Birgit Åkesson trained at Mary Wigman’s school from 1929 to 1932, then abandoned her expressionist style and began to seek her own form of dance. After a brief study period with Max Reinhardt in Berlin, she made her solo debut in Paris at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in a recital entitled “Danses modernes” ([Modern Dance], 1934), then opened her school in Stockholm. After a new show in 1936, the critics were as severe as she was herself and, for ten years, she no longer danced in public. In 1946, she broke the silence with a new recital where she danced with extreme concentration, slowly, in an uninterrupted flow of movements. After Stockholm, she gained international reputation when she gave recitals in Copenhagen, Prague, London, New York, Paris and Milan. The artist related more to contemporary painters and composers, Picasso, Calder, Arp or Hindemith, than to dancers. “Eye: Sleep in Dream” is the result of her collaboration with poet Erik Lindegren and composer Karl-Birger Blomdahl (1953), followed in 1957 by “Sisyphus”, at the Royal Opera House in Stockholm. She produced seven ballets including “The Minautor” (1958), “Rites” (1960), “Play for Eight” (1962) and “Icaros” (1963). Like those of Martha Graham whom she met in the United States, her ballets are often inspired by classical myths, but she preferred abstraction, rejecting M. Graham’s taste for blood and references to American legend. After creating the solo “Les Heures du jour” [Hours of the Day] for Erik Bruhn on Swedish television (1967), she left dance and travelled to Africa for the first time to study ritual dances. She returned several times and, in 1983, published the results of her research. She also conducted research trips to China and Japan to study dance forms in Asia. In 1989, she created two solos for dancer Chiang Ching and recreated at the Stockholm Opera, for young ballerina Marie Lindqvist, “Persefone’s Dance”, a solo from “Sisyphus”. Sometimes called “the Picasso of Dance”, she remains one of the pioneers of twentieth century European modern dance.
