Bauhaus, Constructivism, Performance

In the winter of 1929, the Bauhaus arranged one its famed parties to which guests of the Dessau art school were invited to wear "something metallic." The Metal Party, with is fantastical metallic costumes, and decorations placed throughout the studios, stairways, corridors and open areas, was documented by a few photographs and described by a local newspaper. The tone of the review is full of awe at the inventiveness of the mise en scène. The entire new building in Dessau, which opened its doors in 1925, had been transformed for a temporary festivity inspired by the design vision undergirding the various disciplines taught in the school's curriculum. There are numerous questions that can be raised about the performance vision implied by these large scale parties (e.g. the Kite Festival, the Lantern Festival, the White Party), trying to link it to the Bauhaus dances, Moholy-Nagy's constructivist film/photography, and the theatrical legacy of a radical "design-in motion" concept largely forgotten today. Curiously, Oskar Schlemmer's design-choreography has been mostly treated as a minor historical footnote, while it actually, as I will argue, deserves to be more fully examined in the context of twenty-first century digital art and performance installations.

Since the Bauhaus was predominantly an academy for the visual arts, crafts, and design, the presence of Schlemmer's Stage Workshop seems, at first sight, to have been peripheral, whereas the theatrical parties, from the beginning, found a prominent place in the school's annual calendar. Playful exuberance was encouraged, we learn from the recent exhibition Bauhaus: Art as Life at Barbican Art Gallery, London (May 3-August 12, 2012), which foregrounds such scenes of lively social choreographies. One photograph shows "the building as a stage," with six actors posing on the various floors in masks and costumes, arranged in a vertical/diagonal configuration that renders them almost as architectural elements. More interesting, for the archaeology of site-specific performance, is the transformation of architecture into a stage world, including Schlemmer's musical stairs and the innumerable glass spheres suspended from the ceiling, which inspired some of the artists to photograph themselves against refractive surfaces. Another image shows members of the Stage Workshop in costume on the rooftop, and others depict party-revelers at the Metal Party arriving in outrageous costumes made of aluminum foil, pots and pans, spoons, or other functional metallic materials, to slide down a metal chute erected to connect the two Bauhaus buildings.

The catalogue notes that the parties moved from imaginative improvisations to the rhythm of the seasons (Weimar), with the Lantern Festival in the spring and the Kite Festival in the autumn, to spectacular and monumental stage productions (Dessau), where these celebrations promoted contact between the school and the public. The parties were considered important by the master teachers (Johannes Itten lectured on "our play, our party, our work"). Judging from the photographs the festivities gave free rein to masters and students to demonstrate their design creativity, providing opportunities to conceive invitations, posters, costumes, decorations.¹ There seems to have been a method in these performative festivities, at least

Schlemmer clearly articulates the precise need to "evolve parodies" of all existing theatre forms. This formulation took me by surprise:

The endeavours of the Bauhaus to integrate art and artistic ideals with the craftsmanship and technology by way of investigating the elements of design, and the attempts to direct all activities together toward architecture, naturally exert an influence on the work of the stage. For the stage is after all architectonic: it is ordered and planned, and it provides a setting for form and colour in their liveliest and most versatile form. The stage was there on the very day the Bauhaus opened, because enjoyment in designing was there on that first day. This enjoyment was first expressed in the celebrations (the lantern party and the kite-flying party), in the invention of masks, the making of costumes and the decoration of rooms. And it was expressed in dancing, dancing, dancing! The music evolved from the Bauhaus dance, which developed from the clown dance into the 'Step'; from the concertina...