Watching: Stage and Dance

Overview

Walter Gropius saw stage design as an interplay of various disciplines, comparable to architecture, forming an "orchestral unity." From the structural affinity of the two arts, he derived the necessity of establishing a Bauhaus stage. Here, the fundamental elements of "stage design" were to be examined and reformulated. At the center of the Bauhaus stage was Oskar Schlemmer, who headed the stage workshop from 1923 to 1929. With his Triadic Ballet and the Bauhaus Dances, he explored the tension between people and space, and thus the fundamental conditions of theatrical design, through abstract and geometric play with form, color, sound, movement, and light.