In 2024 the legendary Bauhaus band will turn one hundred. It accompanied the Bauhaus from Weimar by way of ­Dessau to Berlin. Its repertoire: a mix of Dada and jazz with very original performances and rhythms.

Unfortunately, there is hardly any historical material. Were the Bauhaus festivals more wild happenings or rather bourgeois, upstanding society dances? If one trusts the memories of Andor Weiniger, the driving force behind the band, there was “first the foxtrot – that was the most common dance in the beginning. Then came the one-step and the two-step, ragtime and the Charleston, then the blues and shimmy, then java.” Oskar Schlemmer’s wife Tut described the Bauhaus festivals in retrospect as a “kind of hopping from joie de vivre”.

The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation is celebrating the famous band in September 2024 with, among other things, rare films from the 1920s with live musical accompaniment, a picnic in with colour mottos borrowed from the Bauhaus, dance workshops, the beginnings of salsa, electro-swing, and neo-tango. And the Dessau-Roßlauer chose the colour motto themselves on Instagram: blue.