The Bauhaus art school existed in four different cities Weimar from 1919 to 1925, Dessau from 1925 to 1932, Berlin from 1932 to 1933 and Chicago from 1937-1938, under four different architect-directors Walter Gropius from 1919 to 1928, Hannes Meyer from 1928 to 1930, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1930 to 1933 and László Moholy-Nagy from 1937-1938). These changes of venue and leadership meant a constant shifting of focus, technique, instructors, and politics. When the school moved from Weimar to Dessau, for instance, although it had been an important revenue source, the pottery shop was discontinued. When Mies took over the school in 1930, he transformed it into a private school, and would not allow any supporters of Hannes Meyer to attend it. Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy undertook a wide range of aesthetic investigations, using the school as a laboratory to examine the formal principles of abstraction in painting, photography, and sculpture. He also explored the influence of technology, which had a profound impact on his work.
These experiments led Moholy-Nagy to develop a new kind of theater based on these principles. Underlying this approach was an effort to synthesize the theater's essential components – space, composition, motion, sound, movement, and light – into a fully integrated, abstract form of artistic expression. Moholy-Nagy referred to this idea as the theater of totality, a reinterpretation of Wagner's concept of total theater. Moholy-Nagy's approach to the synthesis of the arts reduced the importance of the written word and the presence of the actor, placing them on an equal plateau with stage design, lighting, music, and visual composition. This interest in formal integration included technology, which is reflected in his use of mechanical motifs in his work in other genres such as painting, photography, film and sculpture. moholy-nagy
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