Liz Hersey

“Bauhaus” is translated to mean “building and stage”. The Bauhaus theatre, run originally by Lothar Shreyer with the help of Oskar Schlemmer in the early 1920’s in the Weimar Republic in Germany was all about the human body. The audience would watch figures or “human dolls” perform onstage. Usually these dolls held static positions, much like the statues of the ancient Greeks, to give a quiet, yet very present, and larger-than-life, impression.

Dolls are meant to invoke a sense of absence in ourselves as we gaze at these empty replicas of the human being. The Bauhaus theatre grabbed hold of this idea and used the human dolls to play around with the idea of subjectivity. The dolls were built to look very androgynous, as the performance dealt with gender identity in a widespread culture. Later on, the human dolls grew to be more controversial, using their shows to make comments about the political and social state Germany was in after the first World War.

As more shows were performed, there were increasing accusations of the Bauhaus theatre as being communist or left wing radicals. Funding from Weimar was pulled in 1924, causing the theatre to close down.

This article is quite interesting because it explores a group of people who want to make a statement with their art, and do so in a non-traditional way. This forces people to have to think more about the events being put before them, which ultimately will pay off better when the message finally hits home. It is very unfortunate that the Bauhaus theatre was forced to shut down. This puts forth the question: is it ever alright to ban someone’s art?

Sue Schaafsma

Bauhaus Theatre of Human Dolls attempted to use theatre to unify all other art forms into one complete form. This type of art that began as a school in Weimar in 1919, and was housed in a building that had a theatre at the centre of its pinwheel shape showing its central status in this movement’s essence.

In most of the Bauhaus works, the human body was represented by the shape of a doll, and often took the form of humans dressed in padded suits with expressionless masks. Their padded forms did not lend any hint about the figure’s gender or individuality, and thus are were expression of the gender ambiguity of post-humanism.

Oskar Schlemmer, one of the Bauhaus’ main contributors, believed that the abstract human forms created by the dolls symbolized the higher human sense. The dolls were also a reaction to the turmoil of that time period in Germany – that of the Second World War and of the rise of Socialism. However, they did not take a definitive political stance, despite public accusations of being associated with Socialism; Koss described the dolls as waiting, and not choosing a side. The Bauhaus dolls were mediums for playful entertainment, but also for serious political expression.

The Bauhaus school also wanted to encourage the audience to see themselves in the dolls, leading them to lose their individuality and join the mass culture. The Triadic Ballet, written by Schlemmer, symbolized the Bauhaus ultimate expression of society’s journey into abstraction. The ballet’s drawing plan was divided into three stages. The first, shaped like a man, represented individualism, while the last which was shaped like a woman represented mass culture.

It is thought provoking to look back on a movement in artistic history, and to see how much the social and political climate of the times contributes not only to the content of the work, but also to the form. It will be interesting in years to come to look back upon the art which we ourselves have produced, and to analyse what social and political factors influenced our creative thinking. As artists, we are not entirely immune from our culture, we are in a feedback loop: we contribute to the life of our culture and our culture contributes to our lives. This cannot be avoided, but if we are aware of this we can better understand what we are in fact attempting to express.

Juliet Koss describes the Bauhaus theatre as having a “hesitant openness” and as often having a contradictory message. Is it possible, however, for an art form, or a person for that matter, to truly hold two contradictory viewpoints simultaneously?

Beth Vanderstelt

In the article, Bauhaus Theatre of Human Dolls, the author describes how this form of stage work in theatre evolved through the early to mid 19th century.

Koss explains how Walter Gropius, the founder of Bauhaus, did not initially recognize stage work as its own form of art in his earlier manifestos, even though it involved many different art disciplines. It was not until later in his career, in 1961, that Gropius defined theatre as an art that brought together all other forms of art. What became most significant in the creation of the Bauhaus theatre was the fact that theatre did not encompass just one particular art discipline. The Bauhaus theatre used experimentation of different arts allowing for non-traditional settings such as costume parties and other events, both private and public. The spectator was often seen as the camera lens within a Bauhaus production, and the performances would sometimes include scenes where real-life matters of confidentiality were mixed with the playfulness of the art, also allowing the spectators to feel they were part of the work.

Koss compares Bauhaus to the theatrical experience of the German stages in the 1920’s, where the end of naturalism in theatre was occurring and abstraction in theatre was gaining popularity. Moholy-Nagy, a professor in the Bauhaus school, who commended Futurists, Expressionists and Dadaists for their work in helping to disestablish some of the naturalist works in theatre, believed that new abstract models of man/woman in theatre were necessary to co-exist with the new form of theatrical performance.

Bauhaus dolls were created, and represented the masses with their androgynous, less defined features, which made them seem to lack emotion, and evoke the absence of individualism. These dolls in their abstraction were considered “post-humanist”, based on the German art movement, which occurred in the 1920’s. They were creating objects or symbols that represented human form without the development of real human characters.

The post-human subject became more and more recognized within the theatre arts, which interim drew more attention to figures that were similar or relating to those of the Bauhaus. Empathy was still present in the creation of these figures, where spectators would still compare themselves to those on stage. Soon though, the shift began to focus more on mass groups of dolls, rather than the individual. Chorus lines or similar figures dancing in unison became popular during this time, bringing across the theories of estrangement. Humans learned from these groups of dolls to no longer reflect on their self as individual characters, but to interact as part of a mass audience.

Bauhaus theatre became very close to something Wagner had envisioned as an ideal theatrical scene. It allowed spectators to become artists through their own participation (or performance), allowing the artist to have “…complete absorption into the audience…”, turning life itself into a work of art.

Question: Should theatre be considered a form of art, or a piece of work that unifies all arts?