Cultural modernity, the Wigman school, and the Modern Girl

This article examines how Mary Wigman’s approach to modern dance functioned as a trope of cultural modernity in the 1920s and 1930s, circulating transnationally through travel and media and appearing in such unexpected places as travel guides, fashion magazines, and cigarette advertisements. It explores how the typology of the Modern Girl, whose body had become a powerful site for the projection of excitement and anxieties about modern life, informed texts and photographs of the Wigman School published in mass-market American publications. Through cultural histories, iconographic analysis, and discursive critique of primitivism and racial masquerade, this study demonstrates how representations of the Wigman dancer participated in discourses of modern femininity.