Saturday, December 12, 2015

Personal View about Mary Wigman

I think that Wigman, who is not like Laban believed that a superior value for dance depended on the ability of dance performances to move audiences, not on a theoretical perspective that transcended dancers and dances. She had no interest in establishing an alternative system for institutionalizing body culture, and pedagogical objectives for her always remained subordinate to the task of discovering and perfecting her own artistic expression. She did not question the spatial contexts designated for dance before World War I, even in such a complicated production as Totenmal;indeed, all her dances fit well on the most conventional municipal stages. They also toured comfortably because Wigman did not favor elaborate scenographic effects, although her powerful dramatic sense entailed a very imaginative use of costumes. But she and Laban did have some beliefs in common. Like her former teacher, Wigman linked a superior value for dance to a heightened condition of abstraction established through movement, not body type, music, or narrative convention. She shared with Laban an inclination toward mystical signification, but she did not veil her feelings, as he did, in foggy crypticity. Wigman was great because she brought to dance an unprecedented magnitude of tragic feeling. I think for her, modern dance had to go well beyond the naive expressions of joy, innocence, and decorative idealism the public had come to expect since the heyday of Isadora Duncan: she tied conditions of ecstatic liberation to conditions of heroic sacrifice.

Mary Wigman’s Vibrato

Leaving behind processes of transmission, we are now approaching a very literal understanding of vibratory energy. It was Wigman, and not Laban, who actively took possession of vibration, turned it into a practice, and introduced it as an actual mode of movement into her choreographic vocabulary. If, as Dalrymple-Henderson shows, painters had started to draw vibrations, dancers caught up and started to perform them. The most extensive description of the initiating moment of Wigman’s engagement with vibration can be found in a series of interviews that were commissioned in 1972–1973 by the GDR Academy of the Arts, conducted by Gerhard Schumann. Looking back at the development of her movement technique, Wigman recounts: "I would like to tell you about a discovery of which I thought that it had been my own; but I learned very soon that it was an age-old discovery of dancing humankind, I called it vibrato. I had torn a muscle and could not dance. And I wanted to resume my work, but I could not jump any more. My ability to jump was gone. It would never come back... . I was not desperate, I always used to try all sorts of things to maintain control of my body. One day I discovered that I was actually in a constant state of quiet, up-and-down vibration. My entire body was in this state, from my feet up to my head. I thought: how beautiful! How wonderful! What is this? An invention? It was exactly this which replaced my ability to jump, and which I developed in its stead. ... the vibrato emerged. It possesses this unbelievable wealth of possibilities, because it allows for differenciation. The most detailed details! ... Later I suddenly saw an African ballet which included it [the vibrato, L. R.], they could do it in such magnificent manner that I almost went green with envy and I thought to myself: you are so deluded! You are priding yourself on inventing something."

While acknowledging her kinetic participation in something bigger than her own idea, Wigman is still keen on emphasizing the personal creative process that made her discover vibration. Less interested in physics and physiology, and further away from the occultist spirit of the beginning of the century, she is fascinated by the kinetic possibilities of the quality that she recognized in the African dancers whose performance she witnessed. Choosing the musical term vibrato for her find, it is clear that her mind was set on playing her instrument well. Considering the translation into dance of the “rapid and minute fluctuations in pitch” that characterize musical vibrato, Mary Anne Santos Newhall writes that Wigman’s vibrations were achieved through a buoyant vertical bounce of the body, sometimes slight and at times more vigorous, either with the whole body or with a single body part. The vibration usually was done travelling across the floor, with many variations, from a light, lifted vibration on the balls of the feet to a deeper bounce with the whole foot placed firmly against the floor. The vibration was achieved through a release in the ankles and a resilience in the knees and hips that was supported by a resonating, lightly panting breath.
To return once more to the visual arts and their occultism-inspired engagement with vibration: if some painters were driven by the belief in the “clairvoyant” potential of art to make visible the invisible, Wigman relates the vibrato not to an urge to see, but to sense more, approaching this sensing in a thoroughly embodied (and less metaphorical) fashion than Laban. When her interview partner suggests that the contained bouncing may have something to do with the wish to transcend gravity despite her injury, she speaks instead of “[a]n ever increasing sensitivity down to the fingertips, to the tip of the nose, everywhere ...”. Wigman pupil Hanya Holm describes the acquisition of the movement quality as extensive kinesthetic exercise: We found the answer to it while sitting on a sofa a whole night, with the springs helping us to bounce back. Then, on our feet without any outward help, the demands of the momentum carried us gradually further until the repetition of the movement finally broke down any mental opposition, and vibration became a true experience for us. 

