Music: Body’s Rich Speech

Boy’s Rich Speech

When a dancer who is also a “messiah” and a “priestess” sets forth on a transcontinental tour, the continent in question can scarcely ignore. For a messiah gathers disciples and a priestess casts spells. Middle-aged Dancer Mary Wigman has thousands of followers in Germany. Last year she started bewitching the U. S. but her time was short. She began again last week in Providence, R. I., had the mixed reception that daring exhibitionists must expect. Most people applauded her wildly or sat in a state of self-conscious hush. Some groped for her message and were honestly perplexed. A few irreverents were amused at what seemed to them mere prancing, lunging and meaningless posturing.

Mary Wigman is bound to mystify many a layman who sees her for the first time. She mystified friends by deciding at 27 that she had to be a dancer. Ten years later she mystified Germany by claiming that the dance should be an art independent of music, by proceeding to illustrate her theory with gestures more gymnastic than lovely, done to whatever primitive gongs or drums best suited her mood.

Germany happened to prove fertile ground for the Wigman idea. The formal ballet never flourished there as it did in Russia and France. The average German is ungraceful and the Wigman doctrine demanded less grace than it did muscular control carried to scientific perfection. Her cult, called tanz gymnastik, spread wholesale among housewives and factory workers who found the exercise profitable. Wigman ideas were modified and taught in the public schools. The Wigman Central Institute in Dresden was subsidized for a time by the Federal Government. Unauthorized groups have used the name of Wigman in Boston, Cleveland and Seattle but this autumn the first official U. S. Wigman School was opened in Manhattan, dedicated to “those thousands, untutored in the rich speech of the body. . . .”

The body’s rich speech is what serious Wigmanites seek to have emphasized over the vulgar view of their work as strange gymnastics. Wigman beginners are instructed not to think, to become mental vacuums so that they may feel some rhythmic, primitive urge and move accordingly. The urge may or may not be pretty. Dancer Wigman can make it grimly angular and austere. She is close to 50, but she can fill the stage with stark, driving energy. In her dark moods, emphasized by monotonous offstage drumbeats, she is more impressive than when she feels mellow and pastoral.