The Language of Dance

Mary Wigman is one of the most celebrated dancers of the modern era, and this book shows her passion for the art. Nearing the ninth decade of her life, the great German dancer and choreographer looks back over her fifty-year career in the dance not to detail the circumstances of her living and working, but to consider the art of the dance itself, its aesthetics, its nature as expression and as interpretation, its relation to the aspirations and the spiritual needs of man. Along the way, she pauses to consider some of her own more notable creations—Totenmal, Farewell and Thanksgiving, Witch Dance, and others: the circumstances that led to their composition, their roots in her own thought and experience, the strange and subtle ways in which an idea or a sensory impression grew and changed as it was translated into the language of dance. It is a book demanding close thought, for it puts into words a series of concepts whose natural mode of expression is not in words; but for the insight it gives into the creative mind at work, especially in the field of the dance, it is of permanent importance.