“I Want Absolute Beauty,” the title of the opening production for this year’s Ruhrtriennale, sounds like a mission statement of sorts.
The event, one of Germany’s major arts festivals, lights up the former industrial sites that dot the Ruhr region, in the country’s northwest — though hulking power plants and abandoned steelworks aren’t where you necessarily expect to find beauty. Then again, this 22-year-old festival has always been about letting audiences encounter the sublime among the ruins. Everywhere I turned during the Ruhrtriennale’s opening weekend, I witnessed beauty struggling — fitfully, clumsily and sometimes stunningly — to be born.
This summer, the Ruhrtriennale welcomes a new artistic leader, the acclaimed Belgian theater director Ivo van Hove. His three-season tenure kicked off on Friday night with “I Want Absolute Beauty,” a staged cycle of songs by the English singer-songwriter P.J. Harvey that van Hove has created for the German actress Sandra Hüller, presented at the Jahrhunderthalle, a former power station in the city of Bochum.
Hüller, best-known for her Academy Award-nominated performance in “Anatomy of a Fall,” gives gutsy and full-throated renditions of 26 of Harvey’s songs accompanied by a four-person band. It’s a heroic performance over an intermission-less hour and a half. Van Hove doesn’t impose a narrative, in the style of jukebox musicals, but a journey of sorts can be followed through the titles (“Dorset” — “London” — “New York”) that appear on a screen where both live and prerecorded video is projected throughout the evening.
The stage area is covered in dirt, and dancers twirl, writhe and gyrate around Hüller. The choreography, by the collective (La)Horde, is earthy and elemental, sometimes joyous and liberating, but often menacing and with hints of sexual violence. Hüller is always front and center, her voice tough but with an edge of fragility. Sometimes she joins the dancers in their primeval thrashing. The results can be exhilarating but are just as often exasperating. Despite the high caliber of the performances, it’s easy to lose interest. Occasionally there’s an earsplitting crescendo or blinding flood light to jolt us back to attention.
It’s a production that hovers at the edge of several genres, never able to make up its mind whether it’s a concert, dance or theater. The Ruhrtriennale, with its unconventional locations, vast venues and even vaster resources (its annual budget is around $19 million), is well-suited to developing and presenting unconventional, multidisciplinary productions and artistic creations that do not easily fit within pre-established categories and classifications. In this case, however, the beauty that van Hove seeks, absolute or otherwise, proves elusive.
I witnessed a far more harmonious fusion of disparate art forms the next day at the Folkwang Museum, in the nearby city of Essen, during the premiere of “Y,” a new dance work by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.
De Keersmaeker has staged work in museum galleries before, but this time, she has also curated the works on the walls, which she has chosen from the Folkwang’s permanent collection. “Y” lasts for the better part of an afternoon, and visitors, who get time-slotted tickets, are welcome to stay however long they please.
As I entered, the dancers were grouped in front of Édouard Manet’s 1877 “Portrait of Faure as Hamlet,” imitating the epée-holding subject’s stance. They soon scattered over several galleries. In one featuring works by Manet and Yves Klein, the dancer Nina Godderis seemed to channel both Hamlet and Ophelia’s madness during a twitching and virtuosic performance that incorporated spoken fragments of the “To be or not to be” monologue and featured several fitful costume changes. Elsewhere, Nassim Baddag spun on his head, his legs spreading out in a V that mirrored the shape of the mountains in a copy of a painting by Caspar David Friedrich.
I had no tear myself away from “Y” after an hour to dash back to Bochum for the German premiere of Philip Venables and Ted Huffman’s “The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions,” based on an underground queer manifesto published by Larry Mitchell in 1977. This remarkable production, first seen at last year’s Manchester Festival, felt unexpectedly intimate the vast Jahrhunderthalle.
For their third collaboration, Venables, a British composer, and Huffman, an American librettist and director, have created a joyous and affirmative musical theater work. Like its source material, the show lays out an alterative world history defined by the endless struggle between queer people and their allies on the one hand, and the guardians of the patriarchy, known simply as “The Men,” on the other. In celebrating the heterodox, the radical, the fringe and even the deviant, the show’s form matches its content, with a bold mixture of musical styles — baroque, folk, pop — and theatrical devices. As exuberant as it is slippery, its unconventional brand of beauty felt right at home at the Ruhrtriennale.
After hailing Venables and Huffman’s queer utopian warriors, I raced 20 miles to another former power station, on the edge of city of Duisburg, for “Legende,” a theatrical homage to the great Georgian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov. The show’s starting time had been brought forward an hour, and I nearly didn’t make it. The reason for the change was that the running time of Kirill Serebrennikov’s show, a co-production with the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, had swelled to over four hours during rehearsals. Told in 10 chapters (the “legends” of title) inspired by Parajanov’s life and work, this German-language production aims for a monumentality that it never quite achieves.
Serebrennikov, a Russian director who now lives in Germany, spent 20 months under house arrest in Moscow on embezzlement charges that were widely seen as trumped up. So it is unsurprising that he has been drawn to another artist tormented by political persecution: Parajanov was hounded by Soviet authorities for his formally daring work, and for his bisexuality, and served several prison sentences.
The production, with its colorful costumes and bric-a-brac props, is a visual stunner, and the performances, from the Thalia’s actors and Serebrennikov’s Russian collaborators alike, are fiercely committed.
Beauty, Serebrennikov says in an interview in the playbill, “requires passion, even cruelty, and often a sacrifice.” And though “Legende” is drawn out, and sometimes overblown, it is clearly animated by passion. In its best moments, the theatrical wattage it generates seems sufficient to reanimate the former power plant itself.
Ruhrtriennale Festival of the Arts
Through Sept. 19 at various locations in the Ruhr region of Germany; ruhrtriennale.de.
Read More: At the Ruhrtriennale, Searching for the Sublime Among the Ruins
