The process of reappraising the stage work is well underway in France and especially Germany, but English-language criticism has scarcely begun to change its impression of the Bauhaus stage under the directorship of Oskar Schlemmer at the Dessau Bauhaus. In the history of theatre and in journalism⁴ there is still a pervasive insistence on defining early twentieth-century Modernist theatre through texts and their more or less radical new staging (e.g., the controversial content of Ibsen or Strindberg, the naturalism of Chekhov, the staging of Craig’s Hamlet in Moscow, Brechtian alienation, Meyerhold’s Constructivist productions et alia) which has consigned the non-narrative (‘abstract’) theatre of the Bauhaus to the outer fringes of Modernist eccentricity. Lack of information and a dearth of commentary in English have compounded the problem. Alternatively, when the Bauhaus stage is placed in the history of performance art and the avant-garde as Roselee Goldberg first did in 1977 (Goldberg 1977) it stands out as strangely anomalous in the line of development she later traces in her seminal book Performance Art from Futurism to the Present (Goldberg [1979] 1988). Schlemmer’s tight-knit form sits uneasily amongst the stimulating ill manners and anarchy of the Futurists, the Expressionist and political excesses of the Dadaists and the bullying avant-garde tactics of the Surrealists. This study is aware of the pitfalls of placing Oskar Schlemmer’s work within the history of any genre, but it acknowledges to some extent the sense of interpreting Schlemmer alongside Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig in their attempts to revitalise the theatre stage (see Kirchmann 1997; Louppe 1999; Schober 1994, 1997). However, arguably Schlemmer demands equally to be considered within the history of dance (Rousier 2001), happenings and the American avant-garde (Pawelke 2005), performance art (Louppe 1999, Niimi 1999, Rasche 1994), postmodern dance (Moyniham and Odom 1984, Blistène 1999, Niimi 1999, Fabbri 2001), contemporary dance and digital performance (Norman 2001, Duhm 2008) and even kinetic and pop art (Krystof 1994: 55–7). Schlemmer’s stage work is, it seems, an enigma. Persistently mentioned usually as little more than a name in the avant-garde historical canon, Schlemmer is rarely well or even fully explained. It seems he has affinities with a range of avant-garde performance that came after him, yet these affinities have so far remained elusive and difficult to define.

Commentators on the theatre of the Bauhaus up to the late 1980s contributed to three unhelpful clichés: that Schlemmer’s stage work is robotic and mechanical, that he suffers from the fatal split between the ‘Apollonian’ discipline of his paintings and the ‘Dionysian’ freedom of performance; and finally that the presence of a stage at the Bauhaus is an example of the Wagnerian urge towards the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’. These myths allow little scope for identifying any synergy between our contemporary stages and the ‘abstract’ space of the Bauhaus stage. Dirk Scheper, writing in 1988, does make a short attempt at the end of his long study to link Schlemmer with, amongst others, figures such as Alwin Nikolais and Rebecca Horn, but although affinities are demonstrable between his work and theirs, the issue is scarcely explored by him in any depth (Scheper 1988: 279–89). Eric Michaud in the 1970s, though he has softened his judgement since (Michaud 1996: 184–187), makes no bones about it: he interprets Schlemmer as fatally limited in his stage work, straitjacketed by the Bauhaus philosophy, particularly that of Kandinsky, and takes a restricted view of Bauhaus ideas as linked to a rigid and unrealistic Utopia that could never be attained; as a result, the stage figures are ultimately robotic and mechanical (Michaud 1978a). Art historians tended before around 1990 to lament the fact that Schlemmer spent so much of his time on the ephemeral art form of performance, and because Hildebrandt in 1946 (see Krystof 1994) unfortunately identified the Apollonian/Dionysian split in Schlemmer between painting and the stage (roughly equivalent to control and freedom) this has become somewhat of a cliché, and a misguiding one. Despite the words originating from Schlemmer himself, it is simply inaccurate to divide Schlemmer’s consciousness and work in this way: it is more accurate to say that his stage work actually constituted the successful fusion of these two impulses. Another falsehood is that the Bauhaus stage is a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ or unified work of art; recent commentators in German such as Thomas Schober (Schober 1997: 124) and Kay Kirchmann (Kirchmann 1997: 88) have correctly pointed out that Schlemmer’s method, at least, was the exact opposite to this: an abstraction, honing down and synthesising of elements peculiar to the stage, rather than a wider inclusive approach. It is exactly this minimalism that has been recognised as distinctive of his work by dance commentators such as Debra McCall (Moyniham and Odom 1984) and later critical commentators Laurence Louppe (1999) and Ryu Niimi (1999).

The workshops of the Bauhaus were dynamic powerhouses fuelled by ideas from some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Walter Gropius, Lyonel Feininger and Oskar Schlemmer himself. All these artists were extraordinarily well read and deeply involved in contemporary debates on culture, history, aesthetics and philosophy. They believed themselves, correctly as I shall argue, to be helping to shape the century to come and beyond. Schlemmer’s stage workshop was an essential part of this, the ‘beating heart of the Bauhaus’ as Goldberg describes it (Goldberg 2003). European Modernists in all their various guises, Futurists, Constructivists, Dadaists, Surrealists, from Moscow to Paris, Berlin to Rome, dispersed into the New World as émigrés becoming artists and teachers who consequently impacted upon the arts, design and architecture. Today, Bauhaus influence on industrial design is fully acknowledged. Similarly, Bauhaus architectural style, as manifested in the Dessau building, and supposedly developed in the New Bauhaus in Chicago, seems to define Modernism. Bauhaus pedagogical influence within art schools was and is pervasive. However, artists from the 1950s onwards who privilege(d) the visual, plastic and aural qualities of the stage and performing body above character, narrative and themes also owe much to the peculiar mix that was Bauhaus Modernism and in many ways their work brings to fruition the unrealised potential of the Bauhaus stage and its highly original and radical recasting of stage semiotics. Moreover, the ‘International Style’, with its stress on functionalism, actually denies many of the values held dear within the Bauhaus until about 1928 when Hannes Meyer took over from Walter Gropius, values epitomised in the stage work. This book will trace the history of such values.

