[1] She became one of the most iconic figures of Weimar German culture and her work was hailed for bringing the deepest of existential experiences to the stage.

Already as a child, she was called Mary, "because the Hanoverians were once kings of England and the House of Welf pride never quite got over the decline of the Kingdom of Hanover to a Prussian province.

Wigman came to dance comparatively late after seeing three students of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, who aimed to approach music through movement using three equally important elements: solfège, improvisation and his own system of movements—Dalcroze eurhythmics.

[3] The Jaques-Dalcroze school's practice made dance secondary to music, so Wigman decided to take her interests elsewhere.

In 1913, on advice from the German-Danish expressionist painter Emil Nolde, she entered the Rudolf von Laban School for Art (Schule für Kunst) on Monte Verità in the Swiss canton of Ticino.

[3] In 1917, Wigman offered three different programs in Zürich, including Der Tänzer unserer lieben Frau, Das Opfer, Tempeltanz, Götzendienst and four Hungarian dances according to Johannes Brahms.

[7][8] In the same year, Wigman together with her assistant Bertha Trümpy, opened a school for modern dance on Bautzner Strasse in Dresden.

When the school moved under the name Semper Zwei next to the opera house, the state capital of Dresden bought the property and in 2019 gave it to the association Villa Wigman for Dance (Villa Wigman für Tanz e. V.), which uses it as a rehearsal and performance centre for the independent dance scene.

Famous students included Gret Palucca, Hanya Holm, Yvonne Georgi, Margherita Wallmann, Lotte Goslar, Birgit Åkesson, Sonia Revid, and Hanna Berger.

Student Irena Linn taught Wigman's ideas in the United States at Boston Conservatory and in Tennessee.

[7] The engineer and Siemens manager Hanns Benkert [de] helped Wigman part-time with the administration of this large organization and also became her life partner between 1930 and 1941.

During this time, Wigman's style was characterized by critics as "tense, introspective, and sombre," yet there was always an element of "radiance found even in her darkest compositions."

She received a guest teaching contract at the dance department of the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig, where the concert pianist Heinz K. Urban accompanied her as a répétiteur.

Wigman and her colleagues’ modern dance styles were therefore deemed a means by which the German people could be shielded by outside influence and purified.

In 1954, Wigman received the Schiller Prize of the City of Mannheim and in 1957 the Great Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

[20] While recovering from her nervous breakdown in 1918, Wigman wrote the choreography for her first group composition, Die sieben Tänze des Lebens (The Seven Dances of Life), which premiered several years later, in 1921.

In 1925, the Italian financier Riccardo Gualino invited Wigman to Turin to perform in his private theatre and in his newly opened Teatro di Torino.

Wigman's dances were often accompanied by world music and non-Western instrumentation, such as fifes and primarily percussion, bells, including the gongs and drums from India, Thailand, Africa, and China, contrasted with silence.

However, she did not choreograph to represent the happenings of the war; she danced to outwardly convey the feelings that people were experiencing in this hard time.

In Leipzig, a memorial plaque on the house at Mozartstrasse 17 commemorates Wigman, who lived and taught there from 1942 until she moved to West Berlin in 1949.

Founding members included the theatre director Max von Schillings, Reichskunstwart Edwin Redslob, the composer Eugen d'Albert, the painters Emil Nolde and Conrad Felixmüller, the archaeologist and senior government minister Ludwig Pallat [de], the journalists and theatre critics Alfred Kerr and Artur Michel [de], the art historian Fritz Wichert, Wilhelm Worringer and Wilhelm Pinder [de] and Privy Councilor Erich Lexer, a surgeon.

This is located at the German Dance Archive Cologne (Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln), which also owns the rights of use for Mary Wigman's works.