Published in 1993 by University of California Press.
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Why does German dance follow a trajectory so divergent from the common periodization of German cultural history? What can explain the alliance of so many German modern dancers with the fascist regime? And what can account for the continuity of leadership in dance “from dictatorship to democracy"? I would suggest that at least a partial explanation lies in the particular way that German dance worked out the relations between modernism, the avant-garde, and mass culture. And so, to provide a context for my reconstructions of Wigman’s dances, I sketch a history of German dance that attends precisely to those relations.
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This defining continuum involved a paradoxical relationship to mass culture that further blurs Bürger's distinction between modernism's antagonistic stance toward mass culture and the historical avant-garde's desire to reconnect with mass culture. For German modern dancers clearly differentiated dance as art from dance as exercise, yet at the same time they envisioned dance as a new form of physical culture. It was the resolution of this paradoxical relationship to mass culture under the Third Reich that accounts for the relatively unbroken continuity of German dance over the years 1933 and 1945·
During the twenties, Ausdruckstanz drew its patronage from amateur students devoted to Tanz-Gymnastik (dance gymnastics), as popular in Germany then as aerobics were in the United States during the eighties. This popularity meant that both the modernist and avant-gardist projects of Ausdruckstanz were tied to the mass cultural interest in physical culture and sport. Indeed, the improvisational methods of Ausdruckstanz blurred the distinction between
professional and amateur dance, for concert dancers deployed the same methods as amateur devotees of Tanz-Gymnastik. Amateur students not only flocked to the private studios opened by Wigman, Laban, and their followers but also provided a ready audience for the dancers and dance groups that toured from city to city.
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Choreographing dances to silence, Wigman and Laban shifted attention away from the temporal dimension and toward the spatial and dynamic dimensions of movement. Recovering the connection between ecstasy and movement, Wigman and Laban shifted attention away from the personality of the dancer and toward the suprapersonal energies of the dance. These innovations achieved the ideal of absolute dance, dance "that speaks through movement alone."
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That is, nineteenth-century ballet represented women as if seen from the perspective of the male voyeur, so that even female spectators took on the perspective that scripts women as objects of desire. In defying the conventions of ballet, early modern dancers challenged the male gaze and introduced possibilities for female self-authorship and female spectatorship. Appropriating the privilege previously reserved for the (usually male) ballet master, the (usually fem.ale) early modern dancer scripted her own performance. In so doing, she appeared to script the experience of many women in the audience. For her mode of female self-authorship and female spectatorship relied upon her universalizing and essentializing of female experience.
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The primary umversalizing element was what John Martin termed “metakinesis”, what dancers now refer to as kinesthesia-the ability of one body to sense another body and to reexperience physically sensations projected by that other body. Although all dance involves kinesthesia, early modern dance intensified its effect. Indeed, John Martin argued that early modern dance took kinesthesia as its starting point and that in this way kinesthesia displaced the codified vocabulary of ballet.
In rejecting the ballet vocabulary, early modern dancers gave up its transnational legibility, transnational in the sense that audiences across Europe and North America were familiar with the ballet vocabulary and could decode its conventions. Without recourse to this internationalized vocabulary, early modern dancers had to fashion alternate referents for their idiosyncratic movement styles. In other words, they had to find new ways to connect their individual bodies to the collective body of the audience. One way was to heighten and thus to essentialize the attributes the dancer shared or possibly shared with the spectator-body consciousness, gender, nationality. To deploy all three referents resulted in paradox or contradiction, for the projection of kinesthesia countered the performance of Woman or National Type. In consequence, early modern dancers either performed the paradox or attempted to resolve the contradiction by dramatizing the relationship of the individual body to the collective body. Thus their solos layered the referents of kinesthesia, Woman, and National Type, and their group works focused on the counterpoint between the individual and the group. In this way their group works staged utopian (and dystopian) visions of Community.
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At issue in this chapter is how Mary Wigman evolved her signature style, which other critics have termed “absolute dance” and I have termed Gestalt im Raum. According to Rudolf von Delius and his successors, the choreographer’s 1914 debut marked an advance determined by the progressive logic of modernism. Yet, as I will argue, the evidence of Wigman’s early dances suggest that her choreographic practice evolved over a period of several years, however prescient Witch Dance I appears in retrospect. From 1914 to 1919 her dances emerged in a complex counterpoint to the choreography or her contemporaries - not only Isadora Duncan but also Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, Rudolf Laban, and the dancers associated wilh the Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire. Although she rejected Duncan's and Dalcroze's working method of musical visualization, Wigman maintained her female predecessor's focus on solo choreography and on choreography for a small group of her students. At the same time, she adopted the working method that Dalcroze shared wilh Laban - improvisation based on movement analysis. Yet she rejected the festival format for group choreography so central to the work of Dalcroze and Laban. And although her use of the mask paralleled the practice of the Dadaist dancers, she conceptualized the principle of the mask in an unprecedented fashion.
