Matinée Dorée with Jazz, Rhönrad and Film - as part of Kultursommer RLP "The Golden Twenties"

The "Matinée Dorée" explores the Golden Twenties through the lens of female self-determination and a spirit of new beginnings - weaving together jazz culture, the sporting ideals of modernity, and an early cinematic portrait of a woman who was far ahead of her time.

Louis Finest with the jazz programme "A Night At The Cotton Club"

The six-piece band "Louis Finest" will perform excerpts from their new programme "A Night At The Cotton Club", evoking the era of the legendary New York jazz club shaped by the orchestras of Jimmy Lunceford, Duke Ellington, and Cab Calloway. The Prohibition years - complete with gangster figures like Al Capone - are also part of the picture.

Louis Finest plays songs from the period, some in their original sound and some reimagined as they might sound today. The set draws on all three of the club's house bands as well as the many guest artists who appeared there over the years, including Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong.

The Rhönrad - a cult sporting object of the 1920s

The desire for a trained body and playful communal spectacle gave rise to collective performances, among them Rhönrad gymnastics. The apparatus - two hoops sized to the proportions of Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, with an athlete locked inside - was set spinning in rotations. It was never quite clear whether the person looked trapped or heroically transcendent, but the slightly bizarre elegance of the Rhönrad was undeniably captivating.

It was invented in 1921 by Otto Feick, a railway worker and trade unionist, while imprisoned in the French military jail in Mainz, where he had been sent for two years for sabotaging trains in patriotic resistance to the French occupation.

By 1927 the Rhönrad had spread widely enough that groups and formations performed with it - in synchrony.