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For the Belgian director’s first edition as animator of the Ruhr Triennale, deserted places are “the point and the finish line”, he says.
By Elisabeth Vincentelli
The calling card of the Ruhr Triennale Arts Festival is to offer performances at former commercial sites, such as power stations or coal-fired power stations, in the Ruhr region of northwestern Germany. For theatre creator Ivo van Hove, who is offering his first season as artistic director of the festival, this creates a sense of déjà vu.
“I’m 20 years old at a time in Belgium when theatre is as old-fashioned as you can imagine,” said van Hove, 65. “My generation has made a real repositioning and we have done it, for example, by ceasing to act. in the theater. My first production took place in a deserted laundromat. We performed in front of 30 other people and had 30 actors on stage.
The scale is much larger at the Ruhrtriennale, but at least van Hove arranged five productions at the festival before taking over as director, so he controls the artistic parameters.
One of them is the attention paid to musical theatre, which in Europe may require a very different bureaucracy compared to English-speaking countries. According to Krystian Lada, a Polish director who helped Van Hove combine the roster, the Ruhrtriennale is known for presenting “a new vision of musical theater” in Germany, where the so-called upper and lower cultures are rigidly separated. Lada’s own entry into the 2024 festival, “Abendzauber”, combines works by Bruckner and Björk.
Van Hove’s “I Want Absolute Beauty,” which opens the festival Friday, revolves around “Anatomy of a Fall” and “The Zone of Interest” star Sandra Hüller (whom he directed in Eugene’s 2013 play O’Neill “Strange Interlude”) performing a P. J. Harvey song cycle. (Van Hove’s view of musical theater, or any theater, is divisive: A recent New York Times review called his musical adaptation of the film “Opening Night,” with new songs via Rufus Wainwright, a “parody “).
Other highlights of the festival include “Legend,” Russian dissident director Kirill Serebrennikov’s take on filmmaker Sergei Parajanov’s paintings; the new dance piece “Y” by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker; and Philip Venables and Ted Huffman’s musical theater piece “The Fagots and Their Friends Between Revolutions. “
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