'Episodes', 2019

Skateboard paintings, spirit beings, colour wheel dances, portals to other worlds, cheese toasties, incessant questioning, augmented reality, atemporal soundscapes, the body, walls and surveillance clouds.

Artist Sarah Kate Wilson along with students and her colleagues at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL have revisited Xanti Schawinsky’s performance-installation, Spectodrama: Play, Life, Illusion (1936), producing episodes formed of performances, costumes, sets and soundscapes that reimagine the work in 2019. Schawinsky, a Bauhäusler unrestricted by media, worked across painting, photography, architecture, graphic design, stage design and played saxophone in the Bauhauskapelle. Later on, he founded the Stage Studies Workshop at Black Mountain College. Schawinsky’s “total experience” theatre works, known as Spectodramas, can be understood as early forms of ‘happenings’ which were later developed at Black Mountain College by artists such as John Cage and Allan Kaprow.

This paper will give an account of Camberwell’s episodes staged at the new Bauhaus Museum, Dessau as part of the Festival Stage TOTAL, one of the highlights of the centenary celebrations.