Research into Corporeality

Photo 1. Fabian Barba in Wigman's Pastorale (photo: Bart Grietens).

The first time I saw films of the Wigman solos on video, I experienced a vague, ambivalent feeling of recognition: something in these dances felt very familiar, although the choreography retained its historical strangeness seen through the eyes of a contemporary dance student. The uncanniness of the experience functioned as a powerful trigger to think about something that concerned me but that at first I couldn't fully understand. For one thing, it made me think of my dance education in Ecuador, and it occurred to me that there could well be significant similarities between Ausdruckstanz and Ecuadorian modern dance (I shall develop this idea at the end of this essay). In a personal research project in 2007, while studying at P.A.R.T.S. between 2004 and 2008, I learned and performed three of Wigman's solos: Seraphisches Lied, Pastorale, and Sommerlicher Tanz, from Mary Wigman's dance cycle Schwingende Landschaft. At that time I realized I was dealing with a totally different physicality for which my contemporary training was insufficient, and I had to seek different technical tools in order to perform these solos. First, I realized I had to develop other modes of muscular tension, as my training in release techniques did not suffice. Second, I was bound to consider movement not purely as a physical activity (I imagine that Wigman would have dismissed such an option as mere gymnastics) but rather as a tool for expressing a subtext. Despite these insights, my approach remained rather vague. The mere knowledge that I was dealing with a different physicality and mental involvement did not enable me to define them accurately.

During the 2008 ImPulsTanz Festival in Vienna, I participated in a two-week workshop with Susanne Linke, one of the last students of Mary Wigman in Berlin. Although she made clear that her class could not be considered as representative of Mary Wigman's approach, she did recognize its affiliation. In her workshop, I was introduced to a well-built and consistent system that provided clear technical tools that I could use to perform the Mary Wigman solos. These tools included exercises to relate the movement of the limbs to strong centric abdominal muscles; control of breathing, stressing the relation of inhalation and exhalation to different movement qualities; the suspension of an impulse in time to increase its dramatic tension; and the creation of movement phrases that foreground the dynamic tension between gravity and muscular resistance in clear geometrical shapes.

Irene Sieben and Katharine Sehnert—two other former students of Wigman in Berlin—taught me and helped me to practice the exercises they had learned in Wigman's school. I was surprised to discover how one of Wigman's movement principles, gliding, and all its possible variations, spontaneously produced some of the positions I had studied from still images. Thus, I came to understand how those body positions had been created, and I gained a sense of the logic that produced them. With this method for "producing" bodily positions I was freed from working with a set and limited lexicon. Equally importantly, I was taught the savoir-faire that underlies a specific corporeality. Small instructions like "you move thinking you're pressing the air in front of you," or "you bend this part of your chest and not that one," or, even better, "don't let your arms hang like that behind you, bring them into the movement," are invaluable sources of information as one tries to embody a specific historical corporeality. In the Wigman school students would practice just one of these movement principles at a time to explore all its variations throughout an hour-and-a-half class. In that way the experience of the class, although based in clear physical terms, could attain a heightened state of perception of the body and movement.

This work provided me with an insight into the notion of subtext and how it can be produced through movement. This has been an important, though not so easy, notion to grasp, and even...