Stâbetanz - Oskar Schlemmer's Bauhaus Dances

(Stick dance)

Between 1926 and 1929, the Dessau Bauhaus presented works of an experimental nature that Oskar Schlemmer designed in collaboration with young artists who came to study in this school. At the end of the First World War, the European avant-garde movements were fascinated by the utopias of “the new man”, soon to be systematically undermined by the rise of European fascist regimes and Nazism. Between these two disastrous events, Oskar Schlemmer was one of those who relentlessly questioned the aporias, the contradictions but also the potentialities of which the name of art condenses the promise. A tireless inventor, he constantly dialogued and debated with the art of his time. Alongside his teachings, writings and research into the fields of drawing, painting and sculpture, his work intended for the stage placed at the heart of his project the relationships of body and gesture in their relations to the space and time of history. His Stäbetanz, a temporal activation of a constructivist sculpture, chants the invention of choreographic abstraction. 

(source: programme of the CND)