Shadow play is probably the word that best describes Ulla von Brandenburg's installation.

The harlequins sway behind cloths.

Tires, rods and trapezoidal ladders are draped in front of it.

The immersive room "Masked and above all - secretive" makes it clear in the entrance what it's all about: the Triadic Ballet by Oskar Schlemmer and its contemporary interpretation.

The colourfulness, the characters and the movements leave no doubt that the artist orientated herself on this work.

In a film, this is then satirized in a humorous way.

Kevin Hanschke

volunteer.

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The ballet circus is part of an exhibition that wants to present the Triadic Ballet in a museum, just as Schlemmer had planned in the 1920s.

The Staatsgalerie Stuttgart is taking on the task with the entertaining exhibition "Moved by Schlemmer: 100 Years of Triadic Ballet", which focuses on the reception history of avant-garde dance theater and tells of the creation process of the works.

To this end, the curators are not only collecting the original figurines, but also paintings and drawings by the Bauhaus master, who was born in 1888, and contemporary works of art by Kalin Lindena and Haegue Yang.

As early as 1912, Schlemmer was working on the idea of ​​a total work of art on stage, for which he teamed up with the dancer couple Albert Burger and Elsa Hötzel, who, after a stay at the Educational Institute for Music and Rhythm in Hellerau, wanted to revolutionize ballet.

There should be no more ballerinas, but self-sufficient creatures that move to the rhythm of industrial modernity.

The utopia of the machine man, which was also taken up by Fritz Lang in his film epic "Metropolis" in 1926, had already become reality for Schlemmer before the First World War.

The mechanical dance to classical music

It must have been an amazing feeling to see the ballet on September 30, 1922 when it premiered at the Württembergisches Landestheater in Stuttgart.

Streamlined costumes reduced to minimalist forms adorned the dancers, who danced mechanically to the classical music of Mozart, Haydn and Debussy.

The costumes in the otherwise completely formalized and plotless three-act play were composed of the simplest materials such as foil, plywood and wire.

For the show, the Staatsgalerie rearranged the figurines and placed them in spatial contexts based on Schlemmer's theories.

They were also set in motion again for the first time in a hundred years.

The three-act play was a choreographic sensation because it testified to the “new human”: body movement and form formed a symbiosis.

The dancers had to submit to the costume, which was also due to the fact that the clothes weighed several dozen kilos.

The velvet cords on the "diver" indicate this with their bulk.