Mary Wigman

This article deals with the German dancer and choreographer. For the German painter see Marie Wiegmann .

Mary Wigman,
photograph by Abraham Pisarek , 1946

Mary Wigman (born November 13, 1886 in Hanover , †  September 19, 1973 in West Berlin ; actually Karoline Sofie Marie Wiegmann ) was a German dancer , choreographer and dance teacher. She made the expressive dance internationally known as New German Dance .

She is considered to be one of the most influential pioneers of rhythmic-expressive expressive dance, which between 1920 and 1935 experienced its heyday not only in Germany .

Life

Beginnings

Mary Wigman in Amsterdam, 1922

Marie 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 pride of the Guelphs never completely got over the decline of the Kingdom of Hanover to the Prussian province." For her first appearances she matched the family name as "Wigman", the English first name but pronounced it in German "Wiggmann".

She spent her youth in Hanover, England, the Netherlands and Lausanne . Wigman studied rhythmic gymnastics in Hellerau with Émile Jaques-Dalcroze and with Suzanne Perrottet (1889-1983) from 1910–1911 , but felt artistically unsatisfied there: Like Suzanne Perrottet, Mary Wigman also looked for movements that were independent of music and independent body expression. After that she stayed in Rome and Berlin. On the advice of the painter Emil Nolde , she entered Rudolf von Laban's art school on Monte Verità in Switzerland in 1913 . Laban was significantly involved in the development of modern expressive dance ( Labanotation ).

In Munich she performed her first public dances Hexentanz I , Lento and Ein Elfentanz . During the First World War, she stayed with Laban in Switzerland as his assistant and taught in Zurich and Ascona . In 1917 she offered three different programs in Zurich, including the dances The Dancer of Our Lady , The Sacrifice , Temple Dance , Idolatry and Four Hungarian Dances after Johannes Brahms . She performed this program again in Zurich in 1919 and later in Germany. Only the performances in Hamburg and Dresden brought her the big breakthrough.

Time of the Weimar Republic

Wigman's school building on Bautzner Strasse

Memorial plaque from Martin Hänisch on the school building

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Dance of Death of Mary Wigman , 1926–1928

In 1920 she opened a school for modern dance on Bautzner Strasse in Dresden. During his time in Dresden, Wigman had contacts with the city's lively art scene, for example with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner . From 1921 the first performances took place with her dance group. Film recordings of the group made in the Berlin Botanical Garden in 1923 with excerpts from scenes from a dance drama were published in the film Paths to Strength and Beauty in 1925 . The school on Bautzner Strasse in Dresden has long been a rehearsal stage for the Saxon State Opera in Dresden . When this moved under the name “Semper Zwei” next to the Semperoper, the state capital Dresden bought the property and in 2019 gave it to the association “Villa Wigman für Tanz e. V. “, which uses it as a rehearsal and performance center for the independent dance scene.

Wigman's most famous male student was Harald Kreutzberg . Famous students included Gret Palucca , Hanya Holm , Yvonne Georgi , Margherita Wallmann , Lotte Goslar , Birgit Åkesson and Hanna Berger . Dore Hoyer , who developed the expressive dance of a Wigman and Palucca, worked several times with Mary Wigman, but was never her student. Ursula Cain was one of Wigman's students .

Mary Wigman toured Germany and neighboring countries with her chamber dance group. She first appeared in London in 1928 and in the United States in 1930. In the 1920s, Wigman was the idol of a movement that wanted to break dance out of subordination to music. She rarely danced to music that was not composed for her. It was often danced only with the accompaniment of gongs or drums and in rare cases completely without music, which was particularly well received in intellectual circles.

Wigman created incessantly new solo dances , including Dances of the Night , The Spook , Vision (all 1920), Dance Rhythms I and II , Dances of Silence (all 1920-23), The Evening Dances (1924), Visions (1925), Helle Schwimmern ( 1927), Schwingende Landschaft (1929) and The Sacrifice (1931). Group dances were titled The Celebration I (1921), The Seven Dances of Life (1921), Scenes from a Dance Drama (1923/24), Raumgesänge (1926), The Celebration II (1927/28) and The Way (1932).