Documents and testimonies show that the vibrato entered Wigman’s teaching, and also her choreographies, for instance the 1926 version of Witch Dance, where it seems to have occurred during the second half. Rudolf Bach describes a “sustained tremor”, “flapping” of fingers, and “wild shaking” of the arms. Around the same time, Böhme calls Wigman’s dances a “world of movement born out of inner vibration”. Vibrato also makes striking later appearances, most prominently in Wigman’s 1957 production of Le Sacre du printemps, which includes powerful sequences of a seated type of bouncing. The choreographer might have taken her cues here from the original 1913 version of Sacre by Vaslav Nijinsky, who famously, and for the first time in the history of Western concert dance, put vibrating bodies on stage. A brief excursus on Nijinsky’s vibrations provides a foil for further carving out the specificities of Wigman’s vibrato.

Critical Review: Kicking Yourself for Missing That Wigman Tour Back in '30?

In 1930 Mary Wigman, one of the innovators of expressionist modern dance in Germany, toured the United States. In 1973 she died, and on Friday at the Museum of Modern Art she returned.

Or, it might be most accurate to say, the dancer Fabi[sz]n Barba tried to bring the small audience at the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater back to that 1930 Wigman tour by performing nine short Wigman solos as Wigman. Chandeliers hung from the ceiling, and each seat held a vintage-style printed program. After each selection, none much longer than five minutes, Mr. Barba gave a different bow, and then came a pause, not much shorter than five minutes, during which he left the stage to change costume. Costumes were very important here.

Since only a few of the dances were preserved on film, Mr. Barba has had to reconstruct or reimagine the works using photographs and written descriptions. It was a mark of his achievement that the nine solos seemed convincingly of a piece. The measured pacing, the slight acceleration, the circling patterns and sculptural gestures and resonant final poses all looked like the products of the same choreographic mind.

His thin limbs delineated the relationship between a curved spine and curved arms. His attention to detail drew the eye to the press of fingertips and the bottoms of palms in an attitude of prayer. His control clarified sudden stops and quick shifts of position.

In a thin-strapped dress Mr. Barba wafted his wrists girlishly. With his face and body shrouded in red fabric, tight around the neck like a napkin ghost, or wielding a pole within his costume to make it billow, he suggested what Martha Graham might have seen in Wigman. And the costuming raised other questions of history and authenticity. Did Wigman actually wear, as Mr. Barba did, a hoop dress of see-through mesh? Through that mesh Mr. Barba's hairy chest was visible, but gender bending did not seem to be the point. His fidelity laid bare the monotony in Wigman's work. His precision underlined its foursquare connection to the music, whether repetitive piano figures or gongs.

While Mr. Barba's performance was true to the subjugation of ego of which Wigman wrote, it lacked the intensity and charisma that so impressed those who wrote about her. Though this lack was likely inevitable, it may also have been by design. The bows and the ritualized, unrequested encores gave a sense of distance, as though the live performance were fragments of old film carefully spliced together. History moved, but the dead stayed dead.

