Mark Franko
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 Gropiuss Bauhaus Manifesto of 1919 read: The ultimate aim of all visual arts is the complete building.1 The building combined architecture with craft, but Schlemmers 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.