D O R E A P A L A N: maggio 2013

venerdì 3 maggio 2013

TRIADISCHES BALLET (1922)

Triadisches Ballett (Triadic Ballet) is a ballet developed by Oskar Schlemmer. It premiered in Stuttgart, on 30 September 1922, with music composed byPaul Hindemith, after formative performances dating back to 1916, with the performers Elsa Hotzel and Albert Burger. The ballet became the most widely performed avant-garde artistic dance and while Schlemmer was at the Bauhaus from 1921 to 1929, the ballet toured, helping to spread the ethos of the Bauhaus.

"For a lot of people this may not be interesting, unless they already have an interest in classical ballet, 20th Century design theory, the modernist art movement or industrial materials development in the early 20th Century (or any combination of those). What Oskar Schlemmer and his mates at the Bauhaus were doing was taking traditional ballet - which might have been seen as the ultimate in aesthetic, refined, beautiful human movement - and clothing it in in costumes made using industrial design and manufacturing processes. In the first dancer here that just makes a costume that looks a little like a Clarice Cliff tea set; but some of the dancers are heavily restricted by their costumes and new or pared down choreography is required to make them move. The "triad" in the Triadic Ballet is Man, Machine and Movement, and the strangeness is in bringing those things togheder. Europe was still in trauma after the Great War, the first truly industrial war, the word "machine" had become associated above all else with "flying machine" and "machine gun" - could anything beautiful ever come form a machine? if it looks less than revolutionary now, that is just another success of the Bauhaus; it shaped the look of the 20th century and beyond."

(found this text as a youtube comment)