Modern Dance and Abstraction: Oskar Schlemmer’s “Triadic Ballet” at the Bauhaus

By:

Schlemmer, a painter engaged in the German artistic debate throughout the Weimar and Bauhaus years and unambiguously committed to modernism, along with the underlying quest for the future total art work as stated by Walter Gropius, may be seen as a figure of confluence. I would like to explore the hypothesis that Schlemmer’s choreographic endeavour constitutes an appropriate model for modern dance, as a new form of performance in the wake of the nineteenth-century aspirations to a Gesamtkunstwerk. This hypothesis is in sharp contrast with common assumptions about the canons of dance modernism, usually defined by two other trends in modern dance rightly considered in the scholarly literature as major references: the Ballets Russes’ modernist ballets and the German Expressionist dance. The very concept of abstract dance might be understood as an apparent opposition in the terms; as a theoretical issue, it confronts us with more challenging questions and brings up new answers. I will demonstrate that The Triadic Ballet represents a place of tensions followed by resolutions, where Schlemmer successfully conducts a renegotiation of deeply-rooted tendencies: abstraction-expression; mechanised-human bodies; heterogeneity-homogeneity of an art work constituted by a dialogue of different mediums. It will be of importance to underline the continuity of Schlemmer’s endeavour with a theoretical debate carried over by many generations about the nature of stage representation, human imitation and the aesthetic function of performing human bodies on stage. The very idea of dance as a performing art lies at the heart of these theoretical issues. Schlemmer will help us to define first abstract dance as a new language, relying on symbols; second, performance as new genre, integrating in a common vision and purpose heterogeneous forms of artistic expression; and third the modern use of rhythmical movement as a new medium.

Stream: Arts Theory and Criticism

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

DEA, MA, PhD candidate. Specialized in European Modern poetry, I have developed an interdisciplinary method suiting my starting-point intentions: to define dancing as a rhetoric pattern and to elaborate a rigorous comparison between the way of writing poetry and the way of dancing at the beginning of the twentieth century. I studied French modern poetry under this angle (fourth-year degree dissertation: “Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Valéry: Dancing as a model and pattern in French modern poetry"), and then had the opportunity to tackle the same subject by enlarging my research to the European modern poetry. My comparative study drew the similarities between William Butler Yeats’, Georg Trakl’s, and Marinetti’s works and the French poets's, in order to examine whether this dancing quality could be considered as a characteristic for the modern poetry in Europe. (Fifth-year degree dissertation: “Dancing in the European Poetry at the edge of the XIXth and the XXth centuries : a study of W.B. Yeats, Georg Trakl, Marinetti"). I studied as an exchange student at the Università degli Studi di Pisa, Italy, in 2003/2004 (Erasmus scholarship); at the Ruprecht-Karls Universität, Heidelberg University, Germany, at the Summer school 2005 (DAAD scholarship), and in Berlin at the Winter semester 2006 (Goethe Institut scholarship).