Dear audience, dear friends of the Ruhrtriennale!

Welcome to my third and final year as Artistic Director of the Ruhrtriennale. For the last three years I have been fortunate enough to be able to programme this remarkable festival together with the splendid Ruhrtriennale team. They have been wonderful and exciting years. I would like to thank everyone who has supported and accompanied me during this time.

Arrival – Searching for Now is this season’s title, following on from Awakening and Migration,and this year we want to go further east and encounter the world of Buddhist thought.

After two seasons where we have been concerned with monotheistic religions, our attention will now address a culture which has an entirely different awareness of spiritual links and religious practice. A culture with one of the most vital and profound traditions of thought and meditation to be found anywhere in the world. Buddhism is less a fixed theological system than a form of search for the pure, true consciousness of existence, in each moment, only here and only now!

This is nothing other than what we do in creating our fleeting art for the stage. Each production exists only now and then never again in the same form. We spend weeks, months and sometimes even years working towards a single moment, fully aware that everything will then be over and that moment will be irrevocably lost. That’s what Arrival – Searching for Now means. It is a challenge to be true, real and awake in the now.

What we would like to discover together with you is the Buddhist thinking which can be found in the great theatrical, musical and literary works of the West. Because it’s all in there, here and now.

With this in mind I encourage you as a host and artist, person and friend: Come! Come and join us! Come and join us in the moment!

Yours

Willy Decker
Artistic Director of the Ruhrtriennale