In 1930 she worked at the Munich Dancer Congress as a choreographer and dancer in Albert Talhoff 's choral work The Totenmal in honor of the dead in the First World War. At the beginning of the 1930s, Wigman had 360 students in Dresden alone , and a further 1,500 students were taught at the branches, including the one in New York . The engineer and Siemens manager Hanns Benkert helped her part-time in the administration of this large organization and also became her life partner between 1930 and 1941. Mary Wigman has been danced and taken in portraits by many well-known photographers, including Hugo Erfurth , Charlotte Rudolph , Albert Renger-Patzsch and Siegfried Enkelmann . The special postage stamp of the German Federal Post Office shown here is based on a photo by Renger-Patzsch. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner created the painting Dance of Death by Mary Wigman in the mid-1920s .

time of the nationalsocialism

The seizure of power by the National Socialists in 1933 immediately affected schools through the new law against overcrowding in German schools and universities of April 25, 1933. Mary Wigman initially obtained an exception when she was approved for the course from September 1933 “exceptionally 5% students of non-Aryan descent”. In the course of the following years, however, students such as the Jewish and Berlin prima ballerina Ruth Abramowitsch were forced to emigrate, as well as the member of her company Pola Nirenska (1910-1992), which Wigman had in 1935 at a dance evening at the school and as a teacher for wanted to engage in a summer course, whereupon in 1935 and 1937 she was accused of being “friendly to Jews”. The Wigman School became a member of the Kampfbund for German Culture in 1933 , and Wigman himself took over the local group leadership of the "Fachschaft Gymnastik und Tanz" in the National Socialist Teachers' Union from 1933–1934 , but noted, for example, "Local group meeting - puke!" In her diary. With Schicksalslied (1935) and Herbstliche Tänze (1937) further solo dances were created. In 1936 she and a group of 80 dancers choreographed the lament for the Youth Olympic Festival on the occasion of the opening of the 1936 Summer Olympics .

In 1942 she had to sell her school in Dresden. She received a guest teacher contract at the dance department of the University of Music in Leipzig , where the concert pianist Heinz K. Urban accompanied her as a répétiteur. In the same year she appeared for the last time as a solo dancer with farewell and thanks .

post war period

100th birthday of Mary Wigman: German postage stamp 1986

Mary Wigman, 1959
(left) with student Nahami Abbell

City sign in Hanover at the parental home

The grave of Mary Wigman in the family grave at the Ostfriedhof Essen

After 1945 she started again with a Leipzig school and in 1947 staged a sensational performance of Orpheus and Eurydice with their students at the Leipzig Opera . In 1949 Wigman settled in West Berlin , where she founded a new expressive dance school, the Mary Wigman Studio.

With her group she performed choral studies (1952) and choral scenes (1953). In 1953 she performed one last time herself at the Ruhr Festival in Recklinghausen together with her students in Die Seherin . At the Nationaltheater Mannheim she choreographed and staged Saul (1954), Carl Orffs Catulli Carmina (1955) and Alkestis (1958), at the Städtische Oper Berlin Sacre du printemps (1957) and most recently Orpheus and Eurydice (1961, director: Gustav Rudolf Sellner ) .

In 1953 she received the Cross of Merit (Steckkreuz) and in 1957 the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, and in 1954 the Schiller Prize of the city of Mannheim . In 1967 she closed her Berlin studio and devoted herself to lecturing at home and abroad. Mary Wigman died in 1973. Her urn was buried on November 14th of that year in the grave of the Wiegmann family in the Ostfriedhof Essen .

Dance technique and improvisation based on the Wigman style is still taught by her student Katharine Sehnert . In Dresden and Mannheim one street was named after Mary Wigman. In Hanover, a notice board was put up on her former home at Schmiedestrasse 18.

Archival holdings on Mary Wigman in public collections

• Mary Wigman Archive at the Akademie der Künste , Berlin. (Manuscripts, choreographic records, diaries, sketches, letters to them, hundreds of photos, also programs, printed matter, reviews, books, etc.)
• Mary Wigman Family Archive in the German Dance Archive Cologne . (Manuscripts, diplomas and certificates, sketches, approx. 1,300 letters from her, hundreds of photos, also programs, reviews, books, dance masks, musical instruments, works of art, etc.)
• Mary Wigman Collection in the Leipzig Dance Archive .
• other holdings: in the Dresden City Archives (school files); in the Albert Renger-Patzsch Archive of the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation / Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich.

