All those immersive shows where digital computing power and programming skill make pixels, not pigments, thrive. And works of art, especially in the category “Hangs as a poster in my dentist’s waiting room”, become a three-dimensional spatial experience. The big hype! As early as the 1920s, Oskar Schlemmer, the influential Bauhaus artist, cracked his famous bald head about how art could encroach on space. And how the human being, this “space bewitched being”, appears in it.
The most visionary, most radical result of Schlemmer’s search for new forms of art and theater is probably the “Triadic Ballet”, in which he released his fantastic automata from the screen or the sculptural pedestal onto the real stage. More than 100 years after the premiere of this dance event in Stuttgart, the Junior Company of the Bavarian State Ballet the legendary work is now present again. From June 1st to 3rd at the Prinzregententheater.
The “diver” (Auguste Marmus) wears a circular lacquer collar and something curtain-like. This costume was based on one of the nine original characters that survived World War II. The other nine are missing.
(Photo: Marie-Laure Briane)
In 2014, the people of Munich were able to experience the “Triadic Ballet” for the first time. At that time almost 70 years had passed since Schlemmer’s death, and copyright was finally in the public domain. Before that, bizarre legal battles over the artist’s legacy had long made exhibitions complicated, if not impossible. The fact that the juniors of the Staatsballett even dared to tackle this immensely complex project was also due to the director at the time, Ivan Liška. The Czech knew the “Triadic Ballet” from his active time as a dancer. He and his late wife, ballet mistress Colleen Scott, had participated in Gerhard Bohner’s groundbreaking reconstruction of the work at the Academy of Arts in Berlin in 1977 and danced in more than 80 performances in over 30 locations in Europe, Asia and America.
In 1989, however, the kilo-heavy costumes went into boxes, only in 2014, freed from the inheritance, were they unpacked again in Munich. And Liška was able to pass on Schlemmer’s ideal legacy to a new generation of dancers. With great success. The juniors also toured halfway around the world with the “Triadic Ballet”. And now, in 2023, it’s other young dancers who plunge into Oskar Schlemmer’s kinetic adventure in Munich.
Half-blind and deaf, as well as heavy “ball hands”, which is also the name of this figurine, in which the dancer Tyler Robinson is stuck.
(Photo: Marie-Laure Briane)
Anyone who was lucky enough to study Schlemmer’s original figurines, conceived as moving sculptures, up close – in the museum space in Stuttgart or Dessau – is entranced and confused at the same time: How do you want to get into these bold design escapades, into these call signs of modernity people stuck? “The Turkish Dancer”, “The Diver” or “The Dancer in White” – only half of the original 18 figurines have been preserved in their original form, and only because Schlemmer had them shipped to New York in 1938. It was never to be performed there in the Museum of Modern Art, but in the care of MoMa the works of art survived the Second World War and only returned to Europe in 1960.
By then, Oskar Schlemmer had been dead for a long time; the National Socialists had sidelined the artist, who saw himself as apolitical. During his lifetime, his work was shown only once in Germany, in 1937 at the notorious “Degenerate Art” show in Munich. Schlemmer died in 1943, aged just 54, in a sanatorium in Baden-Baden. He never saw his figurines dance again.
Oskar Schlemmer himself danced in the premiere
They are poetic, grotesque, eerie – absolutely gorgeous. And as costumes, especially for dance, quite anti-elastic. Oskar Schlemmer himself, an athletic man, danced in the premiere. At that time, parts of these obstinate constructs are said to have flown around the stage.
Hopefully this will not happen in the Prinzregententheater. The company knows from Ivan Liška, now artistic director of the Bavarian Junior Ballet and chairman of the Heinz Bosl Foundation, that it is the costumes that are in control here. Weighing a kilo, made of sheet steel, plywood or wire, they set limits to torques and jumps, creating new spatial experiences according to the laws of geometry. And when changing costumes, two cloakroom attendants have to assist.
Schlemmer sent his stiff, puppet-like machine beings onto the stage at a time when expressive dancers were hopping around scantily clad on Monte Verità in Ticino. While Mary Wigman and Rudolf von Laban celebrated naturalness and the liberation of the body there, Schlemmer saw the proximity of art and technology and searched for principles of order: “Why triadic? Because three is an extremely important, dominant number in which the monomaniac I and the dualistic opposition is overcome and the collective begins.” Man is not only an organism of flesh and blood, but also a mechanism of measure and number. As if Oskar Schlemmer, whose life theme was the figure in the room, had foreseen virtual reality.
Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet Bavarian Junior Ballet, June 1-3, 7 p.m., Prinzregententheater, tickets from the box office of the Bavarian State Opera, phone 21851920 or www.staatsoper.de