Biography|John Neumeier — The Schumacher School He Turned Into Nine Studios

On 3 January 1978 the School of the Hamburg Ballet held its first class in a rehearsal room at the Staatsoper, in the gap between morning and evening calls.

Beatrice Schickendantz-Giger came from Basel to teach. The arrangement was temporary and everyone knew it.

A year later the school moved into upper rooms of the Dammtor-Pavillon, a 1907 service building across from Dammtor station. It was still too small for a company and a boarding school.

Neumeier wanted a single address where students slept, ate, and trained under the same roof as the professional troupe.

The building he wanted was Fritz Schumacher's former girls' grammar school at Caspar-Voght-Straße 54 in Hamm, finished in 1929–30, with a gymnasium roughly the size of the Staatsoper stage.

The Hamburg Senate rejected the conversion twice. On the night of 11 July 1985, after a third vote went through, culture senator Helga Schuchardt walked over to the opera to tell him the city had said yes.

Rebuild work ran from 1987 to 1989. In September 1989 the company and the school moved in.

The house took his name: Ballettzentrum Hamburg — John Neumeier.

Nine studios. A boarding wing for more than thirty students.

In the old gymnastics hall, now the Fokine Studio, restorers uncovered Anita Rée's mural Orpheus with the Animals, painted for the original school and long covered over.

By the end of his tenure nearly four fifths of the Hamburg Ballet's dancers were graduates of this building.

The brick block on Caspar-Voght-Straße is still a working school and rehearsal center, not a museum.

Visitors come for the architecture and the plaque. The dancing happens upstairs.

Photo: UweRohwedder, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons