Dance Scene and Trends in Germany

The Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture was founded in Weimar in 1919. It was based in Dessau from 1925 to 1933 until the Nazis forced the closure of the school that had such a major influence on style. Now, 90 years on, the Bauhaus dances are being declared classics.

Triadic Ballet by Oskar Schlemmer, then aged 34, which was premiered in Stuttgart in 1922, is regarded as the climax of abstract ballet. There was no danced plot, just the “free play” of an optical composition. The tutu costumes consisted of brightly coloured wooden rings, the dancers’ arms were raised as stiffly as swords, and their legs appeared to be as rigid as steel. Their torsos were made of papier mâché: balls as round as globes. Oskar Schlemmer, the master of Bauhaus, admitted later: “We believed that the dancer’s strength (his physical as much as his psychological strength, of course!) would be enough to conquer the costumes’ rigidity through the intensity of the movement. It must be admitted that this battle with material did not always end in the dancer’s victory ...”

By using masks, materials and masquerades, Schlemmer wanted to clobber the human body, because that was what was happening on the production lines, in bureaucracy and mass society in any case. Nothing left the human body intact. Dancing against modernism’s impositions had already been Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s watchword in Hellerau, the garden city near Dresden. Today, there is a European dance centre at the Festspielhaus, which is also home to top choreographer William Forsythe. Since the beginning of the year, Culture Manager Dieter Jaenicke has been directing the Festspielhaus.

Hotbed of avant-garde dance

In 1925, the school disappeared from Weimar and went on an odyssey via Dessau and Berlin to Black Mountain College in America, where Merce Cunningham and John Cage worked. But when Danish director Kirsten Dehlholm shows her almost statue-like choreographies on simple, straight stage steps at the Festspielhaus in her Operation: Orfeo, Schlemmer’s famous painting, Bauhaus Stairway, springs to mind. Bauhaus was a movement that was once a hotbed of international, abstract, avant-garde dance.

Yet in Schlemmer’s lifetime, the Triadic Ballet was a flop. The work made a comeback only decades later, when choreographers were looking for Bauhaus dance. It was reconstructed by Margarete Hasting in Munich in 1968, by Gerhard Bohner in Darmstadt in 1973, by Helfried Foron in Tübingen in 1978 and by Debra McCall in New York in 1982. Each time, Oskar Schlemmer’s one dictum was feted: “The literary is avoided almost in principal; thus, the formal ... the mechanical, lighting effects. At best dance.”

Only 90 years later was this statement called into question. On the stages of the city of Gera, Elena Tumanova danced en pointe to the slot machine music of her old Russian school. The piece were are talking about here is Déjà-vu: Mensch und Form. As in the Triadic Ballet this “Mechanical Ballet” of 1923 by Bauhaus pupil Kurt Schmidt plays with geometrical forms moved by dancers. The five-act piece had already been reconstructed once before, in 1987, by Bauhaus expert and founder of the Düsseldorf Theater der Klänge, Jörn U. Lensing. It is to be reshown at the Theaterhaus Jena in November 2009.

Abstraction and harmony stand shoulder to shoulder

“Mechanical Ballet” is consciously not being “reconstructed” in Gera. Ballet master Peter Werner-Ranke, who has been in residence for the last 35 years, says defiantly: “I do not want to reanimate twentieth century modernism. I live today.” So what does he want to do? Werner-Ranke takes a breath: “Dancing en pointe in particular expresses the greatest possible freedom from archaeological excavations in the soil of modernism, which holds only limitations and debris, only machines and abstraction.” Then he adds with a winning smile: “After all, it is called ‘Mechanical Ballet’, not ‘mechanical dance theatre’.” Werner-Ranke would like to have abstraction and harmony standing shoulder to shoulder. “It is quite clear” that the abstract surface wanted to return to the body, and form wanted to return to people. “The body and form, that is ballet. That is emotion! That is love! Yes, one could think that a ball falls in love with a cube ...” Werner-Ranke celebrates his Kurt Schmidt as euphorically as Otto Dix once did (to whom Kurt Schmidt dedicated a ballet that received national acclaim in 1992) - as a classicist whom he wants to reconcile with classicism.

Tarak Assam of the Tanzcompagnie Giessen also had a similar idea. He discovered the compositions of Bauhaus painter Lionel Feininger, which were inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach’s fugues. So in the Bauhaus commemorative year, he has Feininger’s Fugues danced to Bach’s music. After all, Bauhaus is classical German culture. Bauhaus, ballet and Bach: an alliance with classicism seems to have been forged. It also applies to the dances from Das Nusch-Nuschi by Paul Hindemith and Petrushka, a Burleque in four scenes by Igor Stravinsky. They, too, have long been part of the classical canon. It is only for the commemorative year that they are once again being dubbed Bauhaus and the Young Savages of the 1920s. The Theaterhaus Jena is staging them in November 2009.