Within the last two years, a small collection of videos showcasing Oskar Schlemmer’s work has appeared on the Internet, primarily on websites like YouTube. They were released without fan-fare or any kind of announcement—in fact the very legality of their existence online falls within a grey area shared by much of YouTube’s offerings. Most of these videos feature selected clips from “The Triadic Ballet”, an unsurprising fact given its renown among Schlemmer’s work. More recently, though, a single copy of Margaret Hasting’s 1968 film “Man and Mask: Oskar Schlemmer and the Bauhaus Stage” was uploaded in two parts, offering many viewers their first opportunity to see recorded performances of Schlemmer’s many other dances.
After reading various descriptions and seeing the available photographic documentation, finally viewing these dances in performance presents a noteworthy opportunity examine how the written word and stilled image measure up to a filmed recording. In this regard, the recreation of “Pole Dance” (Stäbetanz) stands out as particularly striking, especially when juxtaposed with an earlier, widely available, photograph of the dance. The picture features dancer Amanda von Kreibig, covered in black but wholly visible to the camera, her arms outstretched in a long diagonal, extended even further by two of the poles. It was taken by Albert Braun in 1927 and it presents “Pole Dance” in one of its earliest stagings. Consequently, it has long served as a primary visual entry into the piece—and with good reason; the photo is a remarkable work of standalone art. Von Kreibig’s pose is at once both strained and stoic. The dark anonymity of her masked figure, cut by these twelve white poles, evokes a mysterious, almost epic quality. It is as if the photograph had captured a grave and ancient ritual, embellished by unshakably Bauhauslian aesthetic touches. Truly, its interplay of diagonal lines and negative space echoes that found in Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack’s 1923 Bauhaus postcard, select László Maholy-Nagy collages, and even the occasional Kandinsky painting. Consequently, it upholds a particular narrative about the Bauhaus and its work, one that emphasizes abstraction over realism and a kind of mechanized geometry over naturalistic designs.
The recorded video of Margaret Hasting’s “Pole Dance” does not fit so neatly into this narrative, though the sum total of the differences between photograph and film are not all immediately apparent. What is instantly clear, however, is that the stilled photograph struggles to convey any real sense of movement. This is unfortunate, for movement— equally if not more than the individual poses— proves integral to the impact ofPole Dance. Furthermore, the photograph features the human performer far more visibly than Margaret Hasting’s staging, which has lit the stage in such a way that the actor disappears into the darkness, leaving an empty black canvas upon which the twelve white lines dance. This difference proves consequential to the work’s presentation. With their manipulator hidden, the titular poles of “Pole Dance” acquire additional prominence, and the entire piece achieves an engaging air of unpredictability— it is difficult to foresee where these poles will move next because it is difficult to see anything but the poles.
In this way, the video of Hasting’s “Pole Dance” offers a glimpse into what Schlemmer may have envisioned when he described the “absolute visual stage” or “Schaubühne,” in his essay “Man and Art Figure”.Such a theatre, Schlemmer wrote, would support pure “forms and colors in motion,” design-driven performances that would be at once “infinitely variable and strictly organized,” and whose realization would result in the human performer’s banishment from the stage, cast instead as “‘the perfect engineer’ at the central switchboard, from where he would direct this feast for the eyes.”[i]
Indeed, particular aspects of Hasting’s “Pole Dance” pay due deference to this description. The dance’s abstract designs, brought to life before the audience, are driven by both spatial and temporal choreography. Visual composition, juxtaposition, and repetition all intermingle with rhythm, timing, and duration— the piece truly is a work of ‘form in motion’, and the viewer’s experience encompasses the moments of stilled design (such as the one captured in the photograph) as well as their transitions. Each pole’s journey becomes its own narrative, performed with an organizational logic that draws the viewer further into the piece.
A closer examination of this logic provides “Pole Dance”a place of practical differentiation from Schlemmer’s overall description of the “Schaubühne”,as well. Whereas Schlemmer imagined some kind of technological apparatus to manipulate his visual forms, relegating the human to a switchboard in the process, Hasting’s “Pole Dance”casts her human performer as the very mechanism through which these poles move. As a result, an inescapably corporeal organization and logic rests at the heart of “Pole Dance’s”abstract designs and movement.
While it is possible that a lack of technological advancements necessitated this derivation from his envisioned “Schaubühne”, Schlemmer’s own writings paint an ambiguous picture of his ultimate opinion on the future role of human performers on stage. In “Man and Art Figure”, for example, Schlemmer lists “Abstraction,” “mechanization,” and the “new potentials of technology and invention” as the three most notable emblems of his time. Going further, he writes, “The theatre, which must be the image of our time and perhaps the one art form most peculiarly conditioned by it, must not ignore these signs.”[ii]But in his personal diary, Schlemmer suggests that an awareness of the contemporary zeitgeist does not then predicate the need to absolutely embrace it, writing, “Not machine, not abstract—always man!”[iii]
Appropriately, the dialectic found between these two positions provides “Pole Dance” its most engaging material. In rooting the performance onto the human body, “Stäbetanz”moves beyond the purely visual, becoming a piece about bodies in motion and the human effort exerted to create pure visual theatre. By obscuring the human performer through lighting and costume, though, this additional layer of meaning is never made wholly explicit to the audience. It is merely suggested, innocuously, in moments when the body’s rotation briefly obscures part of a pole behind itself or when a faint corporeal silhouette emerges between the intersections of the poles.
These moments possess a mesmeric power. The performer’s visual absence has an inverse effect on her/his presence in the space, drawing the viewer further into the performance, if only in an attempt to determine how it works, and what part of the body corresponds to each pole. As the piece progresses, each new design begets another round of questions— Is the performer kneeling or standing? Is that pole connected to both her/his ankle and knee? If s/he is holding this pole here, then how does that pole cross it there? It is here that “Pole Dance” becomes, strangely, an anatomy lesson. Through an aesthetic of mechanized abstraction, “Pole Dance” manages to return its audience to an experience of naturalism and to an encounter with the human body removed from affect.
Schlemmer’s theories espoused in “Man and Art Figure” have earned him close association with a particular strand of theatrical discourse, one that sought artistic expression unbound by the limitations of human consciousness by replacing the human actor with mechanized forms— Heinrich von Kleist and his mechanical dancers, for example, or Edward Gordon Craig and his kinetic scenery and dreams of the Übermarionette. But Margaret Hasting’s re-staging of “Pole Dance”reveals an intriguing twist on this dynamic. Rather than utilizing tools of the visual theatre to replace the human performer, the piece augments the two. “Pole Dance”, in its most synthesized reading,becomes an abstract amplification of the daily articulations found in the human body. The poles— in addition to serving as forms in motion— become a synecdochal skeleton. And in this way, “Pole Dance” is at once abstract, mechanized, and unmistakably human.
[i] Oskar Schlemmer, “Man and Art Figure,” in: “The Theatre of the Bauhaus,” edited by Walter Gropius, trans. Arthus S. Wensinger (Middletown, Connecticut, 1961), p. 22.
[ii] Ibid., pp. 17–18.
[iii] Oskar Schlemmer,The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, selected and edited by Tut Schlemmer, trans. Krishna Winston (Middletown, Connecticut, 1972), p. 116.
Sam Gold is an actor, puppeteer, and theatre artist. As a 2011-2012 Thomas J. Watson Fellowship recipient, he was spent twelve months exploring the relationship between puppets and people in a variety of performance cultures around the world. He currently lives in New York. More information can be found at: www.samgolddoesstuff.com.