Baukastenspiel - Oskar Schlemmer's Bauhaus Dances

BAUHAUS DANCES
Reconstructed and Directed by Debra McCall

The  Bauhaus, an experimental school for the arts and design, was founded by  Walter Gropius in 1919, the same year as the Weimar Republic. Uniting  the arts, crafts and technology in a gesamtkunstwerk (total work) of  design, Gropius envisioned an architecture that would fuse the newfound  technology of mass production with beauty and functionality. One of the  more successful Bauhaus workshops, embodying Gropius’s concerns for  unification and standardization of form, was the Stage Workshop, led by  Oskar Schlemmer. While the Stage Workshop pioneered new abstract forms  of performance, it also served as the catalyst for Bauhaus social  happenings such as the famous Metallic Party.

The  Bauhaus Dances were delivered as a series of lecture dances between  1927-29. They were directly inspired by the architectonic cubical stage  space Gropius designed for the Dessau Bauhaus, which opened in 1926.  Preoccupied with simple gesture–walking, sitting, jumping — and influenced by

Heinrich  Kleist’s widely read essay on the marionette, Schlemmer aimed to create  figures that would symbolize the new technology’s potential, but whose  human element would supersede  the   mechanical. In fact, standardizing  and  unifying the human body through padded costumes  and masks exaggerated the stylistic idiosyncrasies of the dancers. Each  dancer was assigned both a primary color and a tempo to symbolize a  psychological temperament; thus, Schlemmer entered the ongoing color  theory debate with the Bauhaus faculty—including Wassily Kandinsky, Paul  Klee and Johannes Itten—on whether the circle was red (medium tempo),  the square blue (slow tempo), and the triangle yellow (quick tempo). In  both Formentanz (Form Dance) and Reifentanz (Hoop Dance), Schlemmer  investigated the impact of geometric props or forms on the human  figure.  Baukastenspiel (Block Play) was a parody of the Bauhaus  architects and der Bau, “creative construction.” In Stäbetanz (Stick  Dance), by extending the human limbs and torso via twelve poles, the  inherent geometric proportion of the dancer engages the mathematics of  abstract space in a dance of the Golden Section. The Nazis forced the  closure of the Dessau Bauhaus in 1932, but its design influence is felt  to this day. Likewise, the avant-garde legacy of Schlemmer and his Stage  Workshop students would eventually influence the performance theory and  work of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Alwin Nikolais, Robert Wilson,  Meredith Monk, the Judson Dance Theater, Laurie Anderson and David  Byrne, amongst others. 

Debra  McCall recovered Schlemmer’s original notes and sketches during a  research trip to Germany in the 1980s.  After a year of translation and  reconstruction with the assistance of the last remaining performer from  the Bauhaus Stage Workshop, Andreas Weininger, and with the support of  Mrs. Ise Gropius, the Bauhaus Dances premiered at The Kitchen, New York.  This was followed by sold-out tours of the US, Europe and Japan,  including the inaugural Biennale de la Danse in Lyon; the 1984  exhibition “Kandinsky: Russian and Bauhaus Years, 1915-1933” at the  Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the “Oskar Schlemmer”  exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, the  Art Institute of Chicago and the IBM Gallery of Art and Science.  McCall’s reconstructions returned to the original Dessau Bauhaus in  1994, presenting the Bauhaus Dances on that stage for the first time in  sixty-five years.

The  film of the reconstructions, directed by Robert Leacock and Debra  McCall, premiered at Goethe Institut-New York and was selected by the  American Dance Festival for its first Dancing for the Camera:  International Festival of Film and Video Dance. It also was included in  the Museum of Modern Art “Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity”  Bauhaus Lounge exhibition 2009-10, and in the “100 Years (Version #2)”  Performa 09 exhibition at PS 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island  City, New York. The film and Labanotation for the dances reside at the  Library of Congress and the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New  York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, New York.

Source: Bauhaus

More information: bauhausdances.org