5+1 questions for … Sarah Elsing on bauhaus yoga

When I first practiced the “chair” asana almost twenty years ago, I immediately thought of the Wassily Chair, the Bauhaus classic by Marcel Breuer. It looks elegant but starts getting uncomfortable after a while. While I twisted my body into the yoga positions of the triangle, table and arch, the art and architecture critic in me immediately thought of the primary shapes by Wassily Kandinsky. Also the yogic concept of “sacred geometry”, the idea that vital energy can only flow freely when the body is stretched in certain fundamental, recurring forms which are stably grounded and oriented to the human scale, reminded me of the rules of statics and the clarity and straightforwardness of Bauhaus aesthetics. And yet, not everything in the Bauhaus is strictly mathematical and rational. In his fundamental work “Point and Line to Plane”, Kandinsky describes these shapes in a very poetic language. He even had them physically articulated by the expressive dancer Gret Palucca. When I saw those photos, I thought, “hey, those are yoga poses!”

What I like about the Bauhaus is its open, holistic approach. Johannes Itten, the great esoteric of the Bauhaus, understood aesthetic education as a universal education which promotes one’s development as a physical, spiritual and emotional unit. His preliminary course was – as he described it himself – about “developing the senses and increasing cognitive abilities and mental experience”. The students were taught to physically loosen themselves up and relax, and free themselves from the corset of their prior academic training. Itten was wholly aligned with the protagonists of the rhythm movement of that time – civilisation critics, natural philosophers, dance, music and sport educators – and he viewed movement and rhythm as an existential, primal principle. He wanted his students to understand this organisational principle also as a physical experience. In my bauhaus yoga classes, I incorporate a lot of exercises from Itten’s preliminary course which are vividly presented in the “original bauhaus workbook”. We also conduct some experiments which Kandinsky used in his own classes. His basic premise that “everything starts from a dot” shapes my working method as well.

What I also like about the Bauhaus was its clear rejection of one-sided specialisation – despite the fact that the highest and brightest tier of the Bauhaus was devoted to training future architects. As a generalist myself who’s involved in broadly diverse and seemingly contradictory areas, I find that people are often confused because they can’t put me neatly into a box. To me, everything belongs together: art, the body, architecture, music, literature, thinking, feeling and sensual experience. The project of radically casting off conventions and working to create a new vision of how we want to live within a community of likeminded individuals is something that makes me feel euphoric even today. It’s basically nothing else than the idea of sangha in Buddhism or satsang in yoga.

At the end of the class, we often do Kandinsky’s gong exercise, with which he wanted to promote his students’ synaesthetic abilities. Instead of tapping a gong, we all chant “Om” eight times. That alone is a bonding experience because after we’ve done our exercises together, the group can usually chant in a harmonic and harmonious way. Recently one of the participants told me that while she was chanting, she had seen squares and triangles in primary colours, and another reported seeing violet waves. Neither of them had known beforehand that they were synaesthetically wired. That shows me that the knowledge and method I’d like to convey can in fact be experienced in the mind and body, and in a relatively short time, can even trigger creative processes.

At this year’s Bauhaus Festival in Dessau, we were fortunate enough to practice bauhaus yoga for a whole week at the historic Bauhaus and on a meadow in front of the Preller House, the famous Bauhaus dormitory. It was amazing and a little exciting for me to be able to practice, for example, in the classroom where Itten held his preliminary course. But basically, anyone can do these exercises in their living room at home. Chairs, tables, walls, ceilings and windowsills can be used as aids. But to become Bauhaus furniture, all you have to do is practice!