Heiner Goebbels presents programme for Ruhrtriennale 2014.

The international festival of the arts with numerous highlights: music theatre, dance, concerts, film and visual arts in industrial heritage sites in Bochum, Duisburg, Essen and Gladbeck.
Advance booking for all productions opens today, 2^ndApril 2014.

The Ruhrtriennale, in its third and final year under the artistic direction of Heiner Goebbels, places its focus from 15th August to 28th September on boundary-breaking world premieres and new productions by international artists. At its heart lie large scale music theatre productions and the relationship of the visual arts with dance, performance, film and concerts. For the first time the Ruhrtriennale will open in Duisburg, where an excpetional work of 20^th century music theatre will be staged: De Materie by the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, which opens up new perspectives beyond opera. The production in the Duisburg Kraftzentrale (which features, amongst others, the Ensemble Modern Orchestra and ChorWerk Ruhr) is the first fully-staged performance since the world premiere in Amsterdam in 1989.

Surrogate Cities Ruhr in the enormous Kraftzentrale in the Duisburg Landschaftspark is the exceptional event of 2014. The orchestral cycle by Heiner Goebbels is the musical portrait of an imaginary city, which Mathilde Monnier will direct specially for the Ruhrtriennale as a choreography for the Ruhrgebiet with over 140 performers from the region and the Bochumer Symphoniker. The multi award-winning Italian theatremaker Romeo Castellucci is represented at the festival with two new works: in the Jahrhunderthalle Bochum he presents the opera Neither, a result of the encounter between Morton Feldman and Samuel Beckett in the 1970s, with the Duisburger Philharmoniker conducted by Emilio Pomàrico. Castellucci directs Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps as a dance from the dust of bones in the Gebläsehalle Duisburg.

Further highlights of this year’s festival include the long-awaited world premiere of Boris Charmatz’ manger, which focusses on the topic of eating, and the concert by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam in the Jahrhunderthalle Bochum. The Samoan performance artist and choreographer Lemi Ponifasio returns to the Ruhrtriennale together with the MAU Company and his new work I AM. In the Maschinenhalle Zweckel in Gladbeck the young Swiss director Boris Nikitin brings three opera singers from three generations together on stage in the theatre performance Singers Without Shadows and offers the audience insights into their artist’s lives.

The visual artists Matthew Barney, Gregor Schneider, Tino Sehgal, Harun Farocki and the Brazilian artistic duo cantoni crescenti extend the Ruhrtriennale’s possible spaces with their installations, choreography and films. The spatial sculpture Totlast by Gregor Schneider will be created for the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, Harun Farocki together with Antje Ehmann will show his new project An Attitude to Work at the Museum Folkwang, Essen, a selction of 400 short films created in 15 international cities on the subject of work. With River of Fundament Matthew Barney and the composer Jonathan Bepler present their spectacular Gesamtkunstwerk. The Lichtburg in Essen offers an impressive stage for this monumental film opera created against the backdrop of American industrial landscapes. Among the disused blast furnaces of the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord cantoni crescenti – as a contribution of Urbane Künste Ruhr curated by artistic director Katja Aßmann – will create a 70m long sculpture of aluminium plates which is open to visitors all day free of charge.

Numerous concerts of music from the 20th century shape the programme. In the course of 20 Pianos the pop and avant garde musician Matthew Herbert tells the story of twenty remarkable pianos from all over the world at PACT Zollverein. Compositions by Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Luc Ferrari, György Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen, Edgard Varèse and many others will be played by exceptional musicians such as the hr symphony orchestra or the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam. ChorWerk Ruhr will perform Figure humaine by Francis Poulenc and other a capella-works conducted by Florian Helgath in the Salzlager of the Zollverein world heritage site.
The Ensemble Modern invites the audience to a unique concert experience: the four and a half hour overnight concert For Philip Guston starting at 11pm is Morton Feldman’s hommage to his dead friend the painter.  During the performance the audience can make themselves comfortable by sitting or lying in a landscape of suitable furniture.

