Word: wigman
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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...
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...
...Mary Wigman, whose modern German dancing made a noise in the U.S. in the early '30s, emerged from long obscurity, but only a little. "Since 1942 I live in Leipzig," she wrote a U.S. friend. ". . . The Nazis did not like me! Here I live among ruins and have a tiny school of my own. . . . Hard life, but wonderful to be alive, after all! No money . . . nothing...
...confetti-like whirl of bouncing checks wherever she went; and Loie Fuller, whose tour was supposed to be keyed to the ludicrous U. S. progress of her friend Queen Marie of Rumania. Other attractions launched in the U. S. by Hurok: Basso Feodor Chaliapin, Contralto Marian Anderson, Dancer Mary Wigman, the Vienna Choir Boys, the Piccoli Theatre, Pianist Rudolf Serkin, Hindu Dancer Uday Shan...
...second half From Vienna did much better. There was fun in a sketch of a refugee learning English in Six Easy Lessons; fun and charm alike in Little Ballerina, where dainty Ilia Roden plays a daydreaming ballet pupil who quits her routine to imitate Mary Wigman, Pavlova, an Aquacade swimmer. And the finale was a potpourri of those gay, nostalgic Viennese tunes to which all the world has waltzed and to which it is impossible to goose-step...