The international festival of the arts with highlights in opera, dance, music, film and contemporary art. This second edition features major artists from around the world in premieres and new productions and continues to expand its dialog with the visual arts. Douglas Gordon is filming and staging a new work.
artistic direction of Heiner Goebbels
The international festival of the arts with numerous highlights in opera, dance,
music, film, and contemporary art in venues of industrial culture in the Ruhr
Metropolis. In its second year under the artistic direction of Heiner Goebbels, the
Ruhrtriennale (August 23–October 6, 2013) once again features major artists from around the
world in world premieres and new productions and continues to expand its dialog with the visual
arts.
Unusual constellations and combinations run throughout the program. American director Robert
Wilson is staging a production of Helmut Lachenmann’s rarely performed opera Das Mädchen mit
den Schwefelhölzern, featuring the actress Angela Winkler and hr-Sinfonieorchester in a uniquely
sculptural sound and space design. Internationally renowned choreographers Boris Charmatz and
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker are collaborating for their new production Partita No. 2, which is
being created especially for the stage of Bochum’s Jahrhunderthalle. The theater collective Rimini
Protokoll will present their most elaborate production to date, Situation Rooms, and Forced
Entertainment’s The Last Adventures will explore various facets of a new theatrical language. Music
and film are presented side by side in our series of ciné-concerts: at Duisburg’s Kraftzentrale,
Massive Attack will present their only German performance in 2013, featuring the work of BBC
documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis. Robert Del Naja has called the performance “a collective
hallucination.”
In particular, at this year’s Ruhrtriennale several installations will place the spectators at the center
of attention and allow them the autonomy to make their own decisions: the Scottish artist Douglas
Gordon is filming and staging a new work especially created for the Mischanlage, Kokerei
Zollverein. In Museum Folkwang’s central hall, William Forsythe will present the large-scale
installation Nowhere and Everywhere, along with other works where the visitors themselves become
performers and contribute to the success of the performance. Ryoji Ikeda’s test pattern [100m
version] is a pulsating environment created especially for the Kraftzentrale, and London’s Studio
rAndom International will build an impressive accessible water tower as a contribution to Urbane
Künste Ruhr under the direction of Katja Aßmann. Mischa Kuball and Dan Perjovschi have been
invited to set visible signs in public space in Westpark and in the lobby of Jahrhunderthalle.
Several of the world’s most sought after will be creating large format installations that remain in
place for the entire festival. At the huge Kraftzentrale in Duisburg’s Landschaftspark, Heiner
Goebbels will present the work Stifters Dinge, which has been celebrated around the world, in a
new version as an “unguided tour,” an invitiation to the visitors to engage in an individual
experience with no limits.
Vorsitzende des Aufsichtsrats — Ute Schäfer / Geschäftsführer — Lukas Crepaz / Intendant und Geschäftsführer — Prof. Heiner Goebbels
Heiner Goebbels, Artistic Director, Ruhrtriennale: “Perception and experience are very
personal things, they are different for each and every one of us and, even in the theatre, at the
moments when we are most powerfully moved, we are alone. Possibly for this reason we have placed
more emphasis in our programme on self-selected encounters, where one may decide for oneself when
one enters a space, how long one wishes to spend there, how quickly one leaves and whether one will
return.”
Ute Schäfer, North Rhine Westphalia’s Minister of Culture: “Heiner Goebbels has put
together an impressive program that seeks out a dialogue with the region’s unique monuments of
industrial culture. In 2013, the international arts festival can once again claim its place as one of the
most important in Europe. This year, the festival will also go on tour with several of its own
productions, thus serving as a cultural hallmark for the region, for North Rhine Westphalia, and for
all of Germany long after the festival itself.”
Over 150 events with many newly participating artists, 43 productions, including 20 premieres,
new productions, European premieres and German premieres, as well as concerts and artist
discussions transform the outstanding industrial monuments of the region into unique venues for
music, visual art, theater, film, dance, and performance.
Among the highpoints of the festival are the opening production of Harry Partch’s Delusion of the
Fury staged by Heiner Goebbels in collaboration with Ensemble musikFabrik, and the festival
finale, Romeo Castellucci’s version of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, performed together with
the charismatic conductor Teodor Currentzis and the Russian ensemble MusicAeterna. Additional
theatrical works will be the work of Belgium-based theater collective FC Bergman and the world
premiere of Part 2 of Robert Lepage’s cycle Playing Cards at Salzlager, Essen.
