Re-staging Oskar Schlemmer

Scenography and Performance

2019 — Exhibited at the Elmhurst Art Museum

Exhibit and Installation Design, Community Engagement

This project re-stages Oskar Schlemmer’s seminal Triadic Ballet one century after its original debut at the Bauhaus. Could Be Design worked closely with the high school students of Elmhurst Art Museum's Teen Art Council to create a collaborative installation project. The project involves the design and fabrication of costumes and stage-pieces as well as the choreography of a new performance that reinterprets the original ballet in a contemporary setting. Could Be Design guided the teens through concept ideation, design development, and fabrication.

The costumes and stage-pieces riff upon the triadic components of the original: rectangular, triangular, and circular geometry; yellow, pink, and grayscale color; cheerful, festive, and mystical tones of voice. The performance solicits an ongoing mix-up of the animate and the inert, suggesting multiple and overlapping relationships between human and nonhuman charisma. It aims to elicit open-ended animate qualities in order to deny humans of their privileged anthropocentric position. The performance stages architecture’s capacity to usher the nonhuman into our everyday social space, all while putting on a show that induces entertainment, play, and laughter.

EAM Teen Art Council Direction: Joe Hladik
Teen Art Council Participants: Arianna Denning, Kendall Dirks, April Fatheree, Mallori Hecker, Isabel Jones, Hannah Lonergan, Addison Mcclary, Matthew Milani, Savannah Nichols
Photography: Steven Koch
Stage-piece Fabrication: Stolatis Fabrication