Mary Wigman Overview

When explaining the physical sensations of her movement, Mary Wigman seemed to describe an intimate duet in which the surrounding space was her partner. Space for Wigman was animate, actively molding and defining her movments. She described the way air pressed... [more]

When explaining the physical sensations of her movement, Mary Wigman seemed to describe an intimate duet in which the surrounding space was her partner. Space for Wigman was animate, actively molding and defining her movments. She described the way air pressed down on her limbs to create gestures, and the way space pushed her body into directional changes. For Wigman, dance was "a battle for space within space." This seems an extremely intellectual concept for a woman who discovered dance in an emotional outburst. Once, while sobbing in a fit of existential rootlessness, Wigman had a grand epiphany amongst her tears. She realized that grief caused her to move in a wholly new manner, and in that movement there was expression. From that point on, she knew her creative medium was dance. She meant to create art that expressed, beyond the realm of the spoken word, the emotional intensity of life1s experiences. Encouraged by her friend, painter Emil Nolde (she improvised with Nolde and his wife frequently), Wigman studied movement expression with Rudolf Laban. She eventually opened her own school (closed by the Nazis in the late 1930s) teaching dance technique and composition. Considered the founder of the German Expressionist movement in dance, Wigman promoted an aesthetic that has since emanated to many different genres, including the Broadway musical and the Japanese dance form Butoh. According to Wigman, dance is a heighten physical response to human experience: '"joy and spiritual ecstasy transform mans' steps into dance steps." But joy was not her only inspiration -- Wigman was deeply affected by the miseries of both World Wars, and the majority of her work explores a dark spectrum of emotions. Many works are somber and weighted, performed in silence or to minimal percussion scores. Yet certain optimism, untainted by life sorrows, erupted from Wigman1s passion. In her writings on dance, she reminds readers of the two things every dancer must do: play and dream. A seemingly simple piece of advice, but nonetheless a challenge. [show less]