Your annual winter support keeps the Rail independent, relevant, and free
Mark Franko
Mark Franko is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Dance at the Boyer College of Music and Dance, Temple University. Franko was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship last year to complete The Fascist Turn in the Dance of Serge Lifar: French Neoclassical Ballet and the German Occupation (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Dance and the Bauhaus
By Mark FrankoThe “Bauhaus Dances” were a set of choreographic experiments that Oskar Schlemmer and his students performed intermittently during the late 1920s in the context the Bauhaus stage workshop. The opening sentence of Walter Gropius’s “Bauhaus Manifesto” of 1919 read: “The ultimate aim of all visual arts is the complete building.”1 The building combined architecture with craft, but Schlemmer’s insight was the aim of building: to house the body. Although primarily a painter and sculptor, we can tell from his teaching notes that Schlemmer placed the human body at the center of building.
ADVERTISEMENTS