Oskar Schlemmer on Play and Scepticism

This semester I'm teaching a module called Improvisation: Spontaneous Performance. This is the second time I've taught it and this year I've asked students to create weekly blog entries as a way of writing drafts for the Reflective Journal they need to submit at the end of the semester. The first entries are starting to roll in and there's the beginnings of some interesting material. Already I'm feeling like I want to put some of my own thoughts up, which I've started to do. Here's my second entry, written today (the actual blog the students write isn't publicly accessible):

I'm sitting in the National Library today reading The Theater of the Bauhaus by Walter Gropius. The final chapter, by Oskar Schlemmer has some interesting material that seems relevant to our investigations into improvisation. Schlemmer writes that from the early days of the Bauhaus the artists involved sensed that the impulse for creative theatre was "the play instinct" (der Spieltraub). (82) This, he explains is "the un-self-conscious and naive pleasure in shaping and producing, without asking questions about use or uselessness, sense or nonsense, good or bad." (82) That strikes me as a good description of what I hope we will be doing in many of the workshops in this module: 'shaping' and 'producing' without worrying about the usefulness or the sense of what we are doing, but taking pleasure in the playfulness. However, Schlemmer goes on to describe how this developed at the Bauhaus:

"We might say that during the course of its development, this state of naivete, which is the womb of the play instinct, is generally followed by a period of reflection, doubt and criticism, something that in turn can easily bring about the destruction of the original state, unless a second and, as it were, skeptical kind of naivete tempers this critical phase. Today we have become much more aware of ourselves. A sense for standards and constants has arisen out of the unconscious and the chaotic." (82)

I think Schlemmer's idea of a 'skeptical kind of naivete' is helpful here when thinking about how, in this module, we can maintain a sense of naive playfulness but also engage in reflection and criticism about that playfulness without destroying it. The hope then is, that a sense of constants (which in our case would be the development of techniques, habits and understandings) would emerge.

Just some ideas. If you have the time or inclination, let me know what you think.

Walter Gropius (ed) The Theater of the Bauhaus. Trans. Arthur S. Wensinger. London: Eyre Methuen, 1979.

Back again

It's been exactly two months since my last (rather narcissistic) post. Needless to say, a lot has been happening. In particular I've been doing a lot of teaching and have found myself on a treadmill of reading, preparing, teaching classes and marking. I do love it though - and I'm learning more than I think I ever have.

I watched the movie Sophie Scholl: The Last Days last week. Released in 2005, the film details the last five days in the life of Sophie Scholl, a young German woman involved in the non-violent resistance movement known as 'The White Rose' during World War Two. Along with her brother, Hans Scholl, and Christoph Probst, she was executed by the Nazis in 1943 at the age of 22. The film generates a great deal of tension because the outcome of the story is known from the beginning; this serves to focus attention on the reactions of Sophie to her predicament, particularly her courage and faith in the face of certain death. The film carefully treads a difficult line by depicting the heroic nature of Sophie's actions without turning into a piece of hagiography.

I was quite emotionally affected by the film and found myself inevitably reflecting on how I might react in such circumstances. How courageously do I stand by my convictions? Not very. I also found the following quote (attributed to Sophie Scholl) particularly challenging:

The real damage is done by those millions who want to 'survive'. The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don't want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won't take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don't like to make waves or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It's the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you'll keep it under control. If you don't make any noise, the bogeyman won't find you. But it's all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as broad avenues, and a little candle burns out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.