ABSTRACT
Mary Wigman was the best-known ambassador of German dance during the interwar period, as her touring took her across Europe and to the United States. Promotional literature for those tours sought to educate the public about this new art phenomenon, and critics responded with enthusiasm and keen attention, if not always with praise. When US critic John Martin published ‘The Dance’ in 1946 he placed Wigman in the highest constellation of dance artists, in part for her artistic creations and especially for how she widened the range and advanced the underlying theories of the art. Following the Second World War, however, Wigman received only fleeting attention in the English-language historiography of modern dance. In fact, the whole of early German Ausdruckstanz, or dance of expression, was barely discussed in postwar writing on dance modernism, which centered on the American modern dance pioneers and US dance developments. One later exception was the work of Pina Bausch, whose career began in Germany, continued in the United States and then returned to Germany in the form of Tanztheatre.
