Oskar Schlemmer's Research Practice at the Dessau Bauhaus
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theatre research international · vol. 29 | no. 2 | pp128–142 C International Federation for Theatre Research 2004 · Printed in the United Kingdom DOI:10.1017/S0307883304000288 Oskar Schlemmer’s Research Practice at the Dessau Bauhaus∗† melissa trimingham In Germany in the 1920s, Oskar Schlemmer engaged in three years of practical research at the Dessau Bauhaus School of Art, on the nature of ‘non-naturalisitic’ or ‘abstract’ stage space, that is, space exploited theatrically for its dynamism, scale, texture and sonic properties. It is argued here that Schlemmer attempts to recreate on stage the metaphysically resonant spaces which he depicts in his paintings. By engaging with an embodied art form, performance, Schlemmer defies the commonly held assumption that the Bauhaus Stage is locked into the ‘machine age’ mentality and rigid Modernist essentialism. On the contrary Schlemmer’s work is revelatory of stage space in direct, simple and phenomenologically intense ways and has much to teach us about the nature of theatrical power in postmodern visual and object theatre, and is better interpreted in the light of postmodern, rather than Modernist, sensibilities. Oskar Schlemmer’s stage work at the Bauhaus is a riddle that continues to fascinate and intrigue. Looking at the photographs, reading descriptions of the stage pieces, watching reconstructions on video, its non-narrative structures, geometric lines, and minimalist stage settings seem to defy the expectations of performers, directors, designers and audience members; even today, in an age that has seen Happenings, performance art and postmodern performance, it brings sharply to our attention how deeply our expectations of the stage are rooted in Stanislavskian traditions. Modernism has many facets, but its manifestation at the Bauhaus, especially in its second phase at Dessau, was an idealistic, socially responsible, ethical striving after the ‘truth’, shaping an artistic style for a new age, a style moreover which could be articulated and defined.1 I shall here argue that Oskar Schlemmer’s stage work, which bears all the outward appearance of this new style, is better understood as ‘post’ modern work that demonstrates the active role of the viewer in making ‘meaning’; and that Schlemmer links most directly with directors and performance artists who concentrate on the shifting and permeable visual, aural and haptic qualities of the performance space rather than notions of semiotic signing, narrative and mimesis: practitioners such as Tadeusz Kantor, Robert Wilson, Pina Bausch. This shift into a postmodern interpretation of Schlemmer’s stage ∗ Acknowledgements: with grateful thanks to Raman Schlemmer † Bauhaus publications did not use capital letters and when quotations are taken from a Bauhaus source this style is followed. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 28 Sep 2021 at 09:28:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307883304000288 trimingham Research Practice at the Dessau Bauhaus 129 work begins by paralleling Schlemmer’s ideas on first principles (first in his paintings, then on the stage) with the contemporary phenomenology of the essentialist and idealist philosopher Edmund Husserl, who identified a pre-cognitive primary level of perception he called an ‘epoche’. The full implications of our perceiving an ‘epoche’ via the body were not developed until much later by the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but Schlemmer anticipates these developments through his stage practice. I argue that Schlemmer’s ‘post’ modern stage, despite his own transcendent and visionary leanings, not only reveals the impossibility of the stage communicating a fixed truth, but actively demonstrates an embodied reality that shifts according to culture, time and place, and is the result of active communion between performer and audience. Schlemmer’s modest recipe for stage research starts with ‘die Elementare’ (‘the fundamentals’): ‘man gehe vom Punkt, von der Linie aus, von der einfachen Flache¨ ... vom Korper¨ ...von der einfachen Farbe ...vom Material ...vom Raum ...von seinem Gesetz und seinem Geheimnis ...vom korperlichen¨ Zustand’ (‘One should start with a dot, a line, a bare surface ...the body; and with simple colours ...with materials ...with space ...its laws and its mysteries ...with one’s physical state’). Taking a step, raising a hand, moving a finger: Schlemmer’s research tools are absurdly simple, considering the complexity of the stage medium, ‘dieser Sonderwelt des Lebens, des Scheins, dieser zweiten Wirklichkeit, in der alles vom Glanz des Magischen umwittert ist ...’ (‘that special realm of life and illusion, that second reality in which everything is surrounded with the nimbus of magic’). Schlemmer’s promise is even more modest than his means: ‘Dies alles tue und habe man! Dann ist das Loch des Schlussels¨ fur¨ das Ratsel,¨ das die Bauhausbuhne¨ anscheinend gibt, beinahe schon gefunden’.2 (‘All these are the precepts one should follow! They will lead if not to the key, at least to the keyhole to the riddle which the Bauhaus Theatre seemingly poses’). I have chosen to focus on Schlemmer’s research work on the Dessau Bauhaus stage in preference to his better known piece, Das Triadische Ballett (The Triadic Ballet). Even so I have been highly selective, concentrating on the aspects of Schlemmer’s work that are least understood, namely his research into stage space. Schlemmer was in post atDessaubyautumn1925 planning the stage workshop, and was active on the stage from 1926 onwards. According to Schlemmer, the work at Dessau represented a change from Weimar, where he had no stage. At Dessau he says he set himself seriously to the task of investigating ‘B¨uhnenprobleme’ (‘stage problems’): ‘diese liegen fur¨ uns im grundsatzlichen,¨ elementaren, in der bloßlegung ihres primaren¨ sinns’.3 (‘For us these problems and their solution lie in fundamentals, in elementary matters, in discovering literally the primary meaning of the stage’). The resulting Programme der Bauhaus B¨uhne (‘Programmes of the Bauhaus Stage’) was toured in 1929. By this time Schlemmer was about to leave the Bauhaus, then under the directorship of Hannes Meyer, as a protest against the increasing pressure to produce political theatre. The years from 1925 to 1929 therefore represent a period of research activity where work was developed on a single stage and culminated in the touring programme of twelve short performance pieces. During this period Schlemmer did no paintings, whereas up until then this had been his main area of spatial investigation. Instead of creating the virtual space of the painting he creates the actual space of a stage; but his concerns remain the same. Schlemmer is Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 28 Sep 2021 at 09:28:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307883304000288 130 trimingham Research Practice at the Dessau Bauhaus on a metaphysical quest, philosophical in its intent, asking questions that commonly preoccupy a painter or a stage designer, but which rarely interest the actor or director involved with ‘drama’. These questions cluster around notions of space and its mysterious nature. What is space made up from? How does it change? How do we perceive space? How may we control it? In what ways does our experience of space change between our three-dimensional daily immersion in it and our experience of it as an ‘imaginary’ space, that is, that of a painting or the stage? How is our construction of meaning affected by our perception of space? As a Modernist, Schlemmer thought he could come up with some answers. Moreover, as a Modernist, he thought in idealist terms: und dient sie doch nicht zuletzt dem metaphysischen bedurfnis¨ des menschen, indem sie eine scheinwelt aufrichtet und auf der basis des rationalen das transzendentale schafft.4 (Not the least of its functions is to serve the metaphysical needs of man by constructing a world of illusion and by creating the transcendental on the basis of the rational.) Can stage illusions be compared to the visionary insights of a painting? Schlemmer clearly thought so. Schlem- mer as a painter engages with meta- physics all his life endlessly creating the beautiful, resonating and unreal contours of the virtual spaces in his paintings, giving the viewer a direct access to a space no one has ever haptically (i.e. with the whole body) experienced. This article is concerned with how he approaches the problem differently as a stage practitioner. It is worth pausing to look at one of the last paintings Schlemmer did in 1925 before he embarked on the Dessau period of stage work when he did no paintings, an extraordinary gap in his painterly oeuvre. This painting is Ruheraum (Quiet Room) 1925 (Fig. 1).5 Fig. 1 Oskar Schlemmer (1888–1943) Ruheraum, 1925 (Quiet Room), oil on canvas, 110 cm × 90 cm. One of the In this painting he represents an ideal last paintings Schlemmer did before his Dessau stage space on a two dimensional surface, a work, reminiscent of a spa resting room, revealing a space that can never be entered, that stage-like space yearning towards free space beyond the can only be ‘experienced’ in this form: delineated contours. Photo Archive C. Raman Schlemmer, IT – 28824 Oggebbio (VB), Italy. c 2004. a carefully constructed space moulded Buhnen¨ Archiv Oskar Schlemmer/The Oskar Schlemmer by the painters eye to give us the Theatre Estate. sensation of a kind of perfection. Space, which in Company at Table still receded into infinite depths, is limited and defined by architectural motifs in the paintings after 1925, but in such a way that a Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 28 Sep 2021 at 09:28:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.