Special Exhibition Art Museum
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“Dance your life - Dance yourself" – Dance becomes art, 1918 to 1933. Part 2: Highlights
By taking the motto of dancer Mary Wigman, ‘Dance your life – dance yourself,’ the exhibition focuses on the highlights of artistic dance and thus the period from 1918 to 1933. With over 120 prints and sculptures, masks and costumes, films and photographs, the Edwin Scharff Museum shows the fascinatingly multi-layered aspects of artistic dance – and its dialogue with contemporary art.
Around 1900, the new artistic dance not only freed the body from the corset and all convention. It became subjective, emotional and free, and claimed to be an independent art form. The 1920s became the heyday of expressive dance. Important dancers founded a whole network of dance schools, experimented with large amateur groups and launched dance congresses.
The new dance eventually conquered both the theatre and opera stages. Group dance increasingly replaced the initial solo dance.
More and more artists became interested in its forms of movement and saw modern dance concepts as parallels to their own reflections on the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic. Tendencies towards abstraction can be found, as well as dance as kinetic sculpture. At the same time, dance depicted fundamental questions of human destiny and was socially critical and political or religious-spiritual.
We would like to thank our lenders!
Curator: Dr Ina Ewers-Schultz
A comprehensive, richly illustrated catalogue accompanying the exhibition is available in the museum shop for €24.95.