Reenacting Modernity: Fabian Barba's A Mary Wigman Dance Evening (2009)

Extract

To reenact nine solos Mary Wigman performed during her first U.S. tour (1930–31), Fabian Barba establishes a contract with the audience based on representational codes of modernist dance in the early twentieth century. As one enters the theater, a little program is found on one's seat with the intended course of the evening. The program mentions the place and date of the reenactment—in German, with an English translation, as it might have been during the American tours—but not the year. Reading it, we learn that six solos, Aus dem Tanzcyklus “Schwingende Landschaft” (From the Dance Cycle “Shifting Landscape“), dated 1929, will be performed. There will be an eight-minute intermission after which three other solos are to follow: two from Visions and one from Celebration. The program is printed in the typography of those days and the contractual agreement of the dance concert—written in small letters as is usually the case with contracts—is indicated at the bottom: “The audience is kindly asked not to leave the room during the intermission. At the end of the recital and upon demand from the public, two dances can be shown again as ‘encores.’”