Cultural modernity, the Wigman school, and the Modern Girl

ABSTRACT

This article examines how Mary Wigman’s approach to modern dance functioned as a trope of cultural modernity in the 1920s and 1930s, circulating transnationally through travel and media and appearing in such unexpected places as travel guides, fashion magazines, and cigarette advertisements. It explores how the typology of the Modern Girl, whose body had become a powerful site for the projection of excitement and anxieties about modern life, informed texts and photographs of the Wigman School published in mass-market American publications. Through cultural histories, iconographic analysis, and discursive critique of primitivism and racial masquerade, this study demonstrates how representations of the Wigman dancer participated in discourses of modern femininity.

KEYWORDS:

• Modern dance
• Mary Wigman
• feminine modernities
• cultural modernity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Swan, “Peculiar Origin of the New Dances,” n.p.

2 Manning, “Dance History,” 305-306; Elswit, Watching Weimar Dance, 120–6.

3 Clayton, “Modernism’s Moving Bodies,” 30.

4 Appadurai, Modernity at Large.

5 Jaillant and Martin, “Introduction: Global Modernism.”

6 Global modernist studies are beginning to reveal the wider scope of modern dance across geographic and national boundaries. The anthology The Modernist World, for example, surveys dance as cultural production across the globe in the modern era. It reveals Wigman’s global reach, demonstrating that she exerted an influence in Oceania, East Asia, South America, North America, and Europe, often through the travels and migration of her former students. (Ross and Lindgren, The Modernist World.)

7 Lazarus, “Die Wigman-Schule-Dresden (1921-1942) im Spiegel kommunaler Akten,” 97. International students at the Wigman School in Dresden during the interwar period included Eguchi Takaya and Misako Miya from Japan (1931-1932), Zohra Segal from India (1930-1933), and Chinita Ullmann from Brazil (1924–1927).

8 Müller, “A Matter of Loyalty,” xix-xxvii.

9 Bell-Kanner, The Life and Times of Ellen von Frankenberg, 3.

10 Funkenstein, Marking Modern Movement, 89.

11 Giles, “Popular Education and New Media,” 453.

12 Wigman, “The Dance and Modern Woman,” 163.

13 Wigman, “Young Germany Dances,” 39.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., 56.

16 On Wigman’s concept of the Tanzgemeinschaft (dance cultural community), as expressed by her protégé Hanya Holm, see Randall, “Hanya Holm and an American Tanzgemeinschaft.”

17 “The World and the Theatre,” 966–7.

18 Ibid., 967.

19 Ibid.

20 See Reynolds, “Dancing as a Woman.”

21 Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman, 29.

22 Gerda Kerger, translated and quoted in Rasche, “On Dance Fashion,” 192.

23 Wigman, “The Dance and Modern Woman,” 162.

24 Pumphrey, “The Flapper, the Housewife, and the Making of Modernity,” 182.

25 Ibid., 183.

26 Nicholas, The Modern Girl, 6.

27 Ibid., 24.

28 Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman, 7.

29 Weinbaum et al, “The Modern Girl as Heuristic Device,” 12.

30 Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman, 7.

31 Weinbaum et al., “The Modern Girl as Heuristic Device,” 18.

32 Pumphrey, “The Flapper, the Housewife, and the Making of Modernity,” 186.

33 Nicholas, The Modern Girl, 91.

34 “Wigman vs. Traffic,” n.p.

35 Reproduced in Weinbaum et al., The Modern Girl Around the World, image 1.5, 7.

36 Reproduced in Pumphrey, “The Flapper, the Housewife, and the Making of Modernity,” 186.

37 Burke, “The Modern Girl and Commodity Culture,” 363.

38 Purini, “Gret Palucca and Charlotte Rudolph,” 31.

39 Ibid., 28.

40 Kosta, “Cigarettes, Advertising, and the Weimar Republic’s Modern Woman,” 135.

41 Peck, Young Germany, 144.

42 Saida Gerrard Papers, University of Southern California Libraries.

43 Weinbaum et al., “The Modern Girl as Heuristic Device,” 11.

44 Weinbaum, “Racial Masquerade: Consumption and Contestation of American Modernity,” 121.

45 The use of percussion instruments was an important and distinctive aspect of Wigman’s approach, as it offered a greater range of expressive sounds that marked modern dance’s divergence from European classicism. It also gave Wigman greater control over her artistic productions, since she trained her dancers to play the instruments themselves in performance as well as in classes.

46 Seinfel, “Modern Girls Learn Primitive Rhythms,” n.p.

47 Nicholas, The Modern Girl, 10.

48 Seinfel, “Modern Girls Learn Primitive Rhythms,” n.p.

49 Nicholas, The Modern Girl, 117.

50 Pass, “Racial Masquerades in the Magazines,” 283.

51 Nicholas, The Modern Girl, 10.

52 The portrayal of the Wigman dancer as white was often combined with the national origin of the school in Germany, so that dancers were often erroneously assumed to be German. For example, the performing group that accompanied Wigman on her 1932–1933 North American tour were often described in the press as a “group of German girls,” even though it was actually comprised of dancers of diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds, who collectively held passports from six countries (Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, USSR, and US).

53 See Edward Ross Dickinson for a cultural history that examines modern dance in early twentieth century European culture, as part of a broad cultural war between radical modernists and traditionalists. He argues that modern dance was a point of convergence for a whole set of questions raised by social and cultural change. (Dickinson, Dancing in the Blood).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tresa Randall

Tresa Randall is an Associate Professor, Graduate Chair, and Director of the Honors Tutorial program in Dance Studies at Ohio University. She has published in New German Dance Studies, Jahrbuch Tanzforschung, and Journal of Dance Education and has presented her research at conferences of the Modernist Studies Association, Dance Studies Association, and American Studies Association. Her research on the Wigman School in dance archives in Germany was funded by a Faculty Visit Grant of the German Academic Exchange (DAAD).