Dance without any musical accompaniment at all? Only drums that enter little by little? A woman who doesn’t move gracefully or fluidly, sitting on the ground instead and striking and stamping with her hands and feet? Hexentanz is the name of the famous piece by choreographer Mary Wigman, a piece that made a break with everything that dance had been associated with up to that point in time. No one had yet to perform with movements as heavy as those of Mary Wigman, nor with a greater anchoring to the Earth. Though some of her predecessors such as Isadora Duncan may have already experimented with abstract dance, their work also always focused on levity and grace. But in spite of the unfamiliar and unusual sides of Mary Wigman’s productions, the new approach to dance that she invented soon became known around the world as German expressive dance or even “New German Dance”.
Mary Wigman, born in Hannover in 1886 as Karoline Sofie Marie Wiegmann, was part of a reform movement that rebelled against the rigid conventions and moral constriction of the Wilhelmine era. In reaction to the rapid expansion of cities, industrialisation and the “power of the machines”, a new awareness of nature emerged, leading many artists and intellectuals to head out to the countryside. Here they tried out new, liberal and artistic ideas and developed alternative models to the reigning conditions. One such natural idyll was Monte Verità in the Swiss canton of Ticino, where Mary Wigman was also drawn to settle during the First World War. Here she studied with Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, the inventor of rhythmical-musical education, and she encountered Rudolf von Laban, the already famous dance theoretician and choreographer, whose movement studies she subsequently began to absorb.
Back in Germany, at the beginning of the 1920s Mary Wigman founded her own company and celebrated international successes with her solo pieces Die abendlichen Tänze and the epochal Hexentanz. These pieces were largely sombre, full of pathos and thrilling energy. Her group dances also received great acclaim however, such as her choreography inspired by expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s painting Totentanz. The strong impact of her work resulted from the individuality that Wigman conceded to her dancers. Some of them came directly from the school for modern dance which she opened in 1920 in Dresden and would later go on to become influential dancers in their own right.
After the National-Socialists seized power, a great number of Wigman’s pupils were forced to flee Germany – many of them were Jewish. They took with them the elements of New German Dance, carrying them out into the world. Mary Wigman herself at first sympathised with National-Socialism and experienced their parades as fascinating mass choreographies. Despite her pro-Nazi stance, she was unable to save her school and her financial woes began to mount after pupils became scarce and funding was cut – over time she barely received any work at all. In 1941, Mary Wigman was forced to close her school, ending her dance career the following year. Nevertheless, she remained in Germany and suffered increasingly from the consequences of the war, as her diary entries attest. In her journal, however, she was primarily concerned with everyday questions of survival, and less with the causes and perpetrators of the war.
After the war, Mary Wigman founded a school in West Berlin. Alas, she would never again relive the glory and decisive influence she enjoyed in the golden era of New German Dance.