We cred­it the Bauhaus school, discovered­ed by Ger­man archi­tect Wal­ter Gropius in 1919, for the aes­thet­ic prin­ci­ples which have guid­ed a lot mod­ern design and archi­tec­ture within the twentieth and twenty first cen­turies. The college’s rela­tion­ships with artists like Paul Klee, Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, Las­z­lo Moholy-Nagy, and Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe imply that Bauhaus is shut­ly asso­ci­at­ed with Expres­sion­ism and Dada within the visu­al and lit­er­ary arts, and, after all, with the mod­ernist indus­tri­al design and glass and metal archi­tec­ture we asso­ciate with Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles and Ray Eames, amongst so many oth­ers.

We have a tendency to not asso­ciate Bauhaus with the artwork of dance, per­haps due to the varsity’s discovered­ing ethos to carry what they noticed as ener­vat­ed high-quality arts and crafts tra­di­tions into the period of mod­ern indus­tri­al professional­duc­tion. The ques­tion of how one can meet that demand when it got here to per­haps one of many outdated­est of the per­type­ing arts may need puz­zled many an artist.

However not Oskar Schlem­mer. A poly­math, like so most of the college’s avant-garde fac­ul­ty, Schlem­mer was a painter, sculp­tor, design­er, and chore­o­g­ra­ph­er who, in 1923, was employed as Mas­ter of Kind on the Bauhaus the­atre work­store.

Earlier than tak­ing on that position, Schlem­mer had already con­ceived, designed, and staged his most well-known work, Das Tri­adis­che Bal­lett (The Tri­adic Bal­let). “Schlemmer’s primary theme,” says schol­ar and chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Debra McCall, “is at all times the summary ver­sus the fig­u­ra­tive and his work is all in regards to the con­cil­i­a­tion of polarities—what he him­self referred to as the Apol­lon­ian and Dionysian. [He], like oth­ers, felt that mech­a­niza­tion and the summary had been two primary themes of the day. However he didn’t need to scale back the dancers to automa­tons.” These con­cerns had been shared by many mod­ernists, who felt that the idio­syn­crasies of the human might eas­i­ly grow to be sub­sumed within the seduc­tive order­li­ness of machines.

Schlem­mer’s inten­tions for The Tri­adic Bal­let translate—in the descrip­tions of Dan­ger­ous Minds’ Amber Frost—to “units [that] are min­i­mal, empha­siz­ing per­spec­tive and clear traces. The chore­og­ra­phy is lim­it­ed by the cumbersome, sculp­tur­al, geo­met­ric cos­tumes, the transfer­ment sti­fling­ly delib­er­ate, incred­i­bly mechan­i­cal and mathy, with a uncommon trace at any flu­id dance. The entire thing is dar­ing­ly bizarre and unusual­ly mes­mer­iz­ing.” You’ll be able to see black and white nonetheless pictures from the orig­i­nal 1922 professional­duc­tion above (and see much more at Dan­ger­ous Minds). To view these bizarrely cos­tumed fig­ures in movement, watch the video on the high, a 1970 recre­ation in full, bril­liant col­or.

For var­i­ous rea­sons, The Tri­adic Bal­let has not often been restaged, although its influ­ence on futur­is­tic dance and cos­tum­ing is con­sid­er­ready. The Tri­adic Bal­let is “a pio­neer­ing examination­ple of mul­ti-media the­ater,” wrote Jack Ander­son in review of a 1985 New York pro­duc­tion; Schlem­mer “turned to chore­og­ra­phy,” writes Ander­son, “due to his con­cern for the rela­tion­ships of fig­ures in house.” Giv­en that the guid­ing prin­ci­ple of the work is a geo­met­ric one, we don’t see a lot transfer­ment we asso­ciate with tra­di­tion­al dance. As a substitute the bal­let seems to be like pan­tomime or pup­pet present, with fig­ures in awk­ward cos­tumes trac­ing var­i­ous shapes across the stage and every oth­er.

As you’ll be able to see within the pictures fur­ther up, Schlem­mer left few notes regard­ing the chore­og­ra­phy, however he did sketch out the group­ing and cos­tum­ing of every of the three transfer­ments. (You’ll be able to zoom in and get a clos­er have a look at the sketch­es above on the Bauhaus-archiv Muse­um.) As Ander­son writes of the 1985 revived professional­duc­tion, “unfor­tu­nate­ly, Schlemmer’s chore­og­ra­phy for these fig­ures was for­acquired­ten way back, and any new professional­duc­tion should be based mostly upon analysis and intu­ition.” The fundamental out­traces aren’t dif­fi­cult to recov­er. Impressed by Arnold Schoenberg’s Pier­rot Lunaire, Schlem­mer started to see bal­let and pan­tomime as free from the bag­gage of tra­di­tion­al the­ater and opera. Draw­ing from the styl­iza­tions of pan­tomime, pup­petry, and Com­me­dia dell’Arte, Schlem­mer fur­ther summary­ed the human type in dis­crete shapes—cylindrical necks, spher­i­cal heads, and many others—to cre­ate what he referred to as “fig­urines.” The cos­tum­ing, in a way, nearly dic­tates the jerky, pup­pet-like transfer­ments of the dancers. (These three cos­tumes beneath date from the 1970 recre­ation of the piece.)

Schlemmer’s rad­i­cal professional­duc­tion has some­how not achieved the lev­el of recog­ni­tion of oth­er avant-garde bal­lets of the time, includ­ing Schoen­berg’s  Pier­rot Lunaire and Stravinsky’s, Nijin­sky-chore­o­graphed The Ceremony of Spring. The Tri­adic Bal­let, with music com­posed by Paul Hin­demith, toured between 1922 and 1929, rep­re­despatched­ing the ethos of the Bauhaus college, however on the finish of that peri­od, Schlem­mer was compelled to depart “an increas­ing­ly risky Ger­many,” writes Frost. Revivals of the piece, comparable to a 1930 exhi­bi­tion in Paris, have a tendency­ed to concentrate on the “fig­urines” relatively than the dance. Schlem­mer made many sim­i­lar per­for­mance items within the 20s (comparable to a “mechan­i­cal cabaret”) that introduced togeth­er indus­tri­al design, dance, and ges­ture. However per­haps his nice­est lega­cy is the weird cos­tumes, which had been worn and copied at var­i­ous Bauhaus cos­tume par­ties and which went on to direct­ly encourage the look of Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis and the glo­ri­ous extra­es of David Bowie’s Zig­gy Star­mud stage present.

Observe: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this put up appeared on our web site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Women of the Bauhaus: See Hip, Avant-Garde Pho­tographs of Female Stu­dents & Instruc­tors at the Famous Art School

32,000+ Bauhaus Art Objects Made Avail­able Online by Har­vard Muse­um Web­site

Watch Bauhaus World, a Free Doc­u­men­tary That Cel­e­brates the 100th Anniver­sary of Germany’s Leg­endary Art, Archi­tec­ture & Design School

Bauhaus Bal­let: A Dance of Geom­e­try

Josh Jones is a author and musi­cian based mostly in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness