October 7, 2010
Bauhaus comes to our house: Chamber Dance Company takes on dances of the 1920s, 1930s in upcoming concert
Debra McCall was walking up New York City’s 42nd Street one day when she happened upon a film festival at City University of New York. On impulse, she stopped, and the film she saw was a reconstruction of dances by Oskar Schlemmer, who was part of the famed Bauhaus in Germany in the 1920s and early ’30s.
“They were funny, they were colorful, they were smart, they were simple,” McCall said of the dances. “There wasn’t any busyness; they weren’t complicated. They were visually captivating to me.”
McCall was so taken by the dances that she wound up reconstructing them herself for performances in the 1980s and early ‘90s. Now she’s brought them to members of the UW’s Chamber Dance Company, who will perform four of them as part of their concert Oct. 14-17.
The Bauhaus was a school that attempted to combine fine arts, crafts and architecture. Its architectural style, which was marked by the absence of ornamentation and strove for harmony between the function of an object or a building and its design, is what it is best known for. However, artists of all stripes were part of the school. Oskar Schlemmer was originally a painter and sculptor, but he headed the theater workshop at the Bauhaus for a time and became interested in the idea of human figures and their relationship to the space around them. That’s when he created the dances to be performed here.
“These were originally lecture dances,” McCall said. “The purpose was to serve as primers to understanding the figure in space. Schlemmer wanted to know what prevails — the abstract figure who follows the laws of mathematics and the architectonic line and plane and volumes in space? Or does the performer follow the laws of the body — organic, feeling, physiological? Schlemmer felt that no matter the level of abstraction, the human element would always predominate.”
The level of abstraction in these dances is high. In Space Dance, for example, there are three dancers wearing costumes in primary colors — one red, one yellow and one blue. The suits are padded to obscure their figures and they wear helmet-like masks that cover their faces. Each moves on a particular line on the stage — one fast, one slow and one in between.
In Figure in Space, the performer is entirely in white, including white face, and moves on a black background, while in Pole Dance the dancer is in black, and the only thing the audience can see are the white poles strapped to his body and moving as he moves. In Hoop Dance, the dancer’s face shows, but she is clad in black and the only other things visible are the white hoops she carries and manipulates.
All of the dances are performed on a 20-by-20-foot grid that will be marked out on the floor of the Meany stage, which will be narrowed through the use of black curtains. Schlemmer worked with such a grid on the smaller-than-Meany stage at the Bauhaus. McCall saw that stage for herself, thanks to a series of events after her first encounter with the dances.
At first she did a research project on Schlemmer, after which she was approached at the school where she was teaching by a young employee of Jim Henson who was interested in reconstructing Pole Dance because of its relationship to puppets. The two did the reconstruction as a lecture demonstration for the architecture department, and two professors in the audience told McCall that the last surviving member of the Bauhaus company was living in New York. They introduced her to Andreas Weininger, who helped McCall understand the background of the dances. Through him she met the widow of Walter Gropius, the founder of Bauhaus, who told her she really had to go to Germany to see the theater and look at Schlemmer’s original notes and sketches for the dances.
McCall managed to do all that, and presented the first reconstruction in 1982. She later toured the work to Europe and Japan, and in 1994 was invited to bring the dances to the newly restored Bauhaus theater in Dessau. See videos of her reconstructions here.
Hannah Wiley, director of the Chamber Dance Company, discovered the dances on a research trip to New York in the early 1990s. “I found them intriguing, but I thought they were more theoretical than performance oriented, so I put them aside,” Wiley said.
But this year she wanted to do a concert centered around the late choreographer Alwin Nikolais, whose 100th birthday is this year, and that brought the Schlemmer dances back into her mind. “Nikolais is known for adding things to the human form, frequently to distort it,” Wiley said. “The Schlemmer dances just came into my head because they seemed so similar in terms of the objects both of them used to extend the body, although I don’t think Schlemmer’s purpose was to distort.”
Working with those extensions can be a challenge, as CDC dancers can attest.
Brenna Monroe-Cook, one of the three dancers in Space Dance, said the helmet masks the dancers wear limit vision, especially peripheral vision, and also play havoc with balance. She said it’s something of an irony that Schlemmer was interested in the idea of space.
“What I’m finding is that I really have to renegotiate my own sense of space inside of the mask because we’re walking along this grid and it has these very specific limitations but you can’t necessarily see the limitations when you’re in the mask. So there’s something about being able to feel the dimensions of the space in your stride, in the length of your steps.”
General MacArthur Hambrick has an even greater challenge in Pole Dance, as he has to move with 12 poles strapped to his arms, legs and torso. The poles are supposed to be extensions of his body, so they must be placed carefully in line with his bones, and if one is a little off, it causes problems. Hambrick admits he wasn’t fond of the dance at first, saying it made him feel like a machine.
“But once I got into it I kind of fell in love with it,” he said. “It’s as if these things [the poles] are part of my body. It’s hard to explain. I’m making these interesting shapes that I can’t see, but I feel them in a way.”
The Schlemmer dances will open the concert. The company will perform one dance, Pond, by Nikolais. Other choreographers on the program are Tandy Beal, Llory Wilson and Lar Lubovich.
McCall will return to witness the concert after working with the dancers over the summer. “These dancers are beautifully trained and such great performers,” she said “It was a privilege to work with them, and I’m looking forward to the concert.”
The Chamber Dance Company has been invited to perform the Schlemmer dances at Artissima: International Contemporary Art Torino (Italy) Nov. 4 and 5. The international event is dedicated to the presentation of contemporary art.
Tickets for the UW concert are $18, $16 for faculty/staff and $10 for students/seniors. They are available at the Arts Ticket Office, 206-543-4880 or online at http://www.meany.org/tickets. The Dance Program is asking patrons to bring a donation for the University District Food Bank to the concert.
