Mary Wigman: Expressionist, feminist, theatre artist

This article considers Mary Wigman’s career and her work’s relationship to canonicity in both dance and theatre studies with a focus on her position as a female authorial artist in Weimar-era Germany. The article compares Wigman’s early group work The Seven Dances of Life (1921) with Oskar Kokoschka’s seminal expressionist play Murderer Hope of Womankind (1909), arguing that the works have inverse relationships to textuality and to canonicity. This article also explores Wigman’s closeted bisexuality, suggesting that an acknowledgement of the artist’s sexual proclivities is integral to understanding her resistance to the traditional power structures of the theatre and her development of alternative power structures and homosocial female communities.