Inga Weiss was the real deal in a world drowning in polite academic horseshit. This woman looked at post-war Germany, her good parents in Ansbach, the comfortable life, all of it, and said fuck that noise. She went to East Germany. You hear me? During the Cold War, this adventuress packed her bags and crossed over to study with Mary Wigman, the woman who basically told ballet to go screw itself and created something visceral and true and absolutely terrifying.
And Wigman didn’t just teach her steps. She broke her open. Transformed her. You don’t study German Expressionist dance because you want to be pretty. You study it because you need to understand what the body can scream when words are lies. Wigman knew what it meant to move through darkness, and she passed that knowledge to Weiss like a virus, like a sacrament.
What Inga Weiss did afterward at Stanford, that wasn’t empire-building. That was evangelism. For more than 25 years, she stood in front of students and demanded they stop performing and start existing in movement. She founded the contemporary dance program not because the university needed another department or program, but because she understood that dance was about confronting the void, about finding meaning in the meat and bones and breath of being human.
When Stanford launched its master’s degree program in dance in 1976, Weiss wasn’t just there, she was the gravitational force pulling it into existence. She took everything Wigman had burned into her soul and translated it for a generation of American dancers who didn’t know they needed saving from their own timidity.
Legacy? Her legacy was teaching people that dance isn’t decoration. It’s survival. It’s the only honest language we have left.
The fight is won or lost
far away from witnesses –
behind the lines,
in the gym,
and out there on the road,
long before I dance under those lights.
Muhammad Ali