The Mary Wigman Book

This book is the final testament of a truly great creative artist, whose genius as dancer and choreographer was matched by her verbal gifts in both German and English. All her life long Mary Wigman expressed herself with her pen: articles in periodicals and books; letters to friends; poems, private journals and cartoons-and, in her last years, an unfinished autobiography.

Her longtime friend, translator and now her literary executor, Walter Sorell has brought together a rich selection of her work in all these categories. Her reminiscences of her studies with Rudolf van Laban from 1913 onward; of her first compositions and performances; of the dancers who flocked to her company and school at Dresden; of her triumphant American tours in 1930-1933—these are historical documents of the first importance. Equally important, in an aesthetic sense, are her considered statements on the art of dance and on some of her own works. Various as these materials are in their origins, they achieve remarkable unity through Sorell’s skillful editing and his illuminating transitional passages.