{"id":2444974,"date":"2019-06-04T21:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-06-05T03:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=307411"},"modified":"2019-06-04T21:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-06-05T03:00:00","slug":"aspens-bauhaus-ball-toasts-art-movements-centennial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/aspens-bauhaus-ball-toasts-art-movements-centennial\/","title":{"rendered":"Aspen\u2019s Bauhaus Ball toasts art movement\u2019s centennial"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Aspen Institute Curator Lissa Ballinger works on her Bauhaus Ball costume. The Bauhaus Ball will be held June 6 at the Wheeler Opera House honoring the 100th anniversary. It is a free, community event that includes live music, films, Bauhaus-inspired art, performances and a juried costume contest.<\/strong>
EDLbauhaus-atd-052319-2<\/em><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

\u201cPlay becomes party \u2014 party becomes work \u2014 work becomes play,\u201d the Bauhaus master Johannes Itten once said.<\/p>\n

So as Aspen celebrates the centennial of the school and movement that reshaped the world\u2019s conception of design, creation and education \u2014 and shaped modern Aspen through Bauhausler-turned-Aspenite Herbert Bayer<\/a> \u2014 Bauhaus 100<\/a> organizers, of course, planned a costume-heavy bash<\/a> as the centerpiece of a year\u2019s worth of events<\/a>. Costume parties and celebrations were an essential part of the Bauhaus movement, Torsten Blume of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation wrote in a recent journal article, representing the \u201ctotal work of art\u201d ethos of the design school.<\/p>\n

Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius dubbed these legendary parties \u201cunified works of superior common vitality.\u201d The Bauhaus painter Oskar Schlemmer once quipped: \u201cTell me how you party and I\u2019ll tell you who you are.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Bauhaus band played Saturday night dances and monthly masked balls during the German school\u2019s run from 1919 to 1933. Artists, masters and students gathered for birthday celebrations for Bauhauslers like Wassily Kandinsky and Gropius, they toasted the changes of the seasons and they hosted fittingly surreal happenings themed around things like \u201ckite flying,\u201d \u201cmetallic,\u201d \u201celeven elves\u201d and \u201ccatchword.\u201d At these collective happenings, students invested their talents in creative costumes, party experiences and extravagant decorations. The 1928 metallic party, for example, had guests enter via a chute, sliding into a room filled with people in tinfoil dress.<\/p>\n

\u201cSuch occasions allowed this unique design school to present itself with playful inventiveness as a non-conformist, avant-garde collective for education and work,\u201d Blume wrote.<\/p>\n

Parties were often punctuated with a curated dose of whimsy. In a how-to piece about Bauhaus centennial parties, Blume advised: \u201cThere must be surprises, interruptions, unexpected happenings, strange rituals, unplanned stuff and, every so often, bewilderment and confusion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thursday night\u2019s Bauhaus Ball at the Wheeler Opera House launches the Roaring Fork Valley\u2019s Bauhaus 100 celebration into its overstuffed summer run. The party is free and open to the public, with costumes \u201cwildly encouraged,\u201d live music, a costume contest and, no doubt, some surprises. A series of Bauhaus costume-making workshops at the Red Brick Center for the Arts in May drew sell-out crowds.<\/p>\n

The Bauhaus 100 celebration incorporates every arts organization in the valley and this week alone, along with the Ball, includes a Wednesday evening opening of Bauhaus-inspired prints at the Red Brick, an exhibition opening Friday at Carbondale\u2019s R2 Gallery with paintings by Bayer protege Richard Carter and the Bauhaus-inspired Dave Durrance. Soon to come are Bauhaus openings at Colorado Mountain College (June 13), the Aspen Institute\u2019s Resnick and Paepcke Galleries (July 1), along with workshops at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, talks at the Aspen Art Museum and elsewhere, tours of the Bayer landscapes at the Institute and Aspen\u2019s Bauhaus-inspired architecture running through summer. The Aspen Music Festival and School\u2019s summer season is peppered with Bauhaus-inspired and -adjacent concerts, beginning with Dessau native Kurt Weill\u2019s work performed by the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble on June 19 and Gunther Schuller\u2019s \u201cSeven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee\u201d on July 14. Meanwhile, the Aspen Historical Society\u2019s monumental exhibition \u201cBayer & Bauhaus: how design shaped aspen\u201d will run through 2020.<\/p>\n

atravers@aspentimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Aspen Institute Curator Lissa Ballinger works on her Bauhaus Ball costume. The Bauhaus Ball will be held June 6 at the Wheeler Opera House honoring the 100th anniversary. It is a free, community event that includes live music, films, Bauhaus-inspired art, performances and a juried costume contest.EDLbauhaus-atd-052319-2 \u201cPlay becomes party \u2014 party becomes work \u2014 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2444974","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-19 07:22:23","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2444974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2444974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2444974\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2444974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2444974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2444974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}