The Great Fire

When Mary Wigman did her stark, muscular, barefoot dances before U.S. audiences in the early '30s, some of the irreverent wrote the exhibition off as prancing, lunging and posturing. But critics wrote respectfully of "a personal and spiritual force, concentrated, emanated, outflung." After 1933, like many another German artist, she was seldom seen and little noted by the rest of the world. Last week Mary Wigman, past 60 and vibrant as ever, turned up in Berlin to reopen her once-famed modern dance school.

She was voluble--and a little vague--about her twelve years under the Nazis. By her account, the years were a personal struggle to keep her "rich speech of the body" (usually done to tom-toms, bells or a single flute) from being silenced by the "mannered and stilted" conventional ballet form, which appealed more to Nazi leaders.

In 1933, she obediently purged her dance group of Jews. Says she: "We did everything we could to save our little candle light for the day when we could build a great, warming fire." Even so, two years later the Goebbels press decided that her kind of dancing was "modern degeneracy." She was chased out of Berlin, but the Nazis--torn between using her prestige and denouncing her art--allowed her to carry on a school in Dresden.

Soon the Dresden press began to howl that her dances were un-Nordic. Wigman moved on to Leipzig, was still dancing a little, teaching a little, when the Russians found her. Russian reporters interviewed her and respectfully printed her opinions on the dance, but obviously still preferred their own graceful classic ballet to Wigman's somewhat gymnastic, angular and austere style. Russian authorities readily gave her permission to go on lecture tours and to reopen her school. The time has come, she announced last week, to start building the great, warming fire.

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