Dance

Dance in the Erholungshaus

Bettina Welzel

Dance was the last of the art forms to be offered in the Erholungshaus, but then it arrived in style: the first performance, held in 1936, featured Harald Kreutzberg’s “Musik und Tanz unserer Zeit”, with “our” Erich Kraack conducting the Cologne Chamber Orchestra, and provided a brief glimpse of the avantgarde at a time when the arts were subject to strict censorship.
After the war, the Cultural Affairs Department picked up where it had left off, and the Erholungshaus soon acquired a reputation as a venue for ballet and dance enthusiasts. There was no need to go to Berlin, Paris, Hamburg or Munich to see innovative choreographies and ensembles. The first company to appear in 1945 was the Cologne Opera Ballet Company, followed by Gret Palucca (1946), Ballets Janine Charrat (1953), The Imperial Ballet of China (1955), Tatjana Gsovsky (1956) and Maurice Béjart (1958). In 1965, Pina Bausch appeared as a young dancer with the Folkwang Ballet under Kurt Joos.
1969 saw the opening of the Forum and from then on the Cultural Affairs Department used this larger venue jointly with Leverkusen’s Cultural Office to consolidate the town’s reputation as an international dance centre. Structural changes to the Erholungshaus auditorium in 1997 gave the audience a much better view of the stage, and Bayer’s centre of culture once again became an attractive venue for ballet and dance performances. The more intimate atmosphere and the closeness of the audience to the stage made it particularly suitable for “quiet” and experimental works. And the outstanding technical skills of the Erholungshaus team ensure that even the most demanding productions pose no problems.
However, dance in the Erholungshaus means more than just international guest performances. In the attic there is an excellently equipped ballet studio where, in 1955, Annemarie Kirchem-Leopolder began offering regular classes and rehearsing her own choreographies for performance in the Erholungshaus. Since 1994, the studio has been occupied by the ballet school of Karina Maczkowiak, who teaches classical ballet to young dancers, thereby cultivating a new generation of ballet-lovers. This, too, is an important contribution to the future of our ballet programme and ensures that dance in the Erholungshaus, while valuing tradition, remains young, vibrant and forward-looking.