Triadic ballet. “Culture goes city”. Krefeld, June 14 – 16, 2019

“Culture goes city”

“Kultur findet Stadt” is not only a pretty little play on words in German, but above all a colourful and highly varied cultural festival in Krefeld. With lots of live music, dance and theatre, art, literature and creative crafts. For three days, the city is transformed into a huge stage with a dense program. The Krefeld music scene presents itself, with music from rock to pop, and jazz to classical music. Orchestras, bands and soloists with tangible joy of playing. With “Listen to Numbers”, a sampler with thirteen Krefeld pieces of music, “homemade” music comes to the big stage. No matter which genre, whether beginner or old stage professional, the music has to have a Krefeld origin.

On the “suitcase market”, creative people sell – literally “out of a suitcase” – handmade things of all kinds. Jewellery, clothing, decoration and art. Simply everything that fits in a suitcase.  Krefeld cultural institutions and publishing houses present their work.

And the artistic setting and “frame” with which “Kultur findet Stadt” will be opened this year, and which will also be the final act in the program, is a very special highlight in the “Bauhaus Year”: the Triadic Ballet.

The Bauhaus as a dance

Otto Schlemmer’s “Triadisches Ballett” (=Triadic ballet), an avant-garde dance theatre piece that had its premiere almost a century ago (1922), but still seems modern in its radicalism. Mathematics as a dance, so to speak, based on the number three.

Otto Schlemmer was a painter, sculptor and stage designer, and a highly creative experimental artist. His “Triadic Ballet” is a consistent alternative to classical ballet, but also to the expressionist dance theatre of the 1920s. However, Oskar Schlemmer takes up motifs and techniques from these dance theater forms, quotes them, exaggerates their expression. And sometimes he simply loves nonsense, clownesque and cheerful, free play.

Three acts, each with three scenes, the backgrounds tinted differently and increasing in mood. In cheerful yellow, festive pink and mystical black. Danced by the three dancers, and in a total of eighteen costumes. If the human being is still perceived at the beginning, he is dematerialized step by step. In consequence,  at the end, the “abstract” even appears on stage. With the geometric costumes, partly bulky, and in such a shape that graceful dance movements make trouble. The person steps back behind the costume, becomes an abstract figure with partly rather marionette-like movements. He spins, triples, jumps, wobbles and swings. Circle, square and triangle.

Schlemmer himself said about the human body in the Triadic Ballet that it becomes “spatially sculptural, because it is, so to speak, colored and metallic sculptures that, carried by dancers, move in space”.

In the Stuttgart premiere of his Triadic Ballet, Otto Schlemmer himself danced as an amateur dancer under the pseudonym Walter Schoppe. By the way, he wasn’t quite so satisfied with his personal performance in the aftermath. It is said that he lacked a little breath.

TRIAS. The Theater of Sounds

Certainly, the playful and stage-experienced dancers of the Düsseldorf ensemble “Theater der Klaenge” (=Theater of sounds) certainly won’t get out of breath. The professional dance theatre has been dealing with the artistic possibilities of expression of the Bauhaus stage since 1987. With “TRIAS”, the group offers a contemporary reinterpretation of Oskar Schlemmer’s work, both in form and content. Round skirt, diver, ball hands. Spiral and Bajazo. Burlesque, picturesque. Serious and festive. Heroic and monumental. The actors can draw on Otto Schlemmer’s wealth of experience. And they do the same.

The Theater der Klaenge itself writes about his production “TRIAS”:

“Instead of a rigid one-to-one costume recreation, the costumes are interpreted as Schlemmer had developed them. Simply and originally as an extension of ballet costumes and stage figures (also of the puppet theatre). Instead of automated, rigid, dehumanized figurines to mechanized music, TRIAS thematizes the eruption, explosion, and joy of physical, musical action in music and dance theater. Instead of celebrating high Bauhaus art, TRIAS emphasizes the clownish and carnivalistic in Oskar Schlemmer’s approach to the stage.

This promises a lot of energy and joie de vivre. Let yourself be inspired! Have fun!

The new edition “TRIAS” with the Düsseldorf ensemble “Theater der Klaenge” will be performed under the open sky, on Friday June 14, 2019 and Sunday , June 16, 2019 at 9 p.m. on the Krefeld main festival stage at Willy-Göldenbachs-Platz.