Lot 635 N

“Feminine Repetition” was the title of a play on which Xanti Schawinsky worked as a student and later assistant of Oskar Schlemmer at the Bauhaus stage. While the play itself, a ballet-like pantomime, was never completed, Schawinsky was able to present excerpts of the production as a sketch-like stage improvisation entitled “Steppexzentrik” on 20 March 1926 at the Bauhaus carnival ball “Das weiße Fest”. Schawinsky himself performed in his play as a tap dancer in top hat and tails, competing with a larger-than-life “tap machine” (pictured right) built by him and moved invisibly by Hermann Röseler as a symbol of the machine age. Further performers were Vladas Svipas as a “gentleman” in a summer suit, Ellen Hauschild as a courted “lady” and Werner Isaacsohn (Jackson) as drummer who accompanied the modern American jazz music played live from a gramophone (cf. Dirk Scheper, op.cit., p. 126).
The present image by Lucia Moholy underlines the experimental and humorous character of the play, which contains elements of cabaret, dance revue and improvisational theatre and combines them with formal elements of Bauhaus theatre, represented by the “tap machine”. At the same time, the rhythmic double exposure lends the image a staccato-like element, in keeping with the tap dance.

Introduction "From the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College - Photography from a Swiss Private Collection" see lot 631