(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)

Oskar Schlemmer (Stuttgart, September 4th 1888 - Baden-Baden April 13th 1943) was a German painter, sculptor, man of the theatre and choreographer. He was one of the most innovative creators of the Bauhaus. He imagined a "mathematics of dance". One of his best known works is Triadisches Ballett.

Author, filmmaker and video artist Charles Picq (1952-2012) entered working life in the 70s through theatre and photography. A- fter resuming his studies (Maîtrise de Linguistique - Lyon ii, Maîtrise des sciences et Techniques de la Communication - grenoble iii), he then focused on video, first in the field of fine arts at the espace Lyonnais d'art Contemporain (ELAC) and with the group « Frigo », and then in dance.
   On creation of the Maison de la Danse in Lyon in 1980, he was asked to undertake a video documentation project that he has continued ever since. During the ‘80s, a decade marked in France by the explosion of contemporary dance and the development of video, he met numerous artists such as andy Degroat, Dominique Bagouet, Carolyn Carlson, régine Chopinot, susanne Linke, Joëlle Bouvier and regis Obadia, Michel Kelemenis. He worked in the creative field with installations and on-stage video, as well as in television with recorded shows, entertainment and documentaries.

His work with Dominique Bagouet (80-90) was a unique encounter. He documents his creativity, assisting with Le Crawl de Lucien and co-directing with his films Tant Mieux, Tant Mieux and 10 anges. in the 90s he became director of video development for the Maison de la Danse and worked, with the support of guy Darmet and his team, in the growing space of theatre video through several initiatives:
       - He founded a video library of dance films with free public access. This was a first for France. Continuing the video documentation of theatre performances, he organised their management and storage.
       - He promoted the creation of a video-bar and projection room, both dedicated to welcoming school pupils.
       - He started «présentations de saisons» in pictures.
       - He oversaw the DVD publication of Le tour du monde en 80 danses, a pocket video library produced by the Maison de la Danse for the educational sector.

       - He launched the series “scènes d'écran” for television and online. He undertook the video library's digital conversion and created Numeridanse.

His main documentaries are: enchaînement, Planète Bagouet, Montpellier le saut de l'ange, Carolyn Carlson, a woman of many faces, grand ecart, Mama africa, C'est pas facile, Lyon, le pas de deux d'une ville, Le Défilé, Un rêve de cirque.

He has also produced theatre films: Song, Vu d'ici (Carolyn Carlson), Tant Mieux, Tant Mieux, 10 anges, Necesito and So schnell, (Dominique Bagouet), Im bade wannen, Flut and Wandelung (Susanne Linke), Le Cabaret Latin (Karine Saporta), La danse du temps (Régine Chopinot), Nuit Blanche (Abou Lagraa), Le Témoin (Claude Brumachon), Corps est graphique (Käfig), Seule et WMD (Françoise et Dominique Dupuy), La Veillée des abysses (James Thiérrée), Agwa (Mourad Merzouki), Fuenteovejuna (Antonio Gades), Blue Lady revistied (Carolyn Carlson).

Source: Maison de la Danse de Lyon

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