The Sturm Circle
Before joining the Bauhaus, Lothar Schreyer was a central figure in Berlin’s expressionist avant-garde through Herwarth Walden’s gallery and journal Der Sturm. He served as its dramaturge and editor and founded the experimental theatre groups Sturmbühne (1918) and a Berlin counterpart. His theatrical practice was rooted in mystical and spiritual premises: performance as a vehicle for revealing hidden forces through abstracted physical form, full masks (Ganzmasken) that erased the individual face, ritualistic movement, colour scores, and language treated as sonic material rather than narrative meaning. The work aimed at inner revelation rather than dramatic story.
The Theater Workshop
Walter Gropius appointed Schreyer in autumn 1921 to establish and lead the Bauhaus theater workshop — the first person to hold that position. The workshop was conceived as an experimental space integrating word, movement, sound, colour-form, and architecture, aligned with the school’s early ideal of total artistic synthesis. Schreyer staged his own productions: Kreuzigung (Crucifixion) and Kindsterben (Death of a Child), with abstract costumes, full masks, and movement systems derived from his colour-form notation scores. Performances were intimate events for small audiences, esoteric in character and heavy in tone.
They were poorly received — even within the school. The expressionist, spiritually intense character of Schreyer’s work was increasingly at odds with the direction Gropius was taking the Bauhaus by 1922 and 1923: away from mysticism and toward greater clarity, constructivist principles, and practical integration across workshops. Schreyer resigned in 1923. Oskar Schlemmer, already at the school since 1921, took over the workshop and redirected it toward a geometric, abstract, and mechanical exploration of the body in space — producing the work, including the Triadic Ballet, for which the Bauhaus stage became known.
Schreyer’s two-year tenure established performance as a legitimate field within the school’s programme. The transition from his practice to Schlemmer’s illustrates something specific about the Bauhaus’s development between 1921 and 1923: the school arrived with expressionist sympathies and moved, through internal pressure and changing priorities, toward a harder-edged and more structurally grounded approach to art-making. The theater workshop carried that shift in concentrated form.