Oskar Schlemmer: Stäbetanz

Oskar Schlemmer, “Stäbetanz” (‘stick dance’, 1927-28 for the Bauhaus Bühne, Dessau).

Performance : Alma Toaspern (dance), Sharif Sehnaoui (music)
Reenactment & artistic direction: Christophe Wavelet
Production: Corinne Diserens
Coproduction: Rosas Studios & p.a.r.t.s (Brussels, Belgium), Erg (Brussels) & Una–Universidad Nacional De Las Artes (Buenos Aires, Argentina)

From 1926 to 1929, the Bauhaus in Dessau (Germany) regularly presented experimental stage works by artist Oskar Schlemmer, in collaboration with the students of this legendary avant-garde school. Soon after the first world war (1914-1918), European avant-gardes were busy with the utopias of the “new humanity”, soon sadly challenged by the rise of fascisms and nazism. Between these two disastrous moments, Oskar Schlemmer stands among the artists who would question the many aporias and contradictions, but also the unknown potentials that the word “art” may bear. A tireless inventor, he was constantly both in dialogue and debate with the art of his time, including that of his bauhaus colleagues (Klee, Kandinsky, Moholy-nagy, etc). Together with his teaching activities, his writings, drawings, paintings and sculptures, his stage works  are equally important to his body practice. An œuvre where the relationships between body, gesture, space, time and history are challenged. His stäbetanz (1928) appears to be a temporal activation of a constructivist sculpture in motion, a unique case in the history of xxth century abstraction.