Performance and architecture

AIARG 2016, Fifth Annual Conference.
Jacques Lecoq is recognized as one of the most influential pedagogues of modern theatre. Nevertheless, his
contribution to architectural education is little known and quite underestimated. Lecoq starts to apply his
research on mime, gesture and movement to architectural pedagogy in 1968, when he is invited to teach at
the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. From then on, along with the theatre courses
offered in his own school, he develops, over 20 years, a mimodynamic approach to architects’ training. Based also on my direct experience of Lecoq’s method at the School of Mimodrama of Teatro Arsenale in
Milan, my discursive, and - possibly - also non-discursive, contribution aims to show how embodiment and
en-acting exercise can help architects to rediscover the value and authentic meaning of the architectural
environment as theatre of life.

This paper considers the Vordruck (form), a template of a male body
designed by Oskar Schlemmer in 1928 at the Bauhaus for his course
Der Mensch. The Vordruck, whose origins were based on both
ancient precedents as well as the figure of a woman, is an
innocuous, bland, seemingly silent and expressionless figure.
While many copies of this template were printed for his course,
the Vordruck took a leading yet hidden role throughout
Schlemmer’s oeuvre of the human body in space within his
drawings, costume designs and performances. The Vordruck
template fits within the historic legacy of canons that reveal ideal
proportions of the human body, including those by Polykleitos,
Vitruvius and Leonardo da Vinci, yet it is unique when compared
to these earlier canons as well as those developed later (Le
Corbusier and others). Its significance is that it is the earliest
modern canon of the human body developed specifically for
architects and designers, before Le Corbusier’s Modular, while
directly based on its historic precursors, such as Leonardo da
Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, which he enacted within his theatrical
experiments. At the same time the Vordruck represented the
Bauhaus philosophy of designing type-models for mass
production. Yet another previously unknown sources is a female
body, whose unique physical form was erased as Schlemmer
superimposed male traits over her body, transforming the female
into the male body. This erasure recasts and reveals the absence
and erasure of women within the Bauhaus.

Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943) an early twentieth century avant garde figure, is known for pedagogical, artistic, theatrical, and architectural projects in Germany between the world wars. As Master Teacher at the Weimar and Dessau Bauhaus, he was distinguished by his focus on the human body in space. This focus fits Schlemmer and his work firmly within the important subject of the human body and architecture. This dissertation focuses on the image of a male human body designed by Schlemmer, titledVordruck, or "form ." which Schlemmer made into a standardized form that was handed out and used in his Bauhaus course, Der Mensch — the Human Being, in the late 20s. The Vordruck is used here to explore his ideas about the human body in the context of design and architecture at the Bauhaus. Schlemmer placed this human and Return or "space" at the forefront of his productions. Yet the resoundingly maleness of the body and space of the Vordruck is revealed to have female origins: the source of the Vordruck was female. Schlemmer's Vordruck is the lens for a number of explorations. These include ideas of type, sources for this human type, the function of the canonical in artistic production, the implications of creating "ideal types" in the design and redesign of male and female human forms, as well as in the kind of architecture that was produced by the Bauhaus. This lens reveals how Schlemmer's bodies in space provoke architectural places of playfulness as well as ambiguity, vacancy, and indifference, and cause one to ask questions about events of that period in history and the acceptance of difference.

Critical spatial practices, as defined by Jane Rendell, are “‘reflective’ rather than objectifying and take into account their own procedures and methods,” and operate in “a more expanded field than architectural” practice typically includes (Rendell 2011, 20-21). Rendell further argues that “interdisciplinary research calls into question the ideological apparatus that structures the terms and methods of specific disciplinary practices... [it] question[s] dominant processes that seek to control intellectual and creative production, and instead generate[s] new resistant forms and modes of knowledge and understanding” (Rendell 2007, 1-2). Working between discourses and practices of architecture, installation and performance, I argue that ‘performances challenge’ (McKenzie 2001) and that performative spatial practices can be leveraged to critique, crack open and productively undo foreclosed architectural objects and reveal their methods of production. Performances practices, such as the choreographies of spatial labour explored through the creative work Intern[ed], reveal hidden cycles of making and unmaking, mechanisms of invisibility, and architectures that themselves are used politically, in an uneven distribution of the sensible (Rancière 2004), to hide from view disenfranchised populations. Through a narrative that accompanies video excerpts of the performed and installed work, this presentation will interrogate performativities latent within architectural drawings and texts, rehearse a theory of spatial labour, and articulate the value that performance practices contribute towards a critical spatial practice.

McKenzie, Jon. 2001. Perform or else : from discipline to performance. London; New York: Routledge.
Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The politics of aesthetics : the distribution of the sensible. London: Continuum.
Rendell, Jane. 2007. "Introduction. Critical architecture: between Criticism and Design." In Critical architecture, edited by Jane Rendell. London; New York: Routledge.
Rendell, Jane. 2011. "Critical Spatial Practices: Setting out a Feminist Approach to some Modes of what Matters." In Feminist practices interdisciplinary approaches to women in architecture, edited by Lori A. Brown. Farnham, Surrey, UK, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

This short document explains the ethos, and current interests of the IFTR Theatre Architecture Working Group. Calls for papers appear via listservs in November/December each year. Please contact the convenors for further information: awf@aber.ac.uk and j.rufford@exeter.ac.uk