Historical Bauhaus Stage Productions Actualized for Our Time

Jörg U. Lensing, composer and director. Artistic Director at the THEATER DER KLÄNGE. In 1987 he founded the THEATER DER KLÄNGE in Düsseldorf. Since 1987 he has continued to work as a director, choreographer and composer for theatre music for until now 27 productions of this theatre; several compositions of incidental music for theatres and movies. Since 1990: film compositions and sound design for nearly all the films of German film director Lutz Dammbeck. 1992: guest lecturer in drama direction at the Bauhaus Dessau. Since 1996: Professor for "Sound Design” at the Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts.

Art Style Magazine's Bauhaus Special Edition

Historical Bauhaus Stage Productions Actualized for Our Time

Translated by Don MacDonald

What does this model offer our generation and social discourses of today? For a start, the sketches and reports as well as the texts continue to inspire. One can hardly escape the enthusiasm of the texts and reports, one senses a painful emptiness in the face of today’s visionlessness and individual inner conflict of present-day society. One longs for community, for the affirmation of a vision, for the optimism that through one’s own actions, one can work on a concept for a new humankind in a better, more peaceful society. And isn’t it more reasonable and more satisfactory to work on optimistic, hopeful utopias rather than to design dystopias, to succumb to defeatism or even nihilism? At the moment in Germany, the current celebrations of “100 Years of Bauhaus” are also undergoing a strong dismantling regarding the “good image” of the Bauhaus of the twenties: “Women were discriminated against, Gropius was pretentious, after 12 years of existence the Bauhaus itself was a grand failure” etc. Who does this iconoclasm serve? Must the last positivist utopia of the “golden twenties” also be destroyed, only because we find ourselves once again in times of a despairing humankind? The THEATER DER KLÄNGE, which I founded and still run today in Düsseldorf, did not do this and will not do this. On the contrary: In the foundation year of 1987, we seized the opportunity and took on both “The Mechanical Ballet” of 1923 by Kurt Schmidt’s troop as well as the never-before realised sketch of “Mechanical Eccentricity” by the Bauhaus master Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.