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When Kreuzigung, which translates to Crucifixion, premiered in 1920, it represented the culmination of at least one hundred rehearsals. However, like most works by the German expressionist dramaturg Lothar Schreyer, this play was performed only a handful of times. Schreyer firmly believed that his choreographed performances were transient and "unrepeatable." He felt that these unique events served as a vital source of "newly creative forces for the transformation of humanity." Actors performed behind large, geometric masks that covered their entire bodies, moving across sparse and abstract sets. The audience was restricted to a small, tight-knit circle of expressionist artists. After receiving mixed reactions to his earlier works, critics delivered harsh reviews of the workshop's first performance. In 1918, the group had staged an opera called Sancta Susanna, which critics dismissed as "secret speech and limb exercises." Schreyer personally requested that the press not attend future events. Yet, he remembered that "we wanted to give at least one of these plays" a form "which creative people could recognize in the future."
Kreuzigung is a mystical retelling of the Crucifixion set in a desolate, post-war environment. It was the only one of Schreyer's works captured in print. The edition featured here was published in 1920 with a print run of 500 copies. It is said that a limited edition of 25 copies on Japan paper preceded the main run. The book was illustrated with exquisite hand-colored woodcuts. It remains the sole example of his workshop's arcane scoring system, which combined colors, words, and complex symbolic notation. In the introduction to his Kreuzigung: Spielgang Werk VII, Schreyer and his collaborators declared that the play was "intended to be a cosmic mirror of the unity of life." Schreyer preferred the German term Spielgang over the more familiar Theaterstück (play). Each of the seventy-seven prints was produced by the same artists, Max Billert and Max Olderock, who were also responsible for creating the performance masks for Kreuzigung.
Lothar Schreyer was the editor of the influential avant-garde journal Der Sturm. He also founded the expressionist theater group Sturmbühne (storm stage) in Berlin, along with its sister group in Hamburg called Kampfbühne (battle stage). Schreyer's ambitions were very impressive. In 1921, he began a teaching position at the Weimar Bauhaus, where he staged his plays for over two years. Although his work was controversial, it would later influence the theater of the Bauhaus and the modern dance movement. Following the lead of Wassily Kandinsky, Schreyer argued for a theater purged of "lifelike referents." He believed it should consist of what the drama historian Mel Gordon describes as "pure sound, pure movement, pure color, pure form." He developed an abstract, theoretically driven stagecraft that pared down performance to what he called the "language of form." In his memoirs, Schreyer recalls Kreuzigung as the production that came "closest to our goal."
The Kreuzigung score is intricate, graphic, and dense with geometric symbols cobbled together in striking prints. It is a visual embodiment of Schreyer's utopian theatrical aspirations. In this script, stage directions and dialogue are boiled down into a spare, universal visual language. The pages can be read only with the help of a code found on page two. The "Spielzeichen," or play symbols, are condensed into something like a three-bar musical score divided into measures. The top bar contains the script. Across the middle, in a cacophony of colorful zigzags, ellipses, and marks, is a "tone sequence" capturing rhythm, pitch, and volume. Below, blending geometrics and words, we find the "movement sequence" or stage directions.
The "key" for decoding the symbolic notation in Lothar Schreyer's Kreuzigung (1920) reveals the complexity of the system. It serves as a Rosetta Stone for understanding how the performance was meant to function visually and kinetically. The notation demanded a high level of discipline and abstract thinking from the performers. They had to translate the spiritual themes of the play into rigid, geometric patterns.
In Kreuzigung, the character of Christ is transformed into the figure of "Man." In a description that sits between a character sketch and a costume design, Man is introduced as an imposing rectangular silhouette bearing a bright red cross. He takes the stage with Mother and Mistress, similar robotic figures distinguished only by the colors of their geometric breasts, wombs, and antenna-like wings. Although the players were members of the Bauhaus artistic revolution, Schreyer mandated that his works should only be performed by "those who are not professional actors, who do not support the theater business, who are not critics, who do not want to be themselves."
Like other examples in the long history of graphic performance notation, such as the eighteenth-century Beauchamp-Feuillet notation for dance, the Kreuzigung score reduces movement to its basic components. The range of motion available to man, mistress, and mother is limited to half- and quarter-turns, kneeling and straightening, and rearrangements of the arm, forearm, and hand. At its most vigorous, the action is nothing more than a flurry of hand gestures, a few steps forward, or a "half circle left around common axis."
MISTRESS hands on breast, finger-tips together MAN right hand over left hand
The script is stilted and liturgic, with chant-like repetitions. Each line is intense and disjointed, entirely unlike normal speech. The characters echo and speak over each other, creating a soundscape that prioritizes rhythm and emotional resonance over traditional narrative clarity.
Tongues blaze world-world. Wordless. Holy. Holy. Murdered flowers. Cracked stones. Slaughtered animals. I chew the End. Gestures.
Schreyer's Bauhaus theater experiment was ultimately short-lived and controversial, even among the Sturmbühne's tight, insiders-only audience. When the play premiered on April 12, 1920, Schreyer reported mixed reviews. In his memoirs, he recalls complaints that the performance was "zu kultisch," meaning too cultish. In 1923, the artist Oskar Schlemmer replaced Schreyer at the helm of the workshop. Schlemmer's dances would become a hallmark of Bauhaus performance art. Yet, if Schreyer's tenure and his performances themselves were essentially transient, the small run of Kreuzigung books has found lasting importance. They stand as a standout example of Bauhaus typography and graphic arts.
The Kreuzigung volume stands as a testament to the radical spirit of the early 20th-century avant-garde. It bridges the gap between a live, ephemeral performance and a permanent artistic document. Through its unique notation and stark imagery, it offers a glimpse into a vision where the stage became a laboratory for exploring the fundamental structures of human expression.
The legacy of Lothar Schreyer extends beyond the brief moments of performance he created. His efforts to codify movement and speech into a universal language of form laid important groundwork for future developments in modern dance and theater design. The Kreuzigung edition remains a vital artifact for scholars and artists studying the intersection of visual art, literature, and performance in the Bauhaus era. It challenges us to see the stage not merely as a place for storytelling, but as a canvas for abstract, symbolic exploration. Through his rigorous adherence to his own artistic principles, Schreyer ensured that even the most fleeting of his creations left a permanent mark on the history of art.