Performers and Stage as Architecture, Oskar Schlemmer

In the two readings we reviewed for class this week, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present – (Chapter 5) Bauhaus and The Theater of the Bauhaus, the stage itself and the role of the performers on stage are discussed. The Bauhaus was a school in Germany that began in the early 1920s, their goal was to investigate every type of creative process there is and have students doing their research all at the same time in the same place, interacting with each other, mixing and finding solutions together. Oskar Schlemmer took lead of the school and brought with him performance. The performances his students worked on were very experimental, even by today’s standards. Actors wearing garments only made of stripes or costumes which gave actors geometric shapes, took position on stage to look like a three dimensional painting. Lights and sounds were also experimented with along with geometrically breaking down the stage and creating movement based on these dissections. The second reading really breaks down the construction of buildings and how these were considered in performances, understanding that there were 3 basic types of staging. I enjoyed looking at performance in this way, and I believe that in creating performances that look at the stage so closely, the stage becomes part of the props that a performer has at their fingertips to utilize in performance. Not only does the stage become part of the performer’s props, but the performer becomes part of the stage’s architecture. For example, when Schlemmer broke the stage down into geometric sections and the performers moved within these limitations, the spider web-like residue of their movement gets woven into the architectural design of the stage.