Kurt Jooss

The Green Table (1932)

Masked people are assembled around a green table.

 

The BAU’s former boardroom features an excerpt from Kurt Jooss’s The Green Table (1932), a modern ballet classic about the futility of peace negotiations and the price of war. The video is a curatorial reference to Manuel Pelmuș and Frédéric Gies’s Tribute to Kurt Jooss’s “Green Table,” one of the opening performances of steirischer herbst ’25, which deals with Jooss’s choreography.

Kurt Jooss (1901, Wasseralfingen, Germany–1979, Heilbronn, Germany) was a dancer, choreographer, and teacher. He began his career in the 1920s under Rudolf von Laban and was instrumental in the development of German Tanztheater. Jooss celebrated his greatest success with The Green Table (1932), in which his longtime collaborator Sigurd Leeder also danced. Jooss emigrated to England in 1933, and after the war taught at the Folkwang School for Music, Dance, and Speech in Essen, which he had cofounded in 1927.