Bauhaus' Triadic Ballet Still Performed Today

Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet, first staged on September 30, 1922, at the Landestheater in Stuttgart, continues to be performed by the Bayerisches Junior Ballet München under director Ivan Liška. Schlemmer, a German artist who taught at the Bauhaus, created the ballet as a fusion of dance, costume, and geometric abstraction. The performance features three dancers, three sections of twelve dances, and eighteen costumes in red, blue, and yellow, using sphere, cube, and pyramid shapes. Schlemmer noted the difficulty of dancing in the bulky costumes, requiring high bodily discipline to merge body and costume into a single unit. The ballet's precise, almost robotic movements and geometric costumes remain influential in contemporary dance and performance art.