Urshilla dance Company
4/188, C Block, Sector 36, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201301, India
Urshilla Dance Company is not simply a studio; it is a living archive of global groove, housed in a converted early-20th-century textile warehouse on the industrial edge of Sachsenhausen-Frankfurt. Surviving cast-iron pillars still hold up the vaulted roof, their rivets counting decades of rust that now vibrate with sub-bass every night after 8 p.m. Daylight pours through restored clerestory windows in long, oblique shafts, but at sunset the hall is sunk in color by programmable LED battens that pulse in reactive hues to whatever choreographer has the floor. The space commands 450 square meters of floating plank, laid directly on neoprene pads that absorb the impact of tap shoes, sabar djembe footwork, or the inverted heels of contemporary floor work. A glass-walled mezzanine houses the music library—a climate-controlled tower of vinyl, cassette, hard-drive towers, and brittle sheet music for Latin charangas and 14th-century Persian ghazals. Downstairs, an apothecary-style “instrument bar” allows dancers, at no extra charge, to check out berimbaus, South-Indian kanjiras, aluminum spoons, or a 70-year-old Martin tiple salvaged from Bogotás Café Revolution. Resident DJs swap out every six weeks; past residents have included Kyivs electro-dub archivist, Spasibo, and the Ghanaian kologo-revival pioneer Piakulan.
Every Tuesday and Thursday, Urshilla opens its doors to the city’s night workers for a 90-minute “Ghost Shift,” a no-phones movement research session where only barebones rhythm tracks at 65 BPM are allowed—people recharge in near-silence before heading back to hospital wards and airport terminus cafés. On the first Saturday of each month, the stage flips outward: the south wall rolls away on hydraulic rails and becomes an eight-meter screen for multimedia performances that fuse live dance with generative visuals coded by recent graduates of Offenbach Design University. Admission is tiered “equity-wave”: the first 100 tickets are €5, the next 50 rise to €12, but nobody is ever turned away—surplus is redistributed into subsidized rehearsal hours booked by refugee artists awaiting visa decisions.
Acoustically, the room is tuned by the same firm that treated Berlins Funkhaus, giving a warm, rectangular bloom to hand-struck frame drums and razor-sharp clarity to polyphonic overtone singers from Tuva. Near the coat-check hangs a framed certificate marking the 2019 Guinness record for “largest simultaneous improvisational body-percussion wave” (312 dancers), but ask any regular and they will brag just as loudly about the Tuesday night when a brass quintet rehearsing Gabrieli canons stumbled into a flamenco troupe—neither yielded the floor, and the accidental stereo cloud lasted 27 minutes before someone turned the lights to indigo and called it a composition.
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- Published: August 4, 2025
