2017/01/01 by Kirsten Yri · 1 citation
Psychology · Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Diversity and Impact of Dance #Arts, Culture, and Music Studies #Musicology and Musical Analysis #Dance #Art #Power (physics) #Literature #German #Art history #Visual arts #Aesthetics #History #Archaeology
paper · doi:10.1093/musqtl/gdy007
openalex publication_date 2017/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
In the fall of 1935, as part of his duties for the Güntherschule, the dance and movement school he co-founded with Dorothée Günther, Carl Orff attended the famous Tanzfestspiele in Berlin.1 On the program was the premiere of Hymnic Dances (Tanzgesänge) by the German Expressionist choreographer Mary Wigman, accompanied by Hanns Hasting’s percussion soundscape. With dances devoted “to exaltation (Paean); to painful burdens (Road of the Suppliant); to dark threats (Song of Fate); to elemental rhythm (Fire Dance); to the experience of nature (Moon Song); and to unending devotion (Dance of Homage),” it would be difficult not to draw parallels to Orff’s Carmina Burana, his Cantiones Profanae, a work he had been laboring with since April 1934.2 Indeed, we can assume that Orff took a special interest in Wigman’s dances since she was the choreographer of choice for the dances he had slated for Carmina Burana. A 1936 review focusing on one of the dances, Song of Fate, draws attention to the dancer’s powerlessness in a description that captures the Expressionist angst of the preceding period: Costumed in a dark cloak, and with her hand to her breast, the figure senses the threatening doom and the inexorable power of fate. The figure wants to flee, retreat … rebels, laments, cries, threatens, curses, collapses. The figure recognizes powerlessness against fate and goes to the end, resigned, knowing, and upright.3