Dance works and choreographies

The updated catalog raisonné of her biographer Hedwig Müller offers an overview of her works. Her solo witch's dance (2nd version, 1926), as it is available as a film - albeit fragmentary - and her choreography of the Sacre du Printemps (Deutsche Oper Berlin 1957), which were released by theaters in 2013, are still alive on the dance stage today Osnabrück and Bielefeld was reconstructed (2014 at the Bavarian State Ballet Munich ).

Mary Wigman Societies and Mary Wigman Foundation

The first Mary Wigman Society was founded in November 1925 in Berlin as a society of friends of the Mary Wigman dance group . The founding members were, among others, the theater director Max von Schillings , Reichskunstwart Edwin Redslob , the composer Eugen d'Albert , the painters Emil Nolde and Conrad Felixmüller , the archaeologist and secret councilor Ludwig Pallat , the critics Alfred Kerr and Artur Michel , the art historian Fritz Wichert , Wilhelm Worringer and Wilhelm Pinder and privy councilor Erich Lexer , a surgeon . It only existed for a few years.

Founded in 1986 by Hedwig Müller among others , Mary Wigman Gesellschaft e. V. , which has campaigned for the history and future of modern dance for decades, published the magazine Tanzdrama and organized several symposia, was converted into a Mary Wigman Foundation in 2013. This is located at the German Dance Archive Cologne, where the rights of use to the works of Mary Wigman are also located.

Mary Wigman Prize

With the Mary Wigman Prize, the Foundation for the Promotion of the Semperoper has honored outstanding artists or ensembles who belonged or were a part of the Saxon State Opera since 1993. The award takes place annually as part of a gala - the foundation's award winners' concert. The first prize winner in 1993 was Stephan Thoss . The prize was not awarded from 2006 to 2012.

Fonts

• The seven dances of life. Dance poetry. Diederichs, Jena 1921.
• Composition. Seebote, Überlingen undated (1925).
• German dance art. Reissner, Dresden 1935.
• The language of dance. Battenberg, Stuttgart 1963; New edition: Battenberg, Munich 1986, ISBN 3-87045-219-6 .

literature

• Andreas Schwab: Mary Wigman. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
• Rudolf von Delius : Mary Wigman. Carl Reissner, Dresden 1925.
• Kurt Linder: The Metamorphoses of Mary Wigman. Urban-Verlag, Freiburg im Breisgau 1929.
• Rudolf Bach: The Mary Wigman Work. Carl Reissner, Dresden 1933.
• Georg Zivier : Harmony and Ecstasy: Mary Wigman. Academy of Arts, Berlin 1956.
• Dianne Shelden Howe: Manifestations of the German Expressionist Aesthetic as presented in Drama and Art in the Dance and Writings of Mary Wigman. Phil. Diss., University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1985.
• Walter Sorell : Mary Wigman - a legacy. Noetzel, Wilhelmshaven 1986. ISBN 3-7959-0464-1 .
• Hedwig Müller: The foundation of expressive dance by Mary Wigman. Phil.-Diss., Cologne 1986.
• Hedwig Müller: Mary Wigman. Life and work of the great dancer. Edited by the Berlin Academy of the Arts. Quadriga, Weinheim 1986, 1992, ISBN 3-88679-148-3 .
• Hedwig Müller: Mary Wigman's dance and the arts. In: Mona De Weerdt, Andreas Schwab (Ed.): Monte Dada. Expressive dance and avant-garde. Stämpfli Verlag, Bern 2018, ISBN 978-3-7272-7937-9 , pp. 67-83.
• Dietrich Steinbeck (Ed.): Mary Wigmans Choreographic Sketchbook. 1930-1961. Munich - Leipzig - Mannheim - Berlin. Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1987.
• Susan Allene Manning: Body Politics: The Dances of Mary Wigman. Phil. Diss., Columbia University 1987.
• Lena Hammergren: Form och mening i dansen. A study of styles with a comparative style analysis of Mary Wigmans and Birgit Åkessons solodanser. Phil. Diss. Stockholm 1991.
• Gabriele Fritsch-Vivié : Mary Wigman. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1999, ISBN 3-499-50597-5 .
• Claudia Gitelman (ed.): Dear Hanya. Mary Wigman's Letters to Hanya Holm. The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 2003.
• Angela Rannow, Ralf Stabel (ed.): Mary Wigman, an artist at the turn of the century. Verlag Tanzwissenschaft e. V., Dresden 2006, ISBN 3-9803626-4-7 .
• Heide Lazarus (Ed.): Die Wigman / The Wigman File. A documentation of the Mary Wigman School Dresden (1920–1942) with regional archive documents, brochures, complete magazine reproduction "Die Tanzgemeinschaft" (1929/30), radio play excerpt (1932), contextual contributions in German and English. (CD-ROM). Olms, Hildesheim / Zurich / New York 2006.
• Susan Manning: Ecstasy and the Demon: The Dances of Mary Wigman. [1993] new edition. University of Minnesota Press 2006, ISBN 978-0-8166-3802-4 .
• Mary Anne Santos Newhall: Mary Wigman . Routledge Verlag, London / New York 2009.