Journal Article Review: Living Life as Art

Wigman’s career was not that of a “virtuoso”. Rather, it was marked by a period of intense study and intellectual awakening in two artists’ colonies of the time: Hellerau, a small town near Dresden, where she learned rhythmic gymnastics under the Swiss musician, E´ mile Jacques-Dalcroze, and Ascona, Switzerland, where she trained under Laban and became a professional dancer. These colonies were based on the avant-garde ideal of bringing art and life together. They promoted reform as an ideal, focusing on rehabilitating the human body and perception, which seemed to be crippled by mechanised, modern society. Dance functioned as the medium for social and physical regeneration, and those who practised dance in these colonies conceived of themselves first and foremost as cultural revolutionaries rather than as mere “dancers”. Wigman’s dance innovations developed from this cultural context in which bodily movement assumed a key role in reawakening natural expressiveness. In other words, she approached dance primarily as a means of physical regeneration rather than as art. 
Born into a well-to-do bourgeois family in Hannover in 1886, Karoline Sofie Marie Wiegemann attended the Ho¨here To¨chterschule (“higher school for daughters”) until the age of fourteen. It was during this time that she saw the Austrian Wiesenthal sisters perform their new interpretation of An der scho¨nen blauen Donau (The Blue Danube) in Hannover. She was fascinated by it, not only because it was a beautiful waltz, but also because of the sisters’ free and uninhibited interpretation of the traditional dance. Frustrated by not being able to attend university, Wigman, as she chose to call herself after her debut, decided to study dance. 
In the artist colony of Hellerau, Wigman encountered a lifestyle that was completely different from her previous one. Hellerau was an experimental town whose citizens were intent on putting the ideals of social reform into practice. From the architecture of Heinrich Tessenow, based on his ideal of innovating the residential buildings of middle- and lower-class workers, to the “reform clothes” of women who no longer restricted their bodies, Hellerau stood at the forefront of the social, cultural and aesthetic innovations of the time. In the Biergarten and cafe´s, Wigman listened to lectures by Oskar Kokoshka, and heard the music of Igor Stravinsky, Alban Berg, Anton Weber and Arnold Scho¨nberg. She met other students of art, and artists who were part of the Bru¨cke or the Neue Sezession movement. She was truly in the heart of cultural and artistic experiments. 

Wigman successfully completed the programme within two years and earned her certificate to become a teacher of Dalcroze’s method of rhythmic gymnastics, but she was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the limited nature of dance in the context of an institution where dance was considered to be a medium for music education. During this time, she showed one of her solo experiments to her good friends, the artist Emil Nolde and his wife, who suggested that she contact the choreographer Rudolf Laban, who was teaching a new type of dance in Ascona, Switzerland. Wigman decided to attend this counter-cultural community of artists, intellectuals and anarchists for the summer, little knowing that this would determine the future course of her life. Indeed, after only a year, Wigman was performing as a dancer with her solos Lento and Witch Dance I, her debut choreographies, which, significantly, were not accompanied by music and foregrounded dance itself as an autonomous art. 

Ascona, or Monte Verita`, as it was called, was part of the larger Lebensreform movement, a cultural rebellion based on the ideal of rescuing the maimed human body from the stale environment of modern bourgeois society with its fixed norms and sterile values.9 Founded by Ida Hofmann and Henri Oedenkoven, near Lake Maggiore in Switzerland, Monte Verita` became a haven for artists, writers and intellectuals who wanted to pursue an alternative lifestyle, and it thus functioned simultaneously as an artists’ colony and a sanatorium. Among the figures who participated in one way or another were such writers as Hermann Hesse, Else Lasker-Schu¨ler and Marianne Werefkin; political anarchists and psychoanalysts such as Erich Mu¨hsam and Otto Gross, as well as the Dadaists Hugo Ball and Emmy Henning. Isadora Duncan was also an occasional guest. It was also here that Laban had been teaching dance since 1913 as part of its “Schule der Kunst” (“school of art”). 

The Lebensreform movement quickly became popular among young people, who called out for changes in diet and health, and for the release of the body from socially constructed inhibitions. The human body became the only remaining authentic topos that seemed to hold the solution to the disintegrating individual identity and sense of community. In the colony, dance was adopted from the beginning as the ideal medium of communication for expressing the freedom of the body from oppressive social norms and codified behaviours. Free movement practices based on improvisation were part of the basic training with Laban, for whom regaining one’s uninhibited expressiveness meant finding “die neuen Formen eines einfachen und harmonischen Lebens” (“new forms of a simple and harmonious life”).10 The ideal of the Bewegungskunst (“art of movement”) that Laban taught in Monte Verita` was very closely related to the function of the colony as a sanatorium. “Movement” was supposed to become the solution for healing the minds and bodies of modern people.

Work of Mary Wigman

As for the case of many artists, understanding the work of Mary Wigman is easier if we relate it to the historical and geographical context in which it happens.

Wigman starts her choreographic researches within the ambience of the imminence of the First World War and is studying with Rudolph Laban during the time it happens (1914 – 1918). Expressionism, as an artistic trend, is spreading in Germany and Europe with its proposals of the ugly, the deformity, the grotesque and the reaction towards the tragedy of the time.