The formation or Wigman's choreographic practice cannot be separated from the milieus in which she worked, first as a student at Hellerau from 1910 to 1912 and then as a bohemian artist on Monte Verita from 1913 to 1919. Hellerau and Monte Verita were cultural spaces committed to life reform in a newly industrialized society. In both milieus Wigman encountered visions of cultural renewal that became another sort or influence on her work, an influence that her work partly embraced, partly rejected, and ultimately, reinterpreted.
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In comparison with Laban and Taeuber as well as with Fuller and Schlemmer, the singularity of Wigman's conception of the mask becomes apparent. What is striking about Witch Dance I and Idolatry is that the dancer wears no facial mask. Rather her costume serves as a sort of mask. Her costume-as-mask rendered her neither a character type nor a puppeteer. Rather the "subjectivity" of her performing persona always shadowed the "objectivily" of her Gestalt. Her dancing played on the tension between the gendered performer and the genderless Gestalt. As far as I can determine, this use of the costume-as-mask was without precedent in European performance at the time.
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The idea of festival like the idea of the mask, excited the interest of theater reformers in the early twentieth century. Festival productions were often staged for one-time occasions, as was true at Hellerau and Monte Verita. But even when produced in repertory, as was the case for Max Reinhardt's 1910 stagings of Oedipus Rex and the Oresteia, festival productions challenged the conventions of the bourgeois theater, most especially its separation of spectators and performers. In attempting to break down the barrier erected by the proscenium arch, festival productions typically integrated amateur and professional performers and focused attention on the group rather than on the individual.
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Hellerau not only introduced Wigman to the working methods of improvisation and formal analysis that she would make her own but also involved her in a production seminal to the history of Western theater, the staging of Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice undertaken
in collaboration by Dalcroze and Adolphe Appia. The production summarized the theatrical reforms initiated by Dalcroze and Appia and traced a continuity between these theatrical reforms and the social reforms envisaged at Hellerau. To Wigman, one of the members of the chorus, Orpheus suggested possible subject matter as well as a potential model for her own group choreography. Over the next two decades, her solos borrowed subject matter from Orpheus, even though her group dances rejected the festival format.
A first version of Orpheus premiered during a festival in summer 1912, a final version the following summer. Five thousand visitors from all over Europe attended the 1913 production, including many theater artists interested in Dalcroze's and Appia's theatrical reforms - George Bernard Shaw and Harley Granville-Barker from England; Max Reinhardt and Leopold Jessner from Germany; Serge Wolkonski, Serge Diaghilev, and Konstantin Stanislavsky from Russia; Paul Claudel from France. Students at Hellerau, including Wigman, who took the role of a fury in the 1912 production, made up the vast majority of the performers, supplemented by two professionals engaged to perform the singing roles of Orpheus and Eurydice.
The production took place in a theater specially designed by Appia. Essentially a large, open, rectangular hall, the space could accommodate about two hundred and fifty performers and about five hundred spectators. Neither a proscenium arch nor a raised stage nor an orchestra pit separated the performers and spectators, who occupied a continuous space. Appia outfitted the space with a movable set of steps, which echoed the bleacher-type seating for the spectators, and with a system of diffused lighting, which arrayed literally thousands of lights behind translucent linen panels covering the walls and ceiling of the hall. As Alexander von Salzmann, the chief technician, commented, "instead of a lighted space, we have a light-producing space." Spectators too remarked on the integration of space and light, performer and setting, made possible by Appia's design.
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In June 1930 Wigman realized this vision of "communal theater" in collaboration with Albert Talhoff. Together they staged Totenmal (Call of the Dead), a multimedia spectacle memorializing
soldiers killed in the First World War. Premiered at the Third Dancers' Congress held in Munich, the production combined a speaking choir and movement choir. Talhoff borrowed the form of the speaking choir from the working-class theater movement, while Wigman borrowed the form of the movement choir from the populist wing of the modern dance movement. Without her dance group the choreographer cast students drawn from her Dresden school, the Munich branch school, and the Dorothee Gunther school in Munich. She later commented on the transition from the dance group to the movement choir, from Celebration to Totenmal:
It was no longer a matter of the play of forces with and against one another. ... The potential matter of conflict was no longer to be solved within the group itself. What was of concern here was the unification of a group of human beings [that] strove from a unified viewpoint toward a common aim recognized by everyone; a viewpoint which no longer permitted any splitting into single actions .... In the same way as the choric creation demands its antagonist - whether or not it takes actual shape or takes effect as thematic idea above and behind the events-in many cases it also asks for a leader [Anführer] chosen by the chorus, for the one who conveys the message powerfully, who, supported and carried by the entire chorus, advances the thematic idea and brings it to its final execution.
A great short film from 1929 with Mary Wigman dancing can be found here.
