Two nights ago, I dreamed of the witches’ dance on the island of Blockula; I’d been reading about it before going to sleep. I visited the dreaded island, which, in my dream, was located in Morelos State, near Huitzilac and the Lagunas de Zempoala. There, I saw women walking in reverse, milking goats with their arms bent behind their backs, surrounded by frogs and snakes. I was woken by the mews of the cat very close to my face. I believe the smoke from the fires is putting it in an odd mood and it spends a lot of its time trying to communicate, meowing to the brown clouds or to its sleeping humans.

The German choreographer Mary Wigman would have liked the backwards dance of the witches of Blockula. Her 1914 production Hexentanz would have fit well in my dream. Wigman came to dance later in life, without formal training; I sometimes think she felt the need to learn it for no other reason than to create that piece—her first composition—and so contort her body on the stage like a Blockula witch. In my opinion, except for isolated cases of virtuosos with a great many ideas, each person comes to dance in order to perform a single piece, to set a particular idea in motion. The rest of their professional careers involves delving deeper or padding out; possibly silliness.

On YouTube there’s a fragment of a performance of Hexentanz dating from 1926. The background music was provided by cymbals and other percussion instruments (Wigman was a fan of Asian gongs, which she used for meditation), with the sound of the performer beating the boards occasionally merging with the percussion. Wigman is alone on stage, sitting on the floor throughout the whole piece. She moves toward the proscenium, but it isn’t easy to see how this is done without the aid of her hands; there’s something magical and inexplicable about her displacement. When Wigman performed Hexentanz in New York in 1931, one critic speculated that she might have an assistant hidden beneath the boards who propelled the dancer forward. It was the only possible explanation, other than demonic possession (but it would have been unacceptable to advance that hypothesis in the pages of The New Yorker).

At moments it seems that Wigman is suffering some kind of fit or having convulsions. Her wrists turn inward at weird angles; although the quality of the recording is poor, her features appear to contort grotesquely (though impossible, it actually happens: Wigman wore a rigid mask for the piece, so how can we see facial expressions—wood suddenly becoming a second skin?).

That piece made Mary Wigman famous and earned her a place in the history of modern dance. Despite continuing to perform until the mid-1950s, that first spark of dark genius is the most commonly remembered and frequently discussed area of her legacy.

During the First World War, Wigman took refuge in Monte Verità, a utopian—anarchist, vegetarian, and nudist—community in the Swiss canton of Ticino, where she shared her life with such members of the European cultural scene as her friend Sophie Taeuber (who was at that time working on her abstract tapestries), Hugo Ball, Pyotr Kropotkin, Rainer Maria Rilke, and the Rosicrucian Theodor Reuss, a disciple of Aleister Crowley and founder of a sect based on masonic principles known as the Ordo Templi Orientis—to which Wigman’s partner at that time, the choreographer Rudolf von Laban, happened to belong. Wigman struck up a friendship with Reuss. He then introduced her to hermeticism and commissioned her to create a ritual choreography to accompany the Sonnenfest, which was to function as a kind of congress of the sect.

The residents of Monte Verità spoke Esperanto, took part in psychoanalytic sessions, and wrote frenzied manifestos. During that interval of creative freedom, while Europe was annihilating itself by means of trench warfare and gas, Wigman soaked up the spirit of the Cabaret Voltaire, but also remained loyal to her mystic interests and her curiosity about the supernatural.

In 1918, when the Great War ended, the choreographer suffered a “crisis of nerves.” It’s hard to say what the diagnosis would be nowadays; she’d probably be prescribed benzodiazepine and sent home. Her brother had been wounded in action and had returned an amputee. Starvation and despair were rife in Germany. Wigman separated from von Laban and, her spirit broken, had herself committed to a psychiatric clinic.

It doesn’t in the least surprise me that during that crisis she began to compose her first suite of group choreographies, Die sieben Tänze des Lebens. I like to think that while in the sanatorium she became aware of the profound affinity between mystic rapture and the sort of possession displayed by the other female patients, which the doctors insisted on terming “hysteria.” Her Faustian obsession allowed her to understand that, even in illness, there existed that inarticulable core of primitive impulses and brute sound she was attempting to channel in her art. I imagine her watching the compulsive movements of the patients, the series of ritual repetitions and the bouts of rage any interruption triggered. I picture her at a window, observing the male wing of that clinic; making rapid line drawings of the movements of war veterans hounded by hallucinations; enjoying, as she alone could, the way those interned bodies interacted, creating a secret dance nobody else saw.

If someday, after a premiere, a cultural critic from El Diario de Morelos asks me which choreographic style I adhere to, I’ll say: The seventeenth-century Swedish witches who danced back-to-back and fucked Satan, who had a very cold penis; the women of the Weimar Republic who suffered crises of nerves, who rocked back and forth and hurled themselves at the walls under Mary Wigman’s compassionate gaze. Bodies that shuffle in some mysterious way. Faces that gesticulate beneath masks. That’s my choreographic style.