Triadisches Ballett
ballet written by Oskar Schlemmer
Triadisches Ballett (Triadic Ballet) is a ballet developed by Oskar Schlemmer. The ballet became the most widely performed avant-garde artistic dance and while Schlemmer was at the Bauhaus from 1921 to 1929, the ballet toured, helping to spread the ethos of the Bauhaus.
History
The Triadisches Ballett was conceived in 1912 in Stuttgart in a cooperation between the dance troupe of Albert Burger (1884–1970) and his wife Elsa Hötzel (1886–1966) and Oskar Schlemmer. Parts of the ballet were performed in 1915, but though Burger asked Arnold Schoenberg to write the score ("Your music, which I know from the local concert, seemed to me to be the only one suitable for my ideas") he had no success so Schlemmer and the Burgers performed to music by Enrico Bossi. It premiered in the Stuttgart landestheater on 30 September 1922, with music composed by Paul Hindemith, re the Stuttgart Ballet. It was also performed in 1923 during the Bauhaus Week at the Nationaltheater, Weimar, and at the Annual Exhibition of German Crafts, Dresden.
Synopsis
Inspired in part by Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and his observations and experiences during the First World War, Oskar Schlemmer began to conceive of the human body as a new artistic medium. He saw ballet and pantomime as free from the historical baggage of theatre and opera and thus able to present his ideas of choreographed geometry, man as dancer, transformed by costume, moving in space.
The idea of the ballet was based on the principle of the trinity. It has 3 acts, 3 participants (2 male, 1 female), 12 dances and 18 costumes.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Triadisches Ballett” is ballet written by Oskar Schlemmer. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Triadisches, Ballett and ballet, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “ballet written by Oskar Schlemmer” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q318793. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1921, 1929, 1912 and 1884.
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This entry incorporates text from “Triadisches Ballett” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.