Bauhaus Dances film screening + lecture with Debra McCall
Lecture and Film Screening: Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Dances with Debra McCall
Thursday, October 19th at 7pm
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center
Ashville, North Carolina
Lecture + Screening at 7pm | Free and open to all
A narrative within a narrative, Debra McCall presents the story of her reconstructions of Oskar Schlemmer’s 1920s Bauhaus Dances followed by a screening of her film of those reconstructions. The film premiered at New York’s Goethe House in 1987, and was featured in American Dance Festival’s First International Festival of Film and Video Dance, and is presently residing at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. McCall will discuss her research, her process of reconstructing the dances, and the philosophy and work of Bauhaus artists.
Stäbetanz (Pole Dance or Stick Dance), photo by Debra McCall.
As Master of the Theater Workshop at the Dessau Bauhaus in the 1920s, Oskar Schlemmer delivered a series of avant-garde lecture dances on the body in space, his lifelong opus. Schlemmer’s revolutionary ideas for a humanistic theater in the new technology age were transported to the US with the arrival of Bauhauslers Josef and Anni Albers and Xanti Schawinsky, a Theater Workshop performer, to Black Mountain. Their ideas impacted the work of Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham at Black Mountain, who in turn, disseminated Schlemmer’s emphasis on pedestrian movement and “chance composition” to shape work of the Judson Dance Theater and New York’s downtown performance scene.
Reifentanz II (Hoop Dance II), photo by Debra McCall.
Believing Schlemmer’s Bauhaus lecture dances to be the tabula rosa of avant-garde performance art and dance of the late 1960s-70s, Debra McCall set out to East and West Germany in 1981 in search of Schlemmer’s original notes and sketches for the dances, and to walk the stage of the then recently restored Bauhaus. She was challenged to complete these two tasks by the only surviving performer of Schlemmer’s pieces at the time, Andreas Weininger, and by Ise Gropius, Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius’s widow, who insisted McCall could only understand the architectonic nature of Schlemmer’s work by walking the stage Gropius designed for him. A series of fortuitous and occasionally harrowing events led to the premiere of her reconstructions, “Oskar Schlemmer’s 1920s Bauhaus Dances,” at The Kitchen in New York in 1982. With the addition of more reconstructions, a second premiere occurred at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in conjunction with the exhibition, “Kandinsky: Russian and Bauhaus Years 1915-1933.” Critical acclaim and sold-out houses led to tours of major museums and venues in the US, Europe, and Japan, including the first International Biennale de la Dance in Lyon, France, and a return to the original Dessau Bauhaus stage in 1994.
Metal Dance
Gesture Dance. Photo by Nathaniel Tileston.
Formentanz (Form Dance), photo by Debra McCall.
For more information about Bauhaus Dances: Bauhaus Dance website.
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