Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-wp2c8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-17T15:31:12.187Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Female Power and Gender Transcendence in the Work of Martha Graham and Mary Wigman

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2013

Catherine Cabeen
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper contrasts the iconic embodiments of empowered femininity characteristic of Martha Graham's choreographic work and the gender ambiguity found in Mary Wigman's early solos. These modern dance pioneers both emancipated the female body from dominant Western culture's insistence on binary gender definitions. However, their differing approaches to how a liberated female body looks, moves, and dresses provides an opportunity to examine modern dance as a forum for diverse shifts in gender representation. This research draws on my personal experience dancing with the Martha Graham company and historic research investigating Wigman's solo concerts in Germany from 1917 to 1919. This paper makes the claim that modern dance, as a conscious fusion of body and mind, can embrace the fluid complexity of personal identity and encourage both conceptual and embodied transcendence of hegemonic male/female paradigms.

Type
Research Article
Information
Congress on Research in Dance Conference Proceedings , Volume 40 , supplement S1: Dance Studies and Global Feminisms , 2008 , pp. 28 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Anzaldua, Gloria. 1987. “La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness.” In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, by Anzaldua, Gloria, 77–91. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute.Google Scholar
Beasley, Chris. 1999. What Is Feminism? London: Sage.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Chodorow, Nancy Julia. 1997. “Gender, Relation, and Difference in Psychoanalytic Perspective.” In Feminist Socialist Thought: A Reader, ed. Meyers, Diana, 7–20. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Feinberg, Leslie. 1996. Transgender Warriors” Making History from Joan of Arc to Rupaul. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Graham, Martha. 1991. Blood Memory. New York: Washington Square Press.Google Scholar
Hanna, Judith Lynne. 1988. Dance, Sex and Gender; Signs of Identity, Dominance, Defiance, and Desire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Heise, Ursula K. 1992. “Transvestism and the Stage Controversy in Spain and England, 1580–1680.” Theater Journal 44 (3): 357–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herdt, Gilbert. 1996. Third Sex Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. New York: Zone Books.Google Scholar
Manning, Susan. 1993. Ecstasy and the Demon: Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Martin, Biddy. 1994. “Extraordinary Homosexuals and the Fear of Being Ordinary.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6 (2–3): 100–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meglin, Joellen. 1997. “Feminism or Fetishism? La Revolte des Femmes and Women's Liberation in France in the 1830S.” In Rethinking the Sylph: New Perspectives on Romantic Ballet, edited by Garafola, Lynn, 69–90. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Scheyer, Ernst. 1970. “The Shapes of Space.” Dance Perspectives 41 (Spring): 26–33.Google Scholar
Snyder, Allegra Fuller, dir. 1991. Mary Wigman 1886–1973: When the Fire Dances Between Two Poles [videorecording]. Hightstown, NJ: Dance Horizons Video.Google Scholar
Wex, Marianne. 1979. Let's Take Back our Space: “Female” and ‘Male” Body Language as a Result of Paternal Structures. Berlin: Frauenliteraturvelag Hermine Fees.Google Scholar
Wigman, Mary. 1975. The Mary Wigman Book. Translated and edited by Sorell, Walter. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Banes, Sally. 1998. Dancing Women Female Bodies on Stage. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ferris, Leslie. 1993. Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross Dressing. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Funkenstein, Susan. 2007. “Engendering Abstraction: Wassily Kandinsky, Gret Palucca, and ‘Dance Curves.’” Modernism/Modernity 14 (3): 389–406.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garber, Marjorie B. 1992. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Jones, Caroline. 2005. “Abstraction.” In Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenburg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses, edited by Jones, Caroline, 97–141. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Kelly, Katherine E. 2007. “Movement, Gender, and Dance.” In Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections, edited by Scott, Bonnie Kim, 157–74. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
MacLeod, Catriona. 1998. Embodying Ambiguity. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.Google Scholar
Manning, Susan Allene, and Benson, Melissa. 1986. “Interrupted Continuities: Modern Dance in Germany.” Drama Review 30 (2): 30–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Müller, Hedwig. 1986. “Die Begrundung des Ausdrukstanzes durch Mary Wigman.” Translated by Blank, Caroline. Inaugural Dissertation, University of Köln.Google Scholar
Partsch-Bergsohn, Isa, and Bergsohn, Harold. 2003. The Makers of Modern Dance in Germany: Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, Kurt Jooss. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Book Company Publishers.Google Scholar
Thomas, Helen. 1993. Dance, Gender, and Culture. New York: St. Martin's Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Women and Social Movements, 1600–2000” Copyright © 1997–2007 by Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar. Retrieved June 10, 2008, from <http://womhist.alexanderstreet.com>..>Google Scholar