“What are experiments if not the first step into the future?” (O.Schlemmer).
Before the Nazis took control of Weimar Germany and closed down the Bauhaus school forever, artist Oskar Schlemmer was pioneering a new form of abstract dance that remains unique in its vision. Jack Andersen wrote in The New York Times in 1984 that Schlemmer’s dances were “dances only a painter could have choreographed“. Schlemmer applied Nietzsche’s concept of Apollonian and Dionysian elements in art, fusing order and chaos by combining elements of painting with those of theatre. Schlemmer’s was the art of Gesamtkünstwerk: The Art of Total Theatre.
Schlemmer’s Triadisches Ballet (Triadic Ballet) of 1922 was a dance in three parts whose geometrically choreographed participants moved in relation to a trinity of costume, dance and music. Its meaning is rather mysterious, but the following images appeared in my reading: a chaste ballerina in a wedding cake-like tutu pirouetting before a beastly assemblage of puffy geometrical shapes attached to a frowning alien head. An ethereal figure resembling a giant boiled sweet sugar coating a marshmallow pink landscape, and a dancer bobbing around in a costume of shiny balloon-like balls. In part three the costumes are suggestive of the myopic power of science fiction. Black-clad figures, made sinister by impenetrable slits for eyes and silver space helmets, are silently tortured by bright crescent moons. Read the rest of this entry »




Ballet and fashion are timeless partners and this spring the pairing was no more apparent than at 

The six Dyad 1929 ballerinas emerge slowly and silently from the shadowy wings, preparing for their state of flight as the stage is flooded in a powerful wash of yellow. They stand casually and chat in their costumes: two-tone flesh and black leotards, white leotards and a full-length leotard whose bold black lines and points remind me of a lost nautical chart.
