soft and gentle, vehement and wild

"D. H. Lawrence passed through Monte Veritá and in many ways become the most eloquent recorder of motivations and desires of his fellows artists, Mary Wigman included. Lawrence made theatricality and authenticity tenets of his critique of contemporary life.

He compared the relationship between the audience and the action onstage to the reflection of the distancing of modern man from authentic life:

We go to the theater to be entertained…We want to be taken out of ourselves… We want to become spectators in our own show…which is very entertaining. The secret of it all, is that we detach ourselves from the painful and always solid trammels of actual existence, and become only creatures of memory…

Embedded in Lawrence’s prose is an argument for a turn towards the awakening of instincts and emotions in the intellect-driven modern man; a particular way of “becoming” or what Wigman would term Dasein (after Heidegger's Dasein and Karl Jasper's Existenz).

This is precisely what she would call the dancer’s task in the world: a physical “being present”.

Wigman also took the romanticizing of the American Southwest during her 1932 tour. Both Wigman and Lawrence felt that Dance lends itself more to this sort of becoming than does any other art. In her travels across the United States, Mary Wigman had been taken by the expansive landscapes and native dancers of the Southwest.

After viewing the pueblo dances in Taos, New Mexico, Lawrence wrote:

… perhaps they are giving themselves again to the pulsing, incalculable fall of the blood, which forever seeks to fall to the centre of the earth, while the heart, like a plane pulsating in an orbit, keeps up the strange, lonely circulating of the separate human existence…

There is none of the hardness of representation.

They are not representing something, not even playing.

It is a soft, subtle, being something.

(…)

and Wigman about her solo Hexentanz:

There she stands, in the center of the space, eyes closed, feeling how the air presses upon her limbs. One arm is raised, groping, cutting through the invisible space, thrusting forward, with the feet to follow: direction established. Then, as if the space wanted to reach for her, it pushes her backward on a newly created path: counter direction: a play of up and down, of backward and forward, a meeting with herself, battling for space within space: DANCE.

Soft and gentle, vehement and wild."

in Mary Wigman, biography

by Mary Anne Santos Newhall

ed Routledge Performance Pratitioners