Artists at the Bauhaus were coming to terms with flux, change and motion in a world that longed for certainties. Walter Gropius declared (retrospectively) that the purpose of the Bauhaus was finding an ‘objective common denominator of form’, ‘general superpersonal laws’ and ‘universally acknowledged basic concepts’ within a ‘science of design’ (Gropius in Neumann [1970] 1993: 21). A recent publication on the stage of the Dessau Bauhaus similarly interprets the original stage work of the Bauhaus as looking for ‘universal, generalising models’ (Akbar 2008: 17). These fixed points of reference, however, were persistently seen within the Bauhaus, certainly up to 1928 when Gropius left, and probably persistently in individuals beyond then, very much in terms of Gestalt thinking.⁵ It is hard to underestimate the impact of Gestalt concepts not only within the Bauhaus but more generally within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German aesthetics and philosophy; yet they have been little addressed by commentators. Wensinger quotes T. Lux Feininger as saying:

Outside the Bauhaus, Gestalt thinking, with its notion of an ‘Urbild’ or pre-existing form, played a role in early phenomenology that claimed an ‘essence’ or ‘eidios’ in perception, its ideas slowly developing from the mid-nineteenth century onwards within philosophy departments of German Universities; phenomenology was nurtured particularly by those scientific cuckoos in the philosophical nest, the (Gestalt) psychologists. At times Gestalt thought is indistinguishable from vitalism, a movement as equally reviled as it was adored, that attempted, like Gestalt thinking (and like the Bauhaus itself), to be both scientific and holistic in the early years of the twentieth century. An approach to Modernism that accommodates change, time and organicism, identified within the heart of the Bauhaus, enables a more holistic and visionary interpretation of the Bauhaus, and especially of its theatre throughout its existence under Schlemmer. The visionary affinity between the Modernist avant-garde, strongly manifested at the Bauhaus, and aspects of later (postmodern) theatre and performance is identified and celebrated most notably by Bonnie Marranca in her book Ecologies of Theater (Marranca 1996). It is also recognised and restated by recent scholarship on Schlemmer himself in German and French (e.g., Bossmann 1994, Rasche 1994, Schober 1997, Blistène 1999 and Niimi 1999). None of these commentators, however, clearly identify how the aesthetic idealism of the 1920s, at least as it is commonly presented, can be squared with its continual and insistent manifestation via the body on the Bauhaus stage. Beginning with Heidegger in the 1920s and later Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the 1940s, stress upon the embeddedness of the body in the world moves phenomenology and embodied thinking towards increasingly existential interpretations. This book argues that Schlemmer unwittingly unravelled the very idealism he ‘bodied forth’ on stage; but in doing so he opened up a far richer seam of exploration, whereby our very uncertainties about our being in the world and the ever present hope of transcendence are held in a delicate and perpetually enriching balance. His journey into the materiality of objects, their handling, their use, and his insistent deployment of all the material aspects of the stage moves his idealism far from the Platonic Utopianism that Michaud describes and closer to a Cagean minimalist aesthetic of the holiness of the ordinary. The visionary is not lost, but recast into modes we can more easily accept, and establishes a rapport between Schlemmer’s practice and our own that in part explains the fascination that his extraordinary work is able continually to provoke.

Doris Krystof demonstrates in her survey of Schlemmer’s reception in Germany since his death in 1943 how specifically in his case the past has been interpreted according to the present in which it is received (Krystof 1994: 50). We are as we interpret, and we interpret as we are. The phenomenological method is at the heart of this book, and is closely linked to hermeneutics; and (despite Marxist- and Feminist-led criticisms of its supposed essentialism) the phenomenological approach is acutely aware of the accretions of culture, prejudice and familiarity that cloud the phenomena we study. It is our business as researchers to recognise these contexts and our ‘lenses’. Paradoxically, we search out as much as possible about the phenomena we study precisely in order to ask better and more open questions. Accordingly, in this study, historical research sits alongside what is in effect a phenomenological ‘reduction’ of Schlemmer’s work, stripping back his work to the common threads that bind us to him today. This chapter gives a history of the stage at the Bauhaus and is followed by the history of ideas in Chapter 2, but thereafter the material is not structured chronologically. Rather, Schlemmer’s work is analysed by grouping together the stage elements with which he ‘painted’ space: light, scenery, body, motion, object, sound, time. The method is always to start with the historically specific progressing into the phenomenologically direct, that is, by describing the physical effect his applications have on our experience of the stage and our formulation of meaning from that experience. What emerges is that Schlemmer opened up his own and the Bauhaus’s essentialist notions to a permeable and shifting art form using space, time and the body; my suggestion is that we have far more in common with Schlemmer than has hitherto been recognized. As a consequence in this study Schlemmer’s manipulation of the stage elements will continually be set alongside numerous twentieth century and contemporary performances, some from major directors and others not so well known, who also utilise all elements of the ‘Schaubühne’ (Schlemmer 1925: 10) or visual stage.⁶

These words by Oskar Schlemmer’s widow and literary executor Tut Schlemmer in a lecture given in 1949 in Berlin at the America House on Schlemmer’s stage work, which she repeated several times all over Europe, give some flavour of the enormous variety of theatre which permeated the Bauhaus from its earliest days.