Kreuzigung (Crucifixion) premiered in 1920 after at least a hundred rehearsals, and was performed only a handful of times. Its author, the German expressionist dramaturg Lothar Schreyer, thought performances were transient and “unrepeatable” — sources of “newly creative forces for the transformation of humanity.” The book is what survives: the only one of his works ever captured in print, and the sole example of his workshop’s notation system. Thea Applebaum Licht writes it up for the Public Domain Review.

What the edition contains:

  • Seventy-seven hand-colored woodcuts, all by Max Billert and Max Olderock — the same artists who built the performance masks.
  • Published in 1920 in a run of 500 (reportedly preceded by 25 on Japan paper).
  • A three-bar notation called the Spielzeichen. Top bar: the script. Middle: a “tone sequence” of colored zigzags and ellipses capturing rhythm, pitch, and volume. Bottom: the “movement sequence,” blending geometry and words for stage direction.
  • A decoder key on page two, without which the pages can’t be parsed at all.

The stagecraft was as stripped as the notation. Actors moved behind hulking geometric full-body masks on spare abstracted sets, limited to half- and quarter-turns, kneeling, straightening, and rearrangements of arm, forearm, and hand. At its most vigorous, the action is a flurry of hand gestures and a “half circle left around common axis.” Christ becomes the character “Man,” an imposing rectangular silhouette bearing a bright red cross, joined by Mother and Mistress — robotic figures distinguished by the colors of their geometric breasts, wombs, and antenna-like wings. The script is liturgical and chant-like: “Tongues blaze world-world. Wordless. Holy. Holy. / Murdered flowers. Cracked stones. Slaughtered animals. I chew the End. Gestures.”

Schreyer edited the avant-garde journal Der Sturm, founded the Sturmbühne (“storm stage”) in Berlin and its Hamburg sister Kampfbühne (“battle stage”), and followed Kandinsky in arguing for a theater purged of “lifelike referents” — pure sound, pure movement, pure color, pure form. He banned professional actors from his plays: they were to be performed only 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.”

The reception was not kind. Critics had panned his 1918 staging of Sancta Susanna as “secret speech and limb exercises,” and for Kreuzigung Schreyer asked the press not to attend. His memoirs record complaints that it was zu kultisch — too cultish. In 1921 he began teaching at the Weimar Bauhaus, staging his plays there for over two years, but in 1923 Oskar Schlemmer took over the workshop and Bauhaus dance took a different path.

The performances vanished on schedule. The 500 copies did not — they now stand as a landmark of Bauhaus typography and graphic art, a universal visual language worked out for a theater almost nobody saw.