A Mary Wigman Dance Evening

The spirit of the time

Modern dance originated in Europe only a century ago. Important innovators such as Rudolf von Laban, Isadora Duncan and Mary Wigman tried to break with the conventions of classical ballet by devising new techniques and languages of movement. Challenging the values and conventions of bourgeois societies, they wanted to create a dance form that would be in accordance with the ‘spirit of the time’, their time. Their work brought into the dance world modernist imperatives such as innovation, authenticity and individuality, notions that are still relevant in our time. For A Mary Wigman Dance Evening, the young Ecuadorian choreographer Fabián Barba took as a starting point the performances Wigman offered during her first tour through the United States in 1930-31 and has come to gather a recital composed of nine short soli.

● Fabián Barba was still a student at PARTS when he started working on Wigman’s Schwingende Landschaft, created in 1929. For A Mary Wigman Dance Evening he quotes from the whole of her oeuvre. The challenge lies in the tension between his reconstruction and the original.