The Bauhaus movement was one of the twentieth century's most daring experiments in arts education, and its influence on architecture, design, and the visual arts is well known. Many of its most important ideas are revealed in Bauhaus writings about theatrical performance and performance spaces. The Theater of the Bauhaus, originally published in Germany in 1924, describes a theater stripped of history, moralism, scenery, even narrative itself.

The Bauhaus group believed traditional theater to be little more than a vehicle for propaganda and rejected as well the theater of ridicule and satire practiced by the Dadaists and Expressionists.

In place of both conventional and avant-garde drama, Oskar Schlemmer and his Bauhaus associates created an abstract theater of movement, color, light, form, and sound - language would be added later, once the stage had been purged of its "literary encumbrance." They believed that humanity's essential nature - freed from history, tradition, class and nationality - would find expression in theatrical works that incorporated pantomime, masks, dance, and acrobatics.