Every Monday evening there will be classical chamber music programmes and concerts of improvised music in the intimate atmosphere of the Maschinenhaus at Zeche Carl. In 2014 these will include the French string quartet Quatuor Ébène, Bosnian lutenist Edin Karamazov and Fred Frith, one of the most influential musicians of the international improvisational scene and the Sicilian saxophonist Gianni Gebbia.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Boris Charmatz, Saburo Teshigawara, La Ribot and Eszter Salamon present new works in the field of dance and performance. Transfigured Night by De Keersmaeker is based on Arnold Schönberg’s late romantic orchestral chamber music for strings and a poem of the same name by Richard Dehmel. The Japanese dancer and choreographer Saburo Teshigawara appears at the Ruhrtriennale for the first time with his new performance Broken Lights, during which glass is literally danced to pieces. PACT Zollverein and its artistic director Stefan Hilterhaus present for the Ruhrtriennale the German premiere of El Triunfo de La Libertad by La Ribot, who delighted audiences in 2013 with her durational performance Laughing Hole, and MONUMENT 0 by Hungarian choreographer Eszter Salamon.

In the SANAA building, PACT Zollverein and the Duisburg Landschaftspark, Tino Sehgal stages (Untitled) (2000) with the solo dancers Andrew Hardwidge, Frank Willems and Boris Charmatz. Boris Charmatz’ film installation Levée, which was filmed in 2013 on the Halde Haniel in Bottrop, will also be shown during the festival at the Museum Folkwang.

No Education will become itself subject of the programme 2014: this year’s ZEIT Forum Kultur, chaired by Josef Joffe, is devoted to the subject of cultural education and discusses the Ruhrtriennale’s No Education programme which has been running since 2012. No Education 2014 consists of: The Children’s Choice Awards, the official festival jury of Ruhrtriennale, All Children are Other,a public workshop by the Canadian performance Mammalian Diving Reflex, and the participation of children and young people in Surrogate Cities Ruhrand the freitagsküche.

This year the freitagsküche (Friday kitchen) invites the audience every Saturday (!) to join that evening’s artists for food, drink and conversation in an intimate atmosphere after the performance. In the festival’s final freitagsküche the directing duties will be taken over by children from the No Education workshop doing kitchen.

The international festival campus will be held this year in Duisburg and Bochum: students from over 15 European arts schools and theatre institutes will attend Ruhrtriennale productions and take part in seminars and workshops which accompany the festival.  

The tumbletalks are intended as a stage for thinking in public. In this weekly discussion series held at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, members of the audience directly encounter Ruhrtriennale artists including Louis Andriessen, Harun Farocki with Antje Ehmann, Jonathan Bepler, Romeo Castellucci with Emilio Pomàrico, Boris Charmatz, Mathilde Monnier with Eszter Salamon, Heiner Goebbels and Holger Noltze.

Heiner Goebbels, Artistic Director of the Ruhrtriennale:„What makes the Ruhrtriennale distinctive is the interaction between artists and spaces. These are what facilitates strong artistic experiences and they are my highest priority: where else does one have the freedom the let something be created without compromises. Many colleagues who are festival makers and artists from around the world envy us – not only because of these unique spaces and the chance to create art ourselves, but because of our audience, which leaves a lasting impression with its curiosity, its openness, its artistic daring and the directness of its response.“

Over 150 performances in 4 cities with 14 venues and around 1,000 national and international artists, approx. 30 productions, - more than half of which are world premieres, new productions and German premieres – as well as concerts and artist talks transform the region’s remarkable industrial monuments into unique venues for music, the visual arts, theatre, film, dance and performance. The 2014 artists come from some 25 countries includingArgentina, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Samoa, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland and the USA.

Information on accreditation as well as written and visual material can be found in the press area of www.ruhrtriennale.de

Advance booking starts on 2nd April 2014. The Ruhrtriennale begins on 15th August and finishes on 28th September 2014.

Project funders:
De Materie: Kunststiftung NRW, Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, Rudolf Augstein Stiftung /

Le Sacre du Printemps: Istituto Italiano di Cultura Cologne/ manger: Institut français /Surrogate Cities Ruhr: Ruhrtriennale Circle of Friends, Institut français, / Innovationspool – freitagsküche: NRW.BANK / International Festival Campus: Allianz Kulturstiftung, Ruhrtriennale Circle of Friends / No Education: Kemnader Kreis e.V. / Children’s Choice Awards: Stiftung Mercator, Sparkassen in NRW / All Children are Other:Stiftung Mercator /freitagsküche: doing kitchen: Stiftung Mercator / Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra: Stiftung pro Bochum

The Ruhrtriennale receives support from the Ministry for Family, Children, Youth, Culture and Sport of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and by the European Union – European Regional Development Fund. Proprietors: State of North Rhine-Westphalia and Regional Association Ruhr.