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In 1886 the creator of expressionist dance, Mary Wigman was born. Mary Wigman grew up within a middle-class West Prussian family. Wigman lived in Germany up until she passed on in Berlin in 1973. Her life provided a spectrum for distinguishing the complexity and boundless hardship of her generation. In the twentieth century, Wigman participated in the primary contemporary art movements and became the director and transmitter of the Ausdruckstanz, better known as the expressive dance movement.
Her phenomenal work amped up her career, so much so that it expended in the era of the Weimar Republic, The Wilhelmine Empire, the Third Reich and the years of a then separated Germany, following the Second World War. She was not only present for the most ruinous political changes but moreover as an artistic pioneer, Wigman stands as an influential character who made her own interpretation of what we know today as the modern dance.
Mary Wigman
Mary Wigman was primitively born as Karoline Sofie Marie Wiegmann, on 13 November 1886 in Hanover, Germany. She was born a Wilhelmine woman whose parents, Amelie and Heinrich Wiegmann, benefited from the evolution that was changing the German economy. Mary’s father died when she was only nine years old. Her mother remarried with Dietrich three years later and her uncle basically became her stepfather.
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Wigman’s early life was enclosed by her home and their family business. As Wigman excelled in school, she had the burning desire to continue with Gymnasium. Her family, however, sent her brother to a preparatory school and Mary received lessons in language and music, social dancing and comportment. At the age of fourteen, in 19901, Wigman got enrolled into a girls’ school at Folkestone which situated on England’s south coast. She went to Folkestone for a few months and travelled to Luasanne, Switzerland, the following year.
Wigman was the contributor to the well-being and upward social mobility of her family. Thus she had to learn English and France, but the purpose of this education was merely a strategy to make Wigman seem more attractive and marriage worthy. But Wigman always referred to herself as an adventurous spirit. While she was at school in England, stories circulated about a secret passage hidden within the town church.
In The Mary Wigman Book, she reminisce with glaring enjoyment and some pride that she “bought a little hammer and went to tap the walls and listen for a hollow echo”. As Mary Wigman listened for the echoes in the church walls, it gave her the urge to turn her attention to her own inner landscape. Wigman’s goal was to express what she defined as the ‘’stirrings’’ within her.
In a quest to find a channel through which she could express these inner stirrings, Wigman had thought that she might become a singer. Her singing coach told her, “You have a good voice and you have a way of expression I have never seen before. You could make a career”.
But her family was against it. In a desperate attempt to try and live up to her families expectations, she got formally engaged twice, only to have both engagements fail. After the second ended she wrote,“I cried, I begged, and asked my creator to bring me clarity. I didn’t know what I should do, I had to break away, I didn’t want to continue any longer, I could not. The entire bourgeois life collapsed on to me, you might say”.
Wigman found herself stuck between an old order of prescribed roles and the new world of possibilities that were an outgrowth of economic success. Her work allowed her to travel and to experience a different world than what was available to most women in her mother’s era. yet she was expected to put all of her ambition to the service of her family.
‘‘She saw hypocrisy in what she considered the superficial bourgeois respectability of her parents’ generation and she and many members of her own age group would rebel in a fashion not unlike that seen again in the United States of America and Western Europe in the 1960s and 1970s.’’
Wigman’s Influences
Jacques Dalcroze owned a school in which he specialized in rhythmic gymnastics. In 1910, in Amsterdam, Wigman saw students of Jaques Dalcroze perform and it immediately spiked an interest within her. Wigman started rebelling against her parents and joined Dalcroze’s school. Wigman trained at Dalcroze’s school for two years. The expressionist painter, Emile Node encouraged and inspired her to move to Switzerland and start with lessons in 1914 with Rudolf Laban. She started enjoying this type of movement more than the strict and limited range of movement with rhythmic gymnastics.
In 1919 she became Laban’s assistant. She noticed that Laban was too invested in his theories and she wanted them to work more the with human body and rage of movement. Hence she departed from Laban and his company. Her passion for moving and freeing the body, let her discover her own personal idea of dance.
In the year 1920, Wigman opened her own school in Dreselen, Germany. She used all these influences and create a new form of dance, Absolute Dance. The Absolute Dance was very expressive, she referenced her training with Laban and Dalcroze, combined the two with the driven personality, heritage, and the atmosphere of pre-nazi Europe.
References
- Mary Wigman Biography – Encyclopedia Britannica
- Mary Wigman – Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
- Mary Wigman and the Expressive Dance Movement – Book on Amazon
- The Collaboration between Mary Wigman and Hanya Holm – Digital Repository of the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences
- Mary Wigman Dance Company Official Website
