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Theatre and Performance Lecture Notes

Lecture notes on Theatre and performance looking at the work of the Bauhaus in practice. Great notes that you can use.

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Reece Anthony
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166 views

Theatre and Performance Lecture Notes

Lecture notes on Theatre and performance looking at the work of the Bauhaus in practice. Great notes that you can use.

Uploaded by

Reece Anthony
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The Bauhaus Week 8 TI-P Lecture.

Essentially it was one of the first design colleges in Germany.


Klee moved stage to the centre of the syllabus. He did two paintings, one is of a building
(architecture) and the other it the theatre. He feels that theatre is the centre of the work. Most of
his theatre didnt happen at the Bauhaus.
Arts at the Bauhaus being considered in three dimensions. How do all the things work together.
Always linking the body to something thats two dimensional. Theyd do yoga to warm the students
up at the start of the day preparing for the drawing class. They would use the whole body as they
draw.
Schlemmer is the one that made the stage workshop famous, painter and took over the stage
workshop which was never taught as a subject (always as a sideline), but important to the life of
the Bauhause. The stage is an orchestral complex, all the different elements of the arts are
brought and composed together. Thinking of theatre more like music (like the score that I saw in
the reading).
To go back to the begging of the Bauhaus theatre. Shreyer originally directed the theatre
workshops and had some experience in theatre. HE was in fact more conventional to Oscar
schlemmer, his theatre would tell a story and represent things outside of the theatre space. He
tries to score the theatre (visual vs written). There is a whole score to do with the pitch of things
and the speed of movement and there is a key associated with it.
Strange video. Weird arty things that are moving around. LOOKS LIKE BUTTON MOON. WTF?
Comes across as pretty experimental, but also very serious. The Bauhaus students felt it was
humourless and didnt actually really necessarily enjoy it, takes itself so serious that it can don the
giggles. It seems pretty abstract but actually just represents a spiritual narrative with architectural
ideas. Shreyer got removed from the workshops and Schlemmer took over. His style was less
sacred and focused more on dance and comedy playing with material and forms. He was
interested in the triadic ballet. He was interested in schematically thinking of colours and costume.
Non narrative theatre. Almost like kinetic art.
Exploring where the body is in space. Schlemmer and Laban would have been aware of each
others work. And laban trained as an architect also. Must hold in our minds that the parts that
could look conemporary could be from the reconstruction.
The figural cabinet is more related to paintings and thinking of the STAGE AS A MOVING
PAINTING. On the right is not schlemmer, but kurt Schmidt, which was that people would imagine
the stage as a moving machine. (living now in the machine age).
Schlemmer did theorise the theatre. Oral stage, where the author dominates. Play stage, where
the actor dominates, or a visual stage where the artist / designer dominates. The individual
performer is just there to communicate the moving images that he wants to create, making the
moving painting.
He envisiaged, but never did it, that you could have an absolute visual stage where nothing is
alive, and you control the whole thing from a switchboard. (we actually could do this now though
tbh).

Diagrams for the body in space. He began to explore this movement in space a little bit more. He
is trying to distill things down to explore particular sets of movement on stage.
Man and Mask (oskar schelmmer and the bauhause stage). Also elements of popular clowning
theatre. Idea of real laboratoruy element, lets give the dancers a particular style of movement, but
we dont really know how they arrived at the end of the solidification. This is a laboratory that is
really trying to get to the centre of form and movement in the theatre.
Metal dance,. Looks like something out of Doctor Who.
Pole dance uses 12 poles and looks at the movement into a large space. The result is a song of
the joints. Uses sound really weirdly. Although the body has vanished from the stage, it is made
aware of the negative space of the body as we see the movement. He was often criticised for
taking the human out of the performance. Its an abstraction from the body, and must remember
that the students of the Bauhaus were visual artists, he couldnt rely on them for technique so
schlemmer would work with dancers.
Trying to articulate the world in a practical and spiritual way. They had a stage space in Dessau. It
was a multi purpose use space with a stage which was also used as an auditorium. Built for
practical reasons more than anything.
Erwin Piscator was an influence on Brecht.
Puppet theatre design was also using circles, and would be kaleidoscopic shapes. They would
have performers on the Dessau Bauhaus building. Moving towards site specific theatre here.
Maybe we can use the whole building and really transport the theatre! The idea of a space stage
would be seen that was totally unprecedented. Idea of taking theatre out of the theatre.
There were Bauhaus festivals, one in each season, Sounds like a lot of fun. Always feel so
pressed for time, we should just do things. The various teachers would have their own costumes.
The Bauhaus were looking at ideas of totality and embedding yourself in the work.
Its all really pretty radical work. Trying to analyse and go back to basic elements. They didnt really
have that divide between going around outside, partying and dicking around but actually it was
more of a blend and the two really go together and complement each other.
Painting is where you are most likely to have come cross the Bauhaus. The painting are exploring
things that are quite expressionism.
Paul Klee and Moholy_nagy (Hungarian artist, interested in light and movement most of all) were
involved with the Bauhause, a lot of the work was not at the Bauhaus itself but instead part of their
own work.
There was some mysoginy in the Bauhaus.
Schlemmer looks at what the stage would be if you can accept the mechanical stage as its own
genre, does the human really need to be in it.
Gestaltung a word used by Bauhaus artists. (like the sense of a whole) so if the tune has some
notes missing it can be translated into how much of a circle do you need to draw without the whole
thing having to be there. How much of a figure do you need to recognise it really as a figure. Can

translate it as a way of looking at physical and visual theatre of today. How we recognise things as
really working together.
Changing political context. They were working just after work war 1 and there was the german
revolution of 1918-19 which led to an end of the war, and lots of money needed to be paid back.
Growing anti-semitism saw a swing to the right. Lots of anti jewish feelings began to occur.
Schelmmer was not entirely guilt free but there was a little trace in the work, and he still stayed in
Germany through Nazism. After the rise of Nazism, and the school was closed by the Nazis in
1933, by which time it had already become a very different place by then which was far less
abstract. And it resulted in many Bauhaus artists emigrated to the USA, and we werent as good at
absorbing them here.
Their influence needed to be sought out, it was there in painting and there in dance, via a number
of routes on abstract expressionism. Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago.
Josef Albers and others taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. < known for staging
the first happening and its a murky area to be unravelled but feels like it was vaguely influenced
by the work of the Bauhaus. There is an interesting and indirect conversation which sees the work
influencing other works. Real movement in work, and Bauhaus really resonates in a lot of the
current work that we see and the way that things are beginning to develop. There are real
resonances there.

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