Figure and Sound in Space

Year & Context

1993 · Tour until 1998

Co-production with Bauhaus Dessau

About the Production

“one should be as unbiased as possible; one should approach things as if the world had just been created … one should be simple, not impoverished … one should not be sentimental, but instead have wit. with that, everything and nothing is said!”

— Oskar Schlemmer, Bauhaus Dessau

The question Oskar Schlemmer could never answer at the Bauhaus was simply this: what happens when sound is not merely accompaniment, but structure — an equal theatrical element alongside light, colour and movement? Between 1925 and 1928 in Dessau, Schlemmer had developed a “grammar of formal stage elements” and tested it in several “small Bauhaus dances”, but he found in his time no collaborating composer willing to think further on the sonic side of his theatre experiments. Seventy years later, in 1992/93, Theater der Klänge took up that open thread.

“Figure and Sound in Space” is not a reconstruction. It is a response — using the means of 1993. Composer Thomas Neuhaus had developed a prototypical electronic installation: microphones, light barriers, ultrasonic sensors, connected to a real-time control system. The performers used it to steer music and light directly through what they did — movement, voice, body in space. The technology listened. What it gave back was sound.

Seven performers on a geometrically painted dance floor, black-and-white bodysuits, hip belts in the Bauhaus primary colours blue, red, yellow, later fully coloured figure costumes in the primary colours. A voice that detaches from its source and travels through space. Figures oscillating between mechanical movement and living expression — until the two can no longer be separated. “Polyphonic scenic composition” was what director and choreographer J.U. Lensing called this approach: light, sound, movement and colour treated as compositional parameters; only their interplay produces the theatre event in time. What emerged on stage could not be clearly labelled as dance, theatre, or concert. That was intentional.

The production premiered on 25 March 1993 at the Bauhaus Dessau — at the very place it referred to. 32 performances in eight cities at home and abroad followed, including guest appearances in Belgium, France and Israel as the double programme “Tanz am Bauhaus” (1994–1998). The thinking begun here – about the relationship between technology and performer, sound and space – continued to generate new work for two decades: from “Megalopolis” and “Modul|a|t|o|r” to the “HOEReographien”, and onward to the “SUITE intermediale” and the applied performance forms “Das Lackballett” and finally “Mensch und Kunstfigur im Kugeltheater”.

Funded by: Bauhaus Dessau, City of Düsseldorf, Land NRW / Department of Culture (Kultusminister), Stiftung van Meeteren

Hardware and software support by ICEM, Folkwang Hochschule Essen