"Greatest Influence"

Followers of the dance were fairly dizzy last week over the importance of an event in Manhattan. Their enthusiasm invaded the smartcharts and artcharts until lay men also began to feel that they owed it to their development to see the German dancer, Mary Wigman. The house sold out for her debut recital; five more performances were announced and a tour as far west as Chicago. Dancers say solemnly that Mary Wigman is the Greatest Influence of the modern dance. She is a follower of Isadora Duncan in that she repudiates the formal ballet and all its artificial patterns. But in her striving for freedom, for self-expression, she goes further than the Great Isadora whose dances were made to express great music. Wigman creates her dances first, chooses her own rhythms and then lets sounds of a simple, primitive sort (she uses off-stage tom-toms, bells, sometimes a single flute) be devised to accompany her bold, free movements.

Recognition came to her some twelve years ago after a performance in a Swiss kurhaus before an audience of the sick and neurasthenic. In Germany, where pretty, tinted dancing never flourished, she has built up a successful school in Dresden, inspired hundreds of imitators, won thousands of converts. Wigman interviews last week were in the vein of "I love life!" and "I am lying on the earth and am one with the elemental things, the primal things. It is as though my body were filled with life. My body sings and I listen and I try to translate that music into movement." Wigman audiences received her with shouts of ecstasy, apparently found deep, abstract meaning in her lunging, prancing, posturing and whirling, did not mind her looking middle-aged and having dowdy costumes. The uninitiated could appreciate her strength and vitality, her perfect muscular control.

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