100 Years Bauhaus. The opening festival

The 100 Years Bauhaus opening festival kicked off the nationwide celebrations for the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Bauhaus. It invited visitors to take a creative-experimental journey around the legendary Bauhaus stage.

Concerts, installations, puppet and straight theatre, dance and film, workshops and lecture demonstrations, games and festivities: The programme offered numerous different events and formats for Bauhaus experts and novices, which enable the re-discovery of the superb historic testaments of Bauhaus, as well as the legacies and stimuli of this art form for the present and the future.
The festival programme’s artistic director was Bettina Wagner-Bergelt, who invited many artists from all over the world to Berlin to revive the spirit of Bauhaus in the tradition of Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee and many others.
Oriented on Bauhauswoche 1923 (Bauhaus Week 1923) and the legendary Bauhaus Festivals, the opening festival unfolded a creative atmosphere of experimentation and research, learning and teaching, joining in and thinking ahead. Art and technology, light, colour, sound and movement and the relationship between humankind and machine played a key role in the programme. In the “Das totale Tanztheater” (Total Dance Theatre) virtual reality installation, for example, a project by Interactive Media Foundation in cooperation with Filmtank and Artificial Rome, choreographer Richard Siegal allowed the audience and the action on stage to blend with one another.

Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier was the patron of the opening festival, and has officially opened the event on 16 January 2019.

Three leading Bauhaus research institutions (the Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum für Gestaltung in Berlin, the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau and the Klassik Stiftung Weimar), the Federal Government, represented by government officials for culture and media and the Federal Cultural Foundation, as well as representatives of eleven federal states, have joined to form the “Bauhaus Verbund 2019”.
An initiative of the Bauhaus Cooperation Berlin Dessau Weimar, supported by the Federal Cultural Foundation, in cooperation with the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.