This institution is effectively a university of contemporary dance, and has long been based in a secretive but curiously appealing rabbit-warren of buildings in nearby New Cross, which is the same place, really. Being in a rough, tough part of town is the unwavering policy of its redoubtable principal and chief executive, the wonderfully straight-backed Dr. Marion North. It was she who brought the centre here from Surrey in 1974, naming it after Rudolf Laban who had originally founded it as the "Art of Movement" studio in Manchester in 1948. Laban, a modern dance pioneer, had fled Hitler's Germany in 1938, though not before choreographing the opening ceremonies of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Apparently Hitler's propaganda minister Goebbels disapproved of this avant-garde stuff with hoops.
North's egalitarian mission has succeeded. The opening celebration on February 4 included party pieces from illustrious alumni including members of Ballett Frankfurt, the Chomondeleys and the Featherstonehaughs, the CandoCo Dance company and Laban's own Transitions company. It seems that even the actor Simon Callow has a connection with the place. The ambition of North and her colleagues has led them to build - thanks to the Arts Council's Lottery fund - what is now the largest purpose-built contemporary dance centre in the world, costing £22m. On the site of a former rubbish tip by a muddy creekside in Deptford.
This kind of architecture can too easily turn out merely gimmicky, but the high seriousness of Jacques Herzog and his London associate Michael Casey have ensured that it does not. The plastic does not look cheap. It's very beefy and thick, and anyway has glass behind it as well as large windows set into it. In this land of roaming youths and abandoned cars, the plastic skin is a lot less vulnerable than the glass anyway. It is placed well back from the street, protected by the creek at its back, fronted by landscaped mounds made from the cleaner detritus on the two-acre site. Once properly shaped and greened, these will make outdoor rehearsal and performance areas.
