When I brought Wigman to America, shortly after the Great Crash, she was no longer young. She had been born in Germany, in 1886, and could hardly have been called a “baby ballerina.” Originally a pupil of Emile Jacques Dalcroze, the father of Eurhythmics, whose pupils in a “demonstration” had kindled Wigman’s interest in the dance, she did not remain long with him. Dalcroze himself, at this stage, apparently had little interest in dancing. However, he established certain methods which proved of interest to certain gifted dancers. The Dalcroze basis was musical, and his chief function was to foster a feeling for music in his pupils. Music frustrated, handicapped, restricted her, Wigman felt. Individualist that she was, she left her teacher in order to work out her own dance destiny. There followed a period of some uncertainty on her part, and, for a time, she became a pupil of the Hungarian teacher, Rudolf von Laban, who laid down in pre-war Germany the foundations for modern dance. Unlike Isadora Duncan, Laban had no aversion to ballet. As a matter of fact, he liked much of it, was influenced by it; was impressed by the Diaghileff Ballet, was friendly with Diaghileff, and became an intimate of Michel Fokine. His later violent reaction from ballet was certainly not based on lack of knowledge of it. At the Laban school, Wigman collaborated with him, and having a streak of choreographic genius, was able to put some of Laban’s theories into practical form. However, Mary Wigman’s forceful personality was greater than any school and, in 1919, she broke away from Laban, and formed a school of her own. She abandoned what were to her the restricting influences of formal music, as Isadora had abandoned clothing restrictions. A dancer of tremendous power, like Isadora she had an overwhelming personality. Again, like Isadora, all this had a tendency to make her pupils only pale imitations of herself. Wigman’s public career, a secondary matter with her, actually began in Dresden, in 1918, with her _Seven Dances of Life_. Dresden was her temple. Here the Teutonic Priestess of the Dance presided over her personal religion of movement. German girls were joined by Americans. The disciples grew in number and spread out through Germany like proselyting missionaries. Wigman groups radiated the gospel until one found schools and factories and societies turning out _en masse_ for “demonstrations” of the Wigman method. I have said that Wigman found music a deterrent to her method. On the other hand, one of the most important features of her “school” was a serious, thorough, Germanic research into the question of what she felt was the proper musical accompaniment for dance. Her pupils learned to devise their own rhythmic accompaniment. In her show pieces, at any rate, Wigman’s technique was to have the music for the dance composed simultaneously with the creation of the dance movements--certainly a new type of collaboration.