The Makers of Modern Dance in Germany: Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, Kurt Jooss
by Isa Partsch-Bergsohn
from Princeton Book Company
This is the story of the founders of modern dance in Germany: Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, and Kurt Joos, whose work in the first half of the 20th century paralleled the independent development of modern dance in America-without being influenced by it. Laban is credited as being the most important innovator and guiding force and is best known as the inventor of Labanotation, a symbolic language for describing movement. Wigman became Laban's student in 1913 at a time when he was earning a reputation as an inspired choreographer and movement director. Joos was a young man of 19 when, hearing about Laban's pioneering work, he decided to pay a visit to the master. He soon became his assistant and lead male dancer. This book follows the connective threads of these remarkable individuals throughout their careers in chaotic times.
The Mary Wigman Book: Her Writings
Form och mening i dansen: En studie av stilbegreppet med en komparativ stilanalys av Mary Wigmans och Birgit Akessons solodanser (Theatron-serien)
Mary Wigmans choreographisches Skizzenbuch 1930-1961
Ecstasy and the Demon: Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman
by Susan A. Manning
from University of California Press
Mary Wigman, Germany's premier modern dancer between the two world wars, envisioned the dancer in the thrall of ecstatic and demonic forces. Transforming the performer into an abstract configuration of energy in space, her works subverted the traditional eroticization of the female dancer. Critics in her own time and historians since have hailed her as a major innovator of dance modernism.
What commentators have not acknowledged until recently, however, is her collaboration with the Nazis. Under the Third Reich, Wigman subtly transformed the choreographic themes that had brought her fame during the Weimar Republic. Reverting to more traditional images of the female dancer, her works represented the division between male and female spheres so central to fascist ideology. Her choreographic career thus challenges the prevailing view of a sharp break between Weimar and Nazi culture.
Dance and cultural historian Susan Manning traces Wigman's career from Monte Verita, an artist's colony where she spent the First World War in voluntary exile, to West Berlin, where she premiered her final work just months after the building of the Berlin Wall. Manning argues that Wigman challenged the voyeurism of the male spectator while projecting an essentialized national identity, a mystical aura of Germanness.
Introducing methods not usually found in dance studies, Manning spins Wigman's story into an interdisciplinary space bounded by ongoing dialogues on the history of the body and the sexual and national politics of artistic modernism.
Mary Wigman: Leben und Werk der grossen Tanzerin
The shapes of space: the art of Mary Wigman and Oskar Schlemmer (Dance perspectives)
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