Restaged by: Jörg U. Lensing, Udo Lensing, and Ernst Merheim, Bauhaus Dessau, 2009
Music: Hanno Spelsberg
Digital video, color, sound; 16 min
Theater der Klänge, Dusseldorf, Germany”
Other than being formed with mathematical exactitude, it was made out of wood.
Humanized movement through technalized machinery.
Using a camera to record this dance piece, then showing it through a box TV draws the eye.
I chose this piece because of the dance incorporation, alongside the robotic movement. I would love to see the full thing.
“While studying at the Bauhaus in Oskar Schlemmer's stage workshop, Kurt Schmidt, along with collaborators FW. Bogler and Georg Teltscher, choreographed Das mechanische Ballett (The Mechanical Ballet], which premiered in 1923 with music by Hans-Heinz Stuckenschmidt. In the performance, geometric, painted panels were mounted onto dancers dressed in black, creating the illusion of a mechanical interaction between machinelike entities. With names like "Windmühle" [windmill]. "Lokomotive" [locomotive], and "Maschinenwesen" [machine-being], they suggested a historical trajectory of technologies and their progress.”
“These dancing figures remain in tension with a certain anthropomorphism, their shapes abstracting the dancers' human forms to which the costumes correspond. The abstract fields of color convey how individuals might be understood as discrete, programmable components in a machine, their bodies broken down even further into separate constituent parts.”
“Obfuscating dancers behind abstractions completely, the piece portends scientific management's parsing out of labor in a way that threatens to erase the worker. Indeed, by the time the ballet premiered, American Fordism and Taylorism had begun to find their foothold in European industrial production. “
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