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Also, Robert Wilson.
Schlemmer seems to play with near/far and counterpoint a little more than Wilson, and begins to draw the basis of a new kind of choreography.
Schlemmer's work is a real historical moment – it's in parallel to what was happening in Russia, all the great new conceptions of theater space and body movement. It may share some of the same bones or underpinnings that Balanchine brought with him from Russia and which you see traces of in Prodigal Son, 4 T's, Agon, and Rubies.
Merce Cunningham was also exposed to these ideas (at the same time Robert Rauchenberg was looking at Kurt Schwitters) at Black Mountain College, where Joseph Albers taught. You can see Cunningham's late work in this clip :
Schlemmer Pole Dance recreation
I spent my first year at a very serious Bauhaus school, a bit too serious for me – founded by Schlemmer's nemesis – and what I was really fascinated with there were these magical costumes – and later on with what I saw in films clips of the originals or what might have been post-war reconstructions ... In retrospect so much of the New York avante garde of the fifties and seventies seems to be a secret return to what happened in the twenties at Dessau and Berlin, as well as Paris and Moscow.
