Bauhaus Totaltheater: creators, principles, practice

Abstract

The features of the creators of “Bauhaus Total Theater” aesthetics, its direct and indirect connections with Richard Wagner’s, Futurists’ and Dadaists’ ideas are outlined, the basic principles are set out:the theater of the past (speaking drama) was a theater of certain types, which promoted the religious cult or carried out state advertising with the help of the constructed action;a new theater, a total theater of the future is based on abstraction, mechanization and action (Aktionsdrama), instead of the playwriter’s word, as it was before;the purpose of the actor’s creativity is creation of an image in the action of all people, instead of types, as it was in the theater of the Middle Ages; image is a new reality, created by its own rules and organized on the basis of combination of elements (editing, collage, repetition, parallelism, variation, reversal, association, etc.);consequently, an actor who does not have a perfect command of his body has no place in the theater of the future.Bauhaus’s theatrical concepts were also marked in the Ukrainian theater, as Anatoly Petrytsky’s program article evidenced. The type of theater, realized by the Bauhaus, Patrice Pavi, referred to the mechanical theater, originating from the theater of puppets and theater of subjects, where the actors were replaced with animated figures, automations and mechanisms, from Heron of Alexandria (1st century), Torelli’s experiments (16th century), fairgrounds (18th—19th centuries), Gordon Craig superpuppets, Enrico Prampolini’s futuristic scenery up to the modern multimedia theater. However, despite the signs of similarity between the experiments of Bauhaus, Futurists, Dadaists and the creators of modern performances, there are also significant differences between them. The most important of them occurred due to the rebellious, scandalous social orientation of Futurism, Dadaism and promotional art, which was based on anarchist ideas, direct quotation of Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. Unlike them, Bauhaus’s stage ideas were based on a technologically arranged and pragmatically market-oriented approach.