Two Main Currents

The Triadic Ballet was created by Oskar Schlemmer. He taught at the Bauhaus art school in Germany during the Weimar Republic.

Schlemmer’s ballet style: uncluttered, modern and geometric. He named it “Triadic” to reflect the three acts, three dancers, and three colours (one for each act).

Schlemmer also designed the costumes based on cylinder, sphere, cone, and spiral shapes. These turned out to be revolutionary. He saw ballet and pantomime as free from the historical baggage of theatre and opera. He presented his ideas of choreographed geometry, man as a dancer, transformed by costume, moving in space.

Schlemmer saw the modern world driven by two main currents, the mechanised (man as machine and the body as a mechanism) and the primordial impulses (the depths of creative urges).