The series of ciné-concerts is completed with In Absentia and the world premiere of Kwartet
Smyczkowy by the American filmmakers Quay Brothers, who recently had a retrospective at New
York’s MoMA, and the French musicians, improvisers, and DJs Xavier Garcia and Guy Villerd,
who under the title ACTUAL REMIX present a new soundtrack for Fritz Lang’s silent classic
Metropolis before the impressive backdrop of the Gießhalle in Duisburg’s Landschaftspark.
Numerous events in 2013 will focus on dance. Boris Charmatz and his ensemble of twenty-four
dancers will take over Bottrop’s spectacular open-air arena Halde Haniel in Levée des conflits. For
the premiere of a choreographed performance of Vortex Temporum, a late work of French composer
Gérard Grisey, two exceptional ensembles will join efforts in Bochum’s Jahrhunderhalle: Anne
Teresa De Keersmaeker’s company ROSAS and Ictus Ensemble. Other important choreographers
participating this year are La Ribot, Bruno Beltrão, Meg Stuart, and Philipp Gehmacher working
with visual artist Vladimir Miller, who will be showing their work at PACT Zollverein (artistic
director, Stefan Hilterhaus).
Each Monday, classical chamber concerts will take place in the intimate atmosphere of the
Maschinenhaus, Zeche Carl, including the violist and Grammy-Award-winner Kim Kashkashian,
the Arditti Quartet, and New York improvisationalists Zeena Parkins (Elektronic Harp) and Ikue
Mori (Electronics).
Beside hr-Sinfonieorchester in Lachenmanns Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern, two other large
ensembles from North Rhine-Westphalia will be featured in this year’s festival: Bochumer
Symphoniker play Gavin Bryar’s masterpiece The Sinking of the Titanic and Jesus’ Blood Never Failed
Me Yet, and WDR Sinfonieorchester will perform Jonathan Harvey’s Glasgow Trilogy and Alban
Berg’s Violin Concerto, featuring the famous soloist Alina Ibragimova.
The Belgian vocal ensemble graindelavoix was last year’s audience favorite at the sunrise
performance of De Keersmaeker’s Cesena, and this year will perform Missa Caput, composed by
Johannes Ockeghem in the mid-15th century.
The wonderful acoustics of Dortmund’s art nouveau Maschinenhalle, Zeche Zollern, offer the ideal
setting for the sacred music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and British composer Sir John
Taverner. ChorWerk Ruhr, under the direction of Florian Helgath and Ensemble Resonanz, will
present their concert Ikon of Light in the first ever use of this wonderful example of industrial
architecture for the Ruhrtriennale.
Once more this year, in the program No Education artists will work with young people to explore
spaces for aesthetic and unbiased experiences. Children from various schools of the Ruhr Region
will serve as experts for the independent festival jury and will once again name the winners of the
Children’s Choice Awards, an initiative of the Canadian performance group Mammalian Diving
Reflex. Young people can also explore the Ruhr region acoustically with the Stockholm
percussion trio Hidden Mother and compose what they call “audio graffiti,” which can then be
heard on the Internet. Dan Perjovschi will be holding a public workshop on the first weekend of
the festival.
Bochum’s Westpark will again be the site of a festival campus this year: students from 14 European
art and theater schools will visit productions of the Ruhrtriennale and take part in seminars and
workshops that accompany the festival. At tumbletalks, a weekly series of conversations at Essen’s
Museum Folkwang, visitors can meet the Ruhrtriennale’s artists. And in the new format
freitagsküche, art and real life will enter into a culinary alliance in various locations.
A total of 800 artists from around the world—Germany, Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil,
Estonia, France, UK, Italy, Japan, Canada, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Austria, Romania, Russia,
Spain and the US—will be participating in this year’s festival.
The overall program for the Ruhrtriennale 2013 will be on the web site www.ruhrtriennale.de
Ensemble musikFabrik made the instruments and learned to play them with the generous support by Kulturstiftung des Bundes and Kunststiftung NRW.
The Ruhrtriennale is supported by the Ministry for Family, Children, Youth, and Sport, the government of North Rhine-Westphalia and the European Union - European Funds for Regional Development.
Associates and public sector funders: Land Nordrhein-Westfalen and Regionalverband Ruhr.
Press Contact:
Hendrik von Boxberg, press officer +49 (0)209. 60507 137 Sarah Kaes, assistant, +49 (0)209. 60507 210 presse@ruhrtriennale.de
Ruhrtriennale Brings Massive Attack V Adam Curtis and Ryoji Ikeda to the Ruhr Metropolis. Opening Premiere on August 23 with Harry Partch’s Masterpiece Delusion of the Fury