MIES VAN DER ROHE AND THE MOVING IMAGE Lutz Robbers A ...

more than spectators,” von Salzmann writes. 110 Here all the binaries that sustain modern thinking
(subject/object, space/time, light/darkness) dissolved, leaving the spectator-turned-participant no
other choice than to abandon its position as a distanced subject and to merge with the rhythm of
moving lights, music and bodies. 111
The Festsaal blew emptiness of signs and signification to architectural proportions. Here
the entire space became a luminous body that rendered the subject/object binary completely
redundant. The Festsaal ‘spatializes’ the purely cinematic delight and ‘temporalizes’ the
immersive freezing of time in the panorama. The body appears on the scene, a scene which has
become an environment of changing intensities. Inside the pulsating performance space at
Hellerau, the body takes a first step into becoming what Schlemmer later calls a “Tänzermensch”
112
[Man as Dancer].
The modern subject is consequently neither positioned in front of nor inside
of an image of space; rather he/she is part of a dynamic image-space. Hence, it is in the Festsaal
110
Salzmann, "Licht Belichtung und Beleuchtung: Bemerkungen zur Beleuchtungsanlage des
Grossen Saales der Dalcroze-Schule," 72.
111
It should be underlined that while a room like the Festsaal was without precedent in the world
of theatre, spaces of immanent and immersive sensual attractions had become ubiquitous in
metropolitan life of the nineteenth century. “Orgies of light and colors” at the World Fairs,
immensely popular light-organ spectacles (Claude Bragdon, Thomas Wilfred, Alexander
Scriabin, etc.), forms of visual entertainment like the panorama, optical toys were all
manifestations of an expanded field of contemporaneous practices that forged the link between
light, the body, and motion.
112
For Schlemmer the Tänzermensch is the modern figure par excellence:“The laws of cubical
space are the visible, linear network of planimetric and stereometric relationships. […] The laws
of organic man reside in the invisible functions of the inner self: heartbeat, circulation,
respiration, the activities of the brain and the nervous system. If these are to be the determining
factors, then their center is the human being, whose movements and emanations create an
imaginary space. Cubical-abstract space is the only the horizontal and vertical framework of this
flow.” The Tänzermensch mediates between two conceptions of space: the first obeying the
organic laws of the body, a second obeying the structure of abstract-cubic space. By comparison,
Appia and von Salzmann’s Festsaal is ‘total’ in the sense that it inhibits all mediation and
imposes the dominance of the musical score onto dancing bodies and lights. See Oskar
Schlemmer, "Man and Art Figure," trans. Arthur S. Wensinger, The Theater of the Bauhaus, ed.
Walter Gropius (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961 [1925]), 25.
277