Bauhaus Festival 2023

// Festival
1 + 2 Sep 2023
Bauhaus Building and public space

The Mechanical Ballet by the Bauhaus student Kurt Schmidt provides the creative stimulus for the Bauhaus Festival 2023.

The exploration of Kurt Schmidt’s magnum opus during the Bauhaus Festival 2023 will question the social and cultural contexts of his stage work and critically transform into the present day the utopian content of the work and the related dystopias.

This abstract (pseudo-mechanical) ballet premiered in 1923 during the “Bauhaus week” at the Theaterhaus Jena. Even more than Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet, it represented a departure from the previously expressionistic Bauhaus stage. From this point on, the new social design utopias of the Bauhaus were associated with concepts like mechanisation, automation, and standardisation.

In performative projects, spatial and art installations, and experimental discussion and communication formats, the story of the “ghost in the machine” will be told. Also, the perfect machine

will be compared with the imperfect human body, its limitations and its losses of control.