Still from McCall’s Bauhaus Dances, Formentanz (Form Dance), photo by Debra McCall.
The Lecture and Film: Bauhaus Dances
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.
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.
A narrative within a narrative, McCall will present the story of her reconstruction followed by a screening of a film of the reconstructions, premiered at New York’s Goethe House in 1987, featured in American Dance Festival’s First International Festival of Film and Video Dance, and presently residing at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.
Debra McCall is a dance historian, choreographer, Certified Movement Analyst, and performer best known for her reconstructions of Oskar Schlemmer’s 1920s Bauhaus Dances. Recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, she also received the Rome Prize in Design from the American Academy in Rome and a Fulbright-Nehru Professional and Academic Excellence Award for her documentation of medieval reliefs of sacred dancers at the Thillai Nataraja Temple in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu. McCall served on the graduate faculties of New York University and Pratt Institute where she was Mellon Lecturer. Her Bauhaus work has been presented in a variety of venues including Performa 09, Artissima 17 Torino, and Harvard University’s “The Bauhaus and Harvard: 100 years.” She also directs Performing Matters (www.performingmaters.org), an organization dedicated to the preservation of endangered dance and dancers’ rights.
Watch a recording: vimeo.com/142663982
https://www.blackmountaincollege.org/film_screening/bauhaus_dances/