Movies

• Mary Wigman - the soul of dance. Documentation, Germany / USA, 2007, 51 min., Written and directed: Christof Debler, Norbert Busè , production: ZDF , first broadcast: June 23, 2008 (see [1] );
• Allegra Fuller Snyder: “When the fire dances between two poles.” Mary Wigman 1886–1973. Dance Horizons Video. Princeton Book Company, 1991. Documentation, Youtube , 41:41 min. (B / w, English)
• Trailer of the documentation of Katharine Sehnert's lessons in Wigman dance technique at the German Dance Archive Cologne.

Web links

Commons : Mary Wigman  - Collection of Images

• Literature by and about Mary Wigman in the catalog of the German National Library
• Mary Wigman Archive and Mary Wigman Foundation in the German Dance Archive Cologne .
• Mary Wigman Archive in the Archive of the Academy of Arts, Berlin
• Ursula Pellaton: Mary Wigman . In: Andreas Kotte (Ed.): Theater Lexikon der Schweiz . Volume 3, Chronos, Zurich 2005, ISBN 3-0340-0715-9 , p. 2104.
• Mary Wigman. In: FemBio. Women's biography research (with references and citations).
• Kurt Schwaen : Memories of the dancer Mary Wigman. Diary entries, experiences, correspondence; Special issue on the occasion of the 120th birthday of Mary Wigman. 2006. PDF, accessed May 10, 2009 (2.17 MB)
• Laura A. McLary: Restaging Hysteria: Mary Wigman as Writer and Dancer. In: Studies in 20th Century Literature. Vol. 27: Iss. 2, Article June 9, 2003

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Müller 1986, p. 11
2. ^ Giorgio J. Wolfensberger: Suzanne Perrottet - an eventful life. Benteli Verlag Bern and Quadriga Verlag Weinheim / Berlin. ISBN 3-88679-246-3
3. ↑ at dnb
4. ↑ Fritsch-Vivié 1999, p. 92.
5. ↑ Biographical information and link to Pola Nirenska's estate
6. ↑ Müller 1986, p. 241.
7. ^ Mary Wigman archive of the Berlin Academy of the Arts, quoted from Fritsch-Vivié 1999, p. 97.
8. ^ Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung WAZ of November 19, 1973: Mary Wigman's urn buried in Essen
9. ↑ Grave details - Essen cemeteries. Retrieved May 27, 2018 . 
10. ↑ Mary Wigman - Honoring with city plaque by the state capital Hanover , accessed on November 13, 2016
11. ↑ Inventory overview
12. ↑ published on Heide Lazarus' CD-ROM
13. ↑ Catalog raisonné .
14. ↑ A Wigman Society . In: Vossische Zeitung , No. 289 of December 3, 1925.
15. ↑ Irene Sieben, in: Tanz. January 2012, p. 58. See also: Mary Wigman Foundation
16. ^ Website on Mary Wigman's rights of use.
17. ↑ Mary Wigman Prize ( Memento of the original from May 17, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.