The work of influential groups like Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter (from visual arts) or from musicians like Arnold Schönberg, are creating an experimental climate from which Wigman’s thoughts are not detached.

So, after her studies with Dalcroze (with which she finally does not feel identified) and those at Monte Verità with Rudolph Laban, Mary Wigman starts a brave search for a dance that, according to her, doesn’t exist nor doesn’t have any masters or traditions to lean on, but for which Germany is prepared.
“Totentanz” (1917) by Mary Wigman

As part of the project, she creates a dance school in Dresden (in 1920) where students assist to learn something that no one yet recognizes. However, Wigman knows definitely what this new dance should not be: an empty result of manipulating the form of movement throughout bodily technical skills.

That is Ballet, according to her. In those days, Ballet is not such a popular practice in Germany as it is in other countries of Europe, like France. However, it is the only form of dance presented in the official theaters and carries the influence of the Russian Imperial Ballet. For Wigman, the work of ballet dancers is limited to a technical skill that would only be measured in terms of technical virtuosity. The lack of a deep pulsation that would define dance is compensated by an unlimited virtuosity.

But she is in the search for something different. Interested in the relationship between human being and cosmic forces, she describes her creative experience as the transformation into movement of the invisible forces that give her life. The dancer is a medium for her; dance functions as a trance, accomplishing its cathartic function recognized by archaic societies; dance is first of all an expression of ecstasy (or emotional impulses) that creates forms of movement as a consequence.

Therefore, educating a dancer is about making her/him conscious of the impulses that lay within her/him self and about teaching to give way to those impulses and express them. Her goal is to make dance arise from the deep urges of human being without the need of creating a codified technique.

Following these ideas, Mary Wigman gives the first steps and opens the doors of a trend that influences many generations of choreographic artists in the search for new expressive means. Her way of dancing is given the name of Ausdruckstanz(dance of expression or expressionist dance), and states that no movement is considered as ‘bad’ or ‘ugly’ as far as it is executed from a true feeling or is evocative.

In consequence, Wigman aesthetics are made up of very different elements compared to ballet. She dances without music, uses non attractive costumes, works over subjects like death, desperation, the war or social riots, and experiments with masks, among other things. She also opposes to the notion of ‘representing’ something while dancing, in a search for a truthful experience: dance should not represent; dance should be. “We don’t dance histories, we dance feelings”, she says.
“Abschied und Dank” by Mary Wigman

Her career is focused on creating, interpreting and teaching dance both in the solo format and the chorus dances. The first one gives her a way to search for new choreographic possibilities and the second one follows the ideas of the massive bodily education started by her master Laban, and is oriented towards the practice of amateurs.

Wigman’s work spreads over Germany, with offshoots of her main school in Dresden all over the country. Among her pupils are figures like Gret Palucca, Dore Hoyer, Harald Kreutzberg, Yvonne Georgi, Kurt Joss, Susanne Linke, Gerhard Bohner and Hanya Holm. All this artists dance, tour with her and continue spreading her teachings and ideas in Europe and the United States mainly.

Sunday, December 6, 2015

Background




(Mary Wigman)

Mary Wigman, the representative figure of modern dance in Germany, is the pioneer of expressionist dance. Furthermore, she developed dance without music, and improvisational music.

Wigman was born in Hanover, Germany. In the beginning of her dance life, she was a student of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze. In 1913, she was introduced to Rudolf von Laban, and she became Laban's right-hand. Laban's concept of dance influenced Wigman a lot, as a result, Wigman achieved expressionist dance. Her performance based on contrast, for instance, expansion and contraction, pulling and pushing.


In l914, Wigman performed her first production, Hexentanz. This was her solo dance, and it without music. When she worked with Laban, she always supported to performed without dance. Furthermore, she formed its own unique style of dance because she had special concept about modern dance.
(Hexentanz, fragment 4)

In 1920, Wigman established her own dance school that became known as "Dresden Central School." Wigman trained many famous dancers that included Hanya Holm, Harald Kreutzberg and Gret Palucca.

In World War II, Wigman obeyed the rule of Nazi that fired all Jewish dancers in her schools. In 1942, her schools were shut down because Nazi government banned to use dance to express any philosophical views.

Wigman died on September 18, 1973 in Berlin.