresden. She received a guest teaching contract at the dance department of the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig, where the concert pianist Heinz K. Urban accompanied her as a répétiteur. In the same year, Wigman appeared for the last time as a solo dancer with Abschied und Dank.