The myth of HELLERAU stems from the vision of the craftsman and entrepreneur Karl Schmidt, who founded the Deutsche Werkstätten Hellerau and also created the first German garden city with the housing estate Hellerau in 1909.

In 1911, the Festspielhaus HELLERAU was built to a design by architect Heinrich Tessenow. Tessenow realised the visions of stage designer Adolphe Appia and music educator Émile Jaques-Dalcroze in a spatial structure whose clarity and functional structure set the tone for modernism. This building was a visionary alternative to all traditional theater buildings: The Main Stage was designed by Appia with a retractable orchestra pit, freely installable stage elements and rows of audience seats contained no permanent fixtures, neither stage nor curtain and was therefore a “cathedral of the future” (Appia), in which the audience and performers were to merge into a spiritual and sensual unity. However, the lighting concept developed by Georgian painter and stage designer Alexander von Salzmann was particularly fascinating. The ceiling and walls were lined with white waxed cloth panels, behind which thousands of light bulbs created a diffuse, immaterial light and immersed the space, freed from all naturalism, in transparency and transcendence.

Émile Jaques-Dalcroze's teachings were also an alternative to the previous dance and theater tradition: At their center is the “moving human being”, who is educated to become a holistic individual through the targeted training of his rhythmic abilities, who unites art, work and life in himself, who not only “knows” but also “feels”.

Development from an educational institution to a center of European modernism

Wolf Dohrn, a close friend of Karl Schmidt, had met Émile Jaques-Dalcroze and brought him to Hellerau. The newly founded educational establishment quickly became a great success: Dalcroze began teaching as early as October 1910. Initially, it was mainly Swiss pupils that he brought with him to Dresden. But by the second school year, students from all over the world were already coming together. Among them was the young Mary Wigman, who later continued his teachings in her own way. At the first public school festival in the summer of 1912, called the “Festspiele”, the students performed scenes from Gluck's “Orpheus and Eurydice”, as well as improvisations and group exercises, in front of 500 journalists and more than 4,000 spectators.

At the second festival a year later, 5000 spectators experienced the complete performance of “Orpheus and Eurydice” in the Festspielhaus - among them G.B. Shaw, Oskar Kokoschka, Stefan Zweig, Max Reinhardt; also Franz Werfel, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Claudel, Gerhart Hauptmann and many other European intellectuals.

The radically different staging approach at the Festspielhaus, which was diametrically opposed to the stage conventions of the Semperoper in the center of Dresden, was met with great enthusiasm and Europe-wide attention - as well as rejection. As a result, Hellerau, then still a suburb of Dresden, became a centre of European modernism.

Two world wars and the alienation of the art center

This heyday came to an end after just three years. With the sudden death of Wolf Dohrn in February 1914, Hellerau lost its tireless driving force, financial backer and visionary. Émile Jaques-Dalcroze and Adolphe Appia did not return to Hellerau in the summer of 1914 after a stay in Switzerland. After the outbreak of the First World War, the international students left the school. But financial aspects also played a role. Alexander von Salzmann's ingenious lighting system, for example, caused enormous energy costs. The school went bankrupt in 1915.

And yet teaching continued at Hellerau and experiments were carried out with new types of school. The influential English educationalist Alexander Sutherland Neill, for example, founded a forerunner of his famous “Summerhill” school here. Dalcroze's teachings were spread by branches of his school and their pupils not only in Dresden and Europe, but throughout the world.

In 1938, the Festspielhaus was converted into a police school - the rhythmics lessons had already been cancelled years earlier. The boarding houses surrounding the Festspielhaus were demolished and replaced by military barracks. Later, the Waffen-SS used the buildings and grounds.

After 1945, the Festspielhaus was used by the Soviet army as a military hospital and later as barracks and a sports hall for paratroopers. Although the building was entered in the GDR's central list of monuments in 1979, the Festspielhaus remained hidden from the state authorities and the public. Hellerau was almost forgotten.

Revival of the building & development into a European Centre for the Arts

After the last soldiers of the Soviet army had left, the first initiatives began to revitalise the traditional venue. The “Theater of the World” festival under the direction of Hannah Hurtzig performed great world theater in the Festspielhaus in 1996. More and more institutions moved to the site, plans for the restoration were drawn up and an architectural competition was organised. In 2002, the Dresden Centre for Contemporary Music moved to the Festspielhaus site and was transformed into the European Centre for the Arts Hellerau on 01 January 2004.

With funding from the Free State of Saxony, the interior of the Festspielhaus was initially restored according to plans by Munich architect Josef Meier-Scupin in line with Tessenow's ideas and reopened on 07 September 2006 after two years of construction. From 2003 to 2018, the DEREVO dance theatre was permanently based at HELLERAU. From 2004, the Forsythe Company, now the Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company, was given a permanent residency here.

Since 2009, the theater has once again been open all year round. With the completion of the façade in October 2011, the refurbishment of the Festspielhaus is now complete. Under the artistic direction of Dieter Jaenicke, HELLERAU returned to the heyday of the former Festspielhaus. The venue increasingly developed into one of the most important centres of contemporary art in Germany and Europe. The focus is primarily on contemporary dance and contemporary music, but modern theatre forms and contemporary visual arts also have a stage here, since 2018 under the artistic direction of Carena Schlewitt. HELLERAU was and is a growing “laboratory of modernity” as a European Centre for the Arts.