„The dancer and dance teacher Gret Palucca (1902- 1993) is quoted as having said: ‚I don’t want my dancing to be nice and lovely!‘ – and what the artist Roland Fuhrmann has installed in the connecting tract between the old and new sections of this building is also neither of these. After numerous changes of status, most recently in 1999, the dance school founded by Palucca in 1925 is now operating as the Dance Academy following an amendment of Saxony’s University Act. This was the reason for restoring the existing building and adding new ones, including a boarding school for 50 young dance talents. The inauguration ceremony – the design competition was won in 2001 by the Hanover-based architects Storch Ehlers Partner, work is due for completion next year – included the handing over of Fuhrmann’s installation Treibender Rhythmus (Driving Rhythm) which fills the area between the two parts of the complex, linking old and new.
At 7.5 metres long and 2.3 metres tall, the sculpture made of neon orange steel tubing hovers as a seemingly moving, cinematographic element in the space, shivering invisibly, as if poised to jump and yet already in full leap. The artist based the work on a film clip of Palucca dancing from the 1920s, which he broke down into 30 individual pictures. He then abstracted from these 30 frozen dance movements by joining the extremities (hands, feet, head) to form a reduced, straight-edged, geometrical form. All of these movements were then lined up according to their chronology, creating a flowing movement which crosses the space allotted to it as if in a slow–motion jump. The transparency of the sequence of movements lends a tension to the architectural space without blocking lines of sight. To aid comprehension of the work, which can be understood independently of its historical background as a dance sculpture, the original film sequences of the Palucca dance are on display on each floor as transparent strips. Not nice, not lovely, but beautiful!“ Benedikt Kraft
translated by Nicholas Grindell
