Somehow, Oskar Shclemmer's lifework is inseparable from the history of the Bauhaus movement. Founded in Weimar in 1919, The Bauhaus School brought about new perspectives on the Arts: through the means of abstraction, its pursuit was to liberate the human being from the chaos of life. Within this unity of art and life, for the first time in history the elite arts -or high culture- were associated with craftwork, producing both the fracturing of the power structures of Art Schools and Art teaching, and the development of new ideas and concepts, in parallel with the experimentation with new techniques and technologies for its implementation. This usage of new construction materials, as well as the deeply geometrical outlines and the new ideas about design and colour, were established as an aperture towards new proposals sin the creation of spaces, where Art emerged as a way of directly influencing the life, quotidian, and prevailing social structures. Their vision on the artistic production was interdisciplinary and connective, hence their regard about life, space and society.
In 1923, Gropius hired Schlemmer to be in charge of the Theatre Workshop at the Bauhaus. Among the diverse disciplines he included in his classes, one can cite figure drawing, integrated kinetic motion studies and philosophy (focused on the human being), all of which were conclusively integrated by means of scenic production, allowing a broadening of the discursive frontiers and a proposal of new social structures. The reduction of social, labour and private spaces, the industrialization of working tasks, the new sorts of serialized production that the technologization of culture brought about, and the resulting cultural changes in the regard of both time and space were key concepts in Schlemmer's work. Unlike most of his colleagues from the Bauhaus, he placed the human being at the center of his work, rejecting nonrepresentational pure abstraction and focusing on the human body as an architectural form. He was fascinated by the range of movements the human physical structure could make, seeing the human figure as a complex of concave, convex and flat surfaces interacting with each other and the surrounding space. This analysis concerning the body within the space can easily be tracked through his costume design, providing his research with elements to explore both spatially and artistically.
This exhaustive study guided him to create in 1922 his revolutionary and internationally acclaimed Triadisches Ballett. More an antiballet than a factual ballet, this play seeked more to geometrically explore time and space through movement than to virtuously and individually express the human body. Carrying masks which transfigured them into anonymous characters, the dancers incarnated generic behavioural prototipes, and were transfigured from the normal to geometrical shapes. Through this research, Schlemmer was able to obtain a repertoire of basic elements or elementary forms for the escenographic representation, having a decisive influence on subsequent productions by avant-garde directors from the XXth century. Interestingly enough, Das Triadische Ballett was performed only a few times under Schlemmer’s direction, and it was always displayed in different ways: the number of dancers, the musical accompainment, the sequence of the individual numbers and the length of the performance changed every time. Therefore, it is impossible to speak of an original choreography of Das Triadische Ballett. In any case, Schlemmer's purpose was to expose dramatically his visual ideas, in order for them to be understood more as a space of possibilities than a immutable choreography.
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