Project area - Hoop Dance
bauhaus agenten Dessau
- Duration
- 120 min
- Age level
- 10 – 16 years
- location
- inside
What is a person’s position in space? And how do the two correspond and take shape through movement? That was Oskar Schlemmer’s big creative theme. The German painter, sculptor, and set designer was closely connected to Bauhaus; he also created its logo. Schlemmer envisioned modern, visually artistic forms. But he found movement in physical works of art to be limited since movement has more or less been »fixated« there. Dance is a much more flexible form of expression. So Schlemmer created dances, for example, for certain materials and how they could be staged – like the hoop dance.
format
1 lesson unit
School subject
Art, Physical education, Mathematics
Competencies & mediation goal
Perception of space and body, creating movement, exploration
Historical context
The Bauhaus experimental stage workplace directed by Oskar Schlemmer created so-called material dances: like a metal dance, glass dance, hoop dance and backdrop dance – scenes in which series of movements were practiced in the tension between body, objects, and space. Certain materials and how they influenced movement played an important role here. For example, in the hoop dance simple wooden hoops are used to show the possibilities that the material wood and a circular shape can offer to motion and designing space.
Topicality
Staging space by means of dance, theater, sound, and materials. Today stage is again seen as a creative space, where actors, dancers, musicians, and other artists develop experimental projects together. This is also what the experimental Bauhaus stage was used for. It was used to investigate modern man in tension with industrialization, mechanization, and typification, as well as emancipation and individuality. After existing in the shadows for some decades the spirit of this kind of experimental theater has been firmly reestablished in the theater landscape since the 1970s.
Technical & spatial requirements
• Empty room for free movement
authors
bauhaus agenten Dessau
»The relationship between the dimensions of the stage, height, depth, width, to each other and to the human figure really is important.«
Oskar Schlemmer, German painter, sculptor, and stage designer, 1926