Debra McCall: Lecture and Screening of Oskar Schlemmer’s 1920s Bauhaus Dances

A narrative within a narrative, Debra McCall will present her story of reconstructing the 1920s Bauhaus Dances of Oskar Schlemmer, explain the philosophy and work of Bauhaus artists, and screen a film of her reconstructions. Tasked with finding the original notes and sketches thought to have been lost during World War II, McCall scoured museums and archives in West Germany before venturing into East Germany to visit the restored Bauhaus. With its new architecture for a revolutionary age, the Bauhaus—a school of art, crafts, and technology founded by the architect Walter Gropius—embodied the zeitgeist of 1920s Weimar with such faculty as Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, and Wassily Kandinsky. Schlemmer’s early Bauhaus “lecture-dances” were to later inform the avant-garde work of Merce Cunningham, Robert Wilson, The Grand Union, Laurie Anderson, and David Byrne.

Premiered at The Kitchen and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the reconstructions toured internationally to sold-out venues and critical acclaim, including the first Biennale de la Danse in Lyon, Artissima 17 in Turin,and a historic return to the Dessau Bauhaus. A film of the reconstructions directed by Robert Leacock and McCall premiered at New York’s Goethe House and merited inclusion in the American Dance Festival’s International Festival of Film and Video Dance, Performa 09 Biennial of Visual Arts Performance, and the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops in Modernity.” The film resides at the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center and the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

About Debra McCall
Debra McCall set about reconstructing the 1920s avant-garde Bauhaus Dances of Oskar Schlemmer during the heyday of the New York downtown performance scene in the late ‘70s. Working with Andreas Weininger, the last surviving Bauhaus performer, she rediscovered Schlemmer’s notes and returned the dances to their home on the Dessau Bauhaus stage fifty-five years after their premiere. Her reconstructions are considered the definitive interpretations of Schlemmer’s Bauhaus work.

McCall’s choreographic excavations extended to her time as an Advanced Design Fellow at the American Academy in Rome where she choreographed “Psyche’s Last Task,” based on the second century Metamorphoses of Apuleius. Research involved travel to southern Italy, Sicily, Greece, and Egypt to study sculpture, friezes, temples and rituals related to the myth. McCall has been awarded National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships for Choreography, InterArts, and Advanced Design as well as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to preserve the Bauhaus reconstructions through Labanotation. As a 2013 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Scholar at the University of California Davis, McCall studied the roots of the Arab Uprisings. She is also Senior Research Associate at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in New York City and an Honorary Board Member of Art Therapy Italiana in Bologna and Rome, Italy.

A teacher of World Dance, Dean of Cultural History, and Director of Curriculum and Professional Development at the Ross School in East Hampton, NY, McCall was a member of the graduate school faculties of New York University, Adelphi University and Pratt Institute, where she was Mellon Lecturer. She also served on the Education Committee of the Watermill Center in its initial years. McCall’s efforts in dance preservation have translated to her establishing Performing Resistance, an international association whose aim is to defend and advance the rights of performers worldwide to freedom of expression and association and to promote the preservation of performance heritage through media and scholarly documentation.

Public funding provided by Suffolk County