Arena Extended: Pictures at an Exhibition. Jazz Version with Dancing Hands

In this live concert at the Bauhaus Museum Dessau, the Leipzig pianist Stephan König and students from the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences Dessau will make Pictures at an Exhibition, the piano cycle that Modest Mussorgsky composed in 1874, audible and visible in a new way. The concert is produced for live streaming on the digital channels of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation.

While König reinterprets Mussorgsky’s compositions in virtuosic and richly facetted ways using jazz techniques, he will be accompanied by videos of dancing hands: an international group of students from the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences Dessau developed these movement students in the Open Stage Studio of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. Leaning on Oskar Schlemmer’s exercises on the historical Bauhaus stage, they explore their own hands as architectural elements. With their fingers they form rhythmic, moving spatial structures that they then turn abstract to the point of unrecognizability in shadow plays. In sixteen videos, Mussorgsky’s musical interpretations of paintings are translated back into new visual compositions.

As a special scenographic and musical performance, this live concert at the Open Stage on the ground floor of the Bauhaus Museum Dessau is a reminiscence of a legendary production in Dessau of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition from 1928: a staged performance of the piano cycle on 4 April 1928 at the Friedrich-Theater Dessau was accompanied by a mobile Constructivist stage composition by Wassily Kandinsky. For the Bauhaus master Kandinsky, who had developed far-ranging ideas for a revival of the theater by means of an “abstract stage synthesis,” this was his first and only theatrical work realised during his lifetime.

The Open Stage at the Bauhaus Museum Dessau in the city centre enables the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation to engage culturally and artistically in and with the city of Dessau-Rosslau with a fresh approach to a range of event formats, and to communicate the legacy of the Bauhaus to a diverse audience. Programmatically speaking, the Open Stage corresponds with the exhibition Versuchsstätte Bauhaus. The Collection on the upper floor, which showcases the Bauhaus as an experimental, pioneering school, workshop and locus of experimentation. The Open Stage therefore provides spaces for the development of interactive installations, talks, film presentations, discussions, dance, theatre, music and performance projects.

The event Bauhaus Jazz Exploration, which had been planned for 27 June 2020, was postponed to 2021 because of Covid-19. The original concept for the event took the occasion of the centennial of the birth of the jazz musician Günter Boas of Dessau for conversations, lectures,  workshops and concerts. One of them will now be held with a small live audience and can also be followed as a live stream on the digital channels of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation.

The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation is a non-profit foundation under public law. It is institutionally funded by the German Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the State of Saxony-Anhalt, and the City of Dessau-Roßlau.