Dance Techniques 2010

Dance Techniques and Lives
155
always the same, to a certain extent, because the body
is always the same. The craft has to be mastered and perfected,
but the artist’s creativity exists in the spirit of
the age, in the here–and–now, so today’s artists have their
own impressions or their own mental states and feelings.
If I learned gliding or jumping (and bouncing) with
Wigman, then these are the tools that I use in class, but I
use them in conjunction with the knowledge I have today.
Anatomical and medical knowledge was not relevant
for dancers back then. We didn’t take any notice of
the anatomical realities of the body, for example, like
the position of the pelvis in certain movements. Nowadays
people have an enormous body of knowledge—
also about the neuromuscular system. I would be limiting
myself enormously if I were to work now as I did fifty
years ago—that would be terrible. That would not be very
inventive, nor very Wigman. She wanted things to
develop on their own, which is why she didn’t develop a
system like Graham’s, whose technique spans the
globe. Wigman’s teaching method is, indeed, not well
known today because of the lack of any system.
Would you call Wigman’s working method a
‘technique’? We did speak of technique back then.
But the term ‘technique’ has changed in meaning for me.
Back then, technique simply meant learning the craft.
Nowadays, the word ‘technique’ is used to describe a particular
system, something that is fixed. In this sense, I
can obviously not say that Wigman’s working method was
a technique. With Wigman one researched and tried
out the various possibilities and qualities of, for example,
basic movements like walking and turning. When I
work with dancers today, and get them to perform a movement
that, for me, is normal—for example, a movement
starting from the center—then they actually ask me
‘And where should the head be? And where should
the hips be?’ They see everything from the outside, so to
speak, the arm moves like this, the head like this—but
they don’t see where the movement starts and that it
can trigger a wholly organic movement sequence. Then
I stand there and think: So what, indeed, are the hips
doing? What is the head doing? We also observed shape,
and there was a lot of work on coordination. But
there were also organic movements that followed an
internal logic.
That is not the case today? Not really. The
dancers are much, much better technically—that much
is certain. I sometimes ask myself, ‘How does the body
manage to do what these dancers are doing?’ But I
see almost everything done with the same energy, the
same dynamic. Dancers should always be involved
in what they are doing, but I don’t think that they do so
at all now. The speed dancers must maintain means
that they can only strive to make their dancing more or
less technically clean (laugh), they can’t tune the technique
to their personalities. Yet the dancing is so virtuoso
that I stare open–mouthed and think, ‘Wow!’ Yet after
ten minutes I fall asleep because it’s just rote.
So the question again: Would you describe
Wigman’s working methods as a ‘technique’?
Til Thiele taught technique differently than Wigman,
and Manja was different again. Wigman built on what
other teachers had discovered from our bodies, so to
speak. She genuinely only worked with basic movement
forms and principles, which meant that the working
method was exercise–based, whereas today it is more goal–
oriented in that one has to reach a specific outcome as
quickly as possible. With Wigman, one always repeated
a movement until it was clear what one had to do,
what the phrasing was, and what energy was needed,
until one had internalized it. Whenever needed, the
movement could then be referred to, and that is maybe
the method, the way of working.
There was the spinning on the spot, which was one
of Wigman’s specialties, revolving around one’s own
axis without letting the head lead, something that didn’t
exist in any other dance technique, in my opinion. She
had a way to do this that was based on a foot movement.
You started practicing slowly, then did it quicker and
quicker. It was the same procedure for everything else. For
jumps, we started with some foot–work, and then
launched ourselves into the air. The jumping class was
always on Wednesdays, the turn class on Mondays.
Wigman’s classes were exercise classes rather than technique
classes, which we had with Til und Manja.
Wigman’s classes were exercise classes in the truest sense
of the word: We worked on a single movement form—
jumping, vibrating, turning, gliding—for one-and-a-half
hours.
Are there any basic principles underlying
Wigman’s methodology, pedagogy, didactics,
physical learning, aesthetics, and artistic practice?
I have already said something about physical learning
and artistic practice. We discovered themes through practice.
Everything else was learned through improvisation
and composition. We were given composition tasks that
mostly had to do with spatial principles. How does one
place people in the space? Which movements make sense
at particular points in the space? One has to take into
account that when I was training with Wigman in the middle
of the 1950s, she was already seventy-years old.
Her main focus was on space. Even in her exercise classes
she made a big point of working with space, that the
dancer be aware of space and the point in space, that focus
was used. She worked a lot with focus, such that it
didn’t stay with the person but became ‘depersonalized’,
i.e., a gaze went beyond one’s own gaze. I think that’s
something that has since been lost. We also worked a
great deal with the back, with an awareness of the back.