2011 » Germany » Architecture Section

play bauhaus: stage the satellite

The project play bauhaus – stage the satellite examines and explores the Bauhaus stage in its role as a historical as well as contemporary theatre and interdisciplinary performance laboratory with a special perspective on spatial exploration. There are two modes of presentation: 1. “packed”: A set elements are placed close together on an exhibition table, with a video screen providing information about the Bauhaus stage’s history and its contemporary activities, especially those of the “stage satellite”. 2. “unpacked”: During the exhibition period, the “stage satellite” will be used at public places in Prague for three play bauhaus – jam out dance performances and for lecture demonstrations. This means that the elements will temporarily leave the exhibition space. Founded in 1921 in Weimar and continued until 1926 in Dessau, the Bauhaus stage workshop was an integral part of this famous school of architecture and design. The Bauhaus stage today is a well known major modern theatre project. Oskar Schlemmer’s ideas of a “type stage”, his concept of costume dance, and the Bauhaus dances in particular are regarded as major avant-garde theatre projects. But the Bauhaus’s attempts at developing a “mechanical stage” were of key importance as well. These efforts involved adapting and designing the stage space using technical and kinetic apparatuses while for the most part dispensing with human actors – a trend resulting not least from the dominance of visual designers at the Bauhaus. These projects left their traces in theatre history as exalted experiments and are still an inspiration today, perhaps precisely because they remained unfinished. The historical “Bauhaus stage” was less a theatre workshop than an experimental space laboratory in which the spatial type of the “stage” served primarily to develop models of thinking about and imagining space on a highly abstract level. At the Bauhaus, the concept of “building” involved not only the design and execution of architecture in the narrow physical sense. Identifying itself in opposition to contemporary academies and schools of applied arts where architects were trained, the Bauhaus defined the concept of “building” as a fundamentalist and universalist design activity that made use of the spatial “organisation of life processes” just as much as the elemental creation of spatial effects through form, colour, light and movement. The Bauhaus stage Dessau is basically a room that is centrally situated within the architectural monument of the Bauhaus. Placed between the foyer and the canteen, the function of this platform room ensures that the stage project is programmatically embedded in the Bauhaus building. The room can be opened up to the canteen by means of folding, sliding partitions, and the three large double doors allow it to open onto the foyer as well. This meant that, in the 1920s, the stage placed the performing arts in the position of communicative link between the serious, product-oriented work (the workshop wing) and the convivial rituals of leisure time (the canteen). At the same time, however, it demarcated the stage as an autonomous art project. Today this space is again an exceptional location for theatre and music performances, for artistic events experimentation and research. The main focus is an exploration of the Bauhaus theatre’s view of the stage as a laboratory and platform for the artistic and performative study of the concepts, methods and tools of space. Since 2011 a “stage satellite” has been touring and performing these ideas as an ambassador, all the while accumulating new connections and collaborations. For performances at public sites in Prague during PQ2011, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation is collaborating with dancers from the Theatre Faculty of Academy of Performing Arts (DAMU).