- Wigman came to dance comparatively late after seeing three students of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, who aimed to approach music through movement using three equally important elements: solfège, improvisation and his own system of movements-Dalcroze eurhythmics.
- In the 1920s, Wigman was the idol of a movement that wanted dance free of being subordinate to music. Wigman rarely danced to music not composed for her. It was often only danced to the accompaniment of gongs or drums and in rare cases without any music at all, which was particularly popular in intellectual circles.
- On tour, Wigman travelled throughout Germany and neighbouring countries with her chamber dance group. In 1928 Wigman performed for the first time in London and in 1930 in the United States.
- She did not use typical costumes associated with ballet. The subject matters included in her pieces were heavy, such as the death and desperation that was surrounding the war. However, she did not choreograph to represent the happenings of the war; she danced to outwardly convey the feelings that people were experiencing in this hard time.
- Mary Wigman was a German dancer and choreographer, notable as the pioneer of expressionist dance, dance therapy, and movement training without pointe shoes.
- In 1954 Wigman received the Schiller Prize of the City of Mannheim and in 1957 the Great Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.
- She became one of the most iconic figures of Weimar German culture and her work was hailed for bringing the deepest of existential experiences to the stage.
- The first Mary Wigman Society was founded in Berlin in November 1925 as a society of friends of the Mary Wigman Dance Group. Founding members included the theatre director Max von Schillings, Reichskunstwart Edwin Redslob, the composer Eugen d'Albert, the painters Emil Nolde and Conrad Felixmüller, the archaeologist and senior government minister Ludwig Pallat , the journalists and theatre critics Alfred Kerr and Artur Michel, the art historian Fritz Wichert, Wilhelm Worringer and Wilhelm Pinder and Privy Councilor Erich Lexer, a surgeon. It only existed for a few years.
- She is considered one of the most important figures in the history of modern dance.
- Wigman toured the United States in 1930 with her dance company, and again in 1931 and 1933. A Wigman school was founded by her disciples in New York City in 1931 and her work through dance and movement contributed as a gateway for social change with the New Dance Group in the 1930s, this group was started by students from Wigman's New York school. Wigman's work in the United States is credited to her protegee Hanya Holm, and then to Holm's students Alwin Nikolais and Joan Woodbury.
- In 1967 she closed her West Berlin studio and devoted herself to lecturing at home and abroad.
- In 1920, Wigman was offered the post of ballet mistress at the Saxon State Opera in Dresden, but, after taking up residence in a hotel in Dresden and beginning to teach dance classes while awaiting her anticipated appointment, she learned that the position had been awarded to someone else. In the same year, Wigman together with her assistant Bertha Trümpy, opened a school for modern dance on Bautzner Strasse in Dresden.
- While recovering from her nervous breakdown, in 1918, Wigman wrote the choreography for her first group composition, Die sieben Tänze des Lebens (The Seven Dances of Life), which premiered several years later, in 1921. After that her career and influence began in earnest.
- Since 1993, the Foundation for the Promotion of the Semperoper has honoured outstanding artists or ensembles who belong or belonged to the Saxon State Opera (Sächsischen Staatsoper) with the Mary Wigman Prize. The award is presented annually at a gala - the foundation's prizewinners' concert. The first prize winner in 1993 was Stephan Thoss.
- In 1917 Wigman offered three different programs in Zurich, including Der Tänzer unserer lieben Frau, Das Opfer, Tempeltanz, Götzendienst and four Hungarian dances according to Johannes Brahms.
- Wigman gave her first public performance in Munich in February 1914, performing two of her own dances, including one called Lento and the first version of Hexentanz (Witch Dance), which later became one of her most important works.
- During the First World War she stayed in Switzerland with Laban as his assistant and taught in Zurich and Ascona.
- After 1945 Wigman began again with a Leipzig school and in 1947 staged a sensational performance of Orfeo ed Euridice with her pupils at the Leipzig Opera. In 1949 Wigman settled in West Berlin, where she founded a new expressive dance school, the Mary Wigman Studio.
- She would often employ masks in her pieces, influenced again by non-western/tribal dance.
- In Dresden, a street in the Seevorstadt and near Dresden Hauptbahnhof, which had previously been named after Anton Saefkow, was named after Mary Wigman. Streets were also named after her in the Vilich-Müldorf district of Bonn, in the Bothfeld district of Hanover and in the Käfertal district of Mannheim.
- In Hanover, a commemorative plaque was attached to Wigman's former home at Schmiedestrasse 18.
- The Nazi press had criticized some of the 1934 dances by Wigman and other choreographers, for being insufficiently or unimpressively German, the 1935 Rogge and Wernicke works were lauded as appropriate examples of "heroic" German bodily movement, but Goebbels apparently disliked Amazonen for being too Greek in its iconography.
- In 1936 Wigman choreographed the Totenklage with a group of 80 dancers for the Olympic Youth festival to mark the opening of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.
- The Mary Wigman Gesellschaft e. V., which has been committed to the history and future of modern dance for decades, published the Tanzdrama (Dance Drama) magazine and organized a number of symposia, which was converted into a Mary Wigman Foundation (Mary Wigman Stiftung) in 2013. This is located at the German Dance Archive Cologne (Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln), which also owns the rights of use for Mary Wigman's works.
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