Press Releases

Heiner Goebbels, the artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale 2012/2013/2014 and Lukas Crepaz, managing director, Kultur Ruhr GmbH, take stock of Ruhrtriennale 2012, which ended this past weekend, September 29/30, 2012 with the Children’s Choice Awards and Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto’s audio-visual concert utp_ at Bochum’s Jahrhunderthalle. In the first year under the direction of the composer and director Heiner Goebbels, Ruhrtriennale brought 900 artists from around the world to the Ruhrtriennale from August 17 to September 30, 2012.

Over 30 productions, including around 20 world premieres, new productions and German premieres, and many more concerts and guest performances transformed the outstanding industrial monuments of the region into spectacular venues for music, art, theater, dance, and performance.

Around 50,000 guests attended the productions in 2012, while around 7000 came to see the live art exhibition 12 Rooms. Overall, festival events were 85 percent booked. In addition, 13,000 visitors provided their heartbeat for the light installation Pulse Park. Still not counted: the numerous visitors to Our CenturY, an installation around Jahrhunderthalle Bochum.

Many performances were sold out, including the opening production Europeras 1&2, enfant by Boris Charmatz, the concerts of the Boredoms, utp_, and Mandelring Quartett, En Atendant, Sacré Sacre du Printemps, and Disabled Theater, as well as individual performances FOLK., Prolog, and Soapéra. The most visited production in 2012 was Carl Orff’s Prometheus, staged by Lemi Ponifasio at Duisburg’s Kraftzentrale, with over 4,500 tickets sold.

Lemi Ponifasio about Prometheus: „Like the last speeches, the last dances on Earth."

Duisburg's Kraftzentrale with its monumental dimensions becomes a show-place for an unusual artistic constellation: in his first opera work, Samoan performance artist and choreographer Lemi Ponifasio encounters Carl Orff 's stunningly dynamic adaptation of Aeschylus' Prometheus. A large ensemble of singers, actors, dancers, a chorus, musicians, and lay actors participate in performing the tragedy of Prometheus, chained and rebelling against the gods.

Heiner Goebbels, artistic director of Ruhrtriennale receives the 2012 International Ibsen Award in Oslo, on September 8, 2012. The award honours an individual, institution or organization that has brought a new artistic dimension to the world of drama or theatre. The winner receives 2.5 million kroner (330.000 Euro). It has previously been awarded to Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine and Jon Fosse.

www.internationalibsenaward.com

Israeli artist Michal Rovner inaugurates a new site specific work at the UNESCO world heritage Zollverein in Essen on August 18, 2012. Beginning operation in the 1960s, this site once was an industrial plant used to mix different types of coal; the walls of its huge funnel bear the traces of this production process. Each year the Ruhrtriennale 2012 – 2014 invites a contemporary video artist to engage with the space of the industrial monuments and present new works for the site.

Heiner Goebbels, Artistic Director of the Ruhrtriennale: »Michal Rovner invests the inhuman architecture with pulsating life. Is Rovner’s work a videoinstallation or is it a work of art in motion or a piece of theatre projected onto a surface?«

Masses of people emerge from the walls and activate the space. They take on the architectonic shapes and the residue of coal become part of their landscape. The people are moving with the flow and against it. The work creates a chain of associations from the poetic to the political. The title Current refers to a flow of energy or substance, in concrete and metaphorical or ideological contexts. Current also relates to the present time in its most immediate sense.

Ruhrtriennale and Museum Folkwang will be teaming up to present the 12 Rooms exhibition from 17-26 August. For this live-art show, curators Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist have invited 12 international artists to explore the relationship of space, time and body. The result is a total of 12 independent rooms in the main exhibition hall of the new Folkwang building. The museum will be transformed into a stage, the black box of the theatre into a white cube.
Visitors will encounter different situations in each of the 12 Rooms, presented, activated and animated by performers whom the artists have instructed, choreographed and staged accordingly. Each sculpture offers the visitors a direct, intense experience, something that theatre usually prevents with the distance between spectator and stage. Body sculptures and formations arise that take shape before the eyes and in the minds of the viewers. A fleeting glance, a brief chat, a surprising gesture, a disconcerting observation: Each of the 12 Rooms touches the visitor in a different way. Whereby it is entirely up to each visitor to decide whether to stay, to return, and to see what has changed.

PULSE PARK: Relational Architecture No. 14 has been opened – interactive light installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is fed by visitors’ heartbeat.
A contribution by Urbane Künste Ruhr to the programme of the Ruhrtriennale 2012

One week before the opening of the Ruhrtriennale on August 17, Heiner Goebbels and his team gave an inside look at final preparations at Dampfgebläsehaus, Jahrhunderthalle Bochum.

With Klaus Schäfer, state secretary in the Ministry for Family, Children, Youth, Culture and Sport of North Rhine Westphalia, on hand at the press conference, Heiner Goebbels reported on the continuing rehearsals for the opening premiere Europeras 1&2.

For the first time, the artists Michal Rovner and Lemi Ponifasio presented the state of their preparations for Ruhrtriennale. The Israeli-American artist Michal Rovner will be showing Current, a new large scale video installation developed exclusively for Ruhrtriennale at Essen’s Mischanlage / Kokerei Zollverein. The Samoan choreographer Lemi Ponifasio will present his production of Carl Orff’s Prometheus, conducted by Peter Rundel at Kraftzentrale in Duisburg’s Landschaftspark, featuring many stage extras from the region.

Two months before the opening of Ruhrtriennale 2012, 17 performances have
already sold out, including the six evenings of the opening production Europeras 1&2 by John Cage, staged by the artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale Heiner Goebbels and his team at Jahrhunderthalle Bochum, and the open-air concert of the Japanese group Boredoms at Halde Haniel in Bottrop. Also sold out are Mandelring Quartett's concert at Essen's Maschinenhaus and Laurent Chétouane's dance performance Sacré Sacre du Printemps, presented by Essen's PACT Zollverein for the Ruhrtriennale.
Early booking discount: 10% on all tickets until June 16, 2012

First season under new artistic director Heiner Goebbels. The international arts festival will feature numerous highlights in theatre, dance, music, and contemporary art held at venues of industrial culture in Bochum, Bottrop, Duisburg, Essen, and Gladbeck. Ticket presales begin on 16 April 2012.

The International Ibsen Award is one of the world's most prestigious theatre prizes. It honours an individual, institution or organization that has brought a new artistic dimension to the world of drama or theatre. The winner receives 2.5 million kroner (330.000 Euro).

www.internationalibsenaward.com

Heiner Goebbels, artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale 2012/2013/2014, will be staging Europeras 1&2 by John Cage at Bochum's Jahrhunderthalle. The live art exhibition 12 Rooms will be held at Ruhrtriennale's new venue this year, Essen's Museum Folkwang.

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