Mary Wigman

Mary Wigman, born Karoline Sophie Marie Wiegmann on 13 November 1886 in Hanover, was a German dancer and choreographer who broke ground in expressionist dance, dance therapy, and dance training that did not use pointe shoes. She is regarded as a key figure in modern dance history and a defining presence in Weimar German culture, praised for bringing deep existential themes to the stage.

Her father was a bicycle dealer. As a child, she went by Mary, a nickname rooted in local pride: Hanoverians had once been kings of England, and the House of Welf never fully accepted the city’s reduction to a Prussian province. Wigman spent her youth in Hanover, England, the Netherlands, and Lausanne. She came to dance relatively late, after watching three students of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, whose method—Dalcroze eurhythmics—combined solfège, improvisation, and movement. She studied rhythmic gymnastics with Jaques-Dalcroze and Suzanne Perrottet in Hellerau from 1910 to 1911, but felt artistically unsatisfied. Like Perrottet, she sought movements independent of music and free physical expression. She then spent time in Rome and Berlin. Another early influence was a solo concert by Grete Wiesenthal.

Because the Jaques-Dalcroze school treated dance as secondary to music, Wigman looked elsewhere. In 1913, following advice from expressionist painter Emil Nolde, she joined the Rudolf von Laban School for Art on Monte Verità in Switzerland. Laban was a major figure in modern expressive dance and developed Labanotation. She took one of his summer courses and learned his technique, working on movement contrasts like expansion and contraction, pulling and pushing. She stayed with the Laban school through Swiss summers and Munich winters until 1919.

In Munich, she presented her first public dances: *Hexentanz I*, *Lento*, and *Ein Elfentanz*. During World War I, she remained in Switzerland as Laban’s assistant, teaching in Zürich and Ascona. In 1917, she offered three programs in Zürich, including *Der Tänzer unserer lieben Frau*, *Das Opfer*, *Tempeltanz*, *Götzendienst*, and four Hungarian dances set to Johannes Brahms. She suffered a nervous breakdown in 1918. She performed the same program again in Zürich in 1919 and later in Germany, but only shows in Hamburg and Dresden brought her major success.

In 1920, Wigman was offered the post of ballet mistress at the Saxon State Opera in Dresden. She moved into a Dresden hotel and began teaching dance classes while waiting for the appointment, only to learn the job had gone to someone else. That same year, she and her assistant Bertha Trümpy opened a school for modern dance on Bautzner Strasse in Dresden. There, she connected with the city’s art scene, including expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Rivalry grew between her school and older dance schools, especially later with former students and teachers of the Palucca School of Dance. From 1921, her dance group began performing. Film clips of the group, made in 1923 in the Berlin Botanical Garden from *Szenen aus einem Tanzdrama*, appeared in the 1925 German silent film *Ways to Strength and Beauty*. For years, the Bautzner Strasse school served as a rehearsal stage for the Saxon State Opera. When the school moved next to the opera house under the name Semper Zwei, the city 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 space for independent dance.

Her most famous male student was Harald Kreutzberg; others included Ernest Berk (who worked in the UK from 1934 into the mid-1980s), Gret Palucca, Hanya Holm, Yvonne Georgi, Margherita Wallmann, Lotte Goslar, Birgit Åkesson, Sonia Revid, and Hanna Berger. Dore Hoyer, who expanded on Wigman and Palucca’s expressive dance, collaborated with Wigman but was never her student. Student Irena Linn taught Wigman’s ideas in the United States at Boston Conservatory and in Tennessee. Ursula Cain also studied with her.

Wigman toured Germany and neighboring countries with her chamber dance group. She first performed in London in 1928 and in the United States in 1930. In the 1920s, she became the idol of a movement that wanted dance free from being subordinate to music. She rarely danced to music not composed for her, often using only gongs or drums, and occasionally no music at all—a style especially popular in intellectual circles.