To say things are unclear is still a euphemism. Politically, socially, wherever you look: the situation is not good. But what’s even worse: it is hard to understand the implications. Action seems to be needed – but how? What is to be done? Stand still because any form of action is only going to make everything worse, as some fashionable political theories recommend? Accelerate capitalism to defeat it with its own weapons? Barricade the borders and close our hearts? Or defend traditions of internationalism and solidarity?

Situations are coming to a head, various crises are becoming a permanent condition, but the prospect of alternatives is hazy. It is in this landscape that independent theater finds itself searching for how art today can be political. What would be the appropriate form for the theater to do that?

Between activism and autonomy (which is making a surprising comeback as a demand) artists are now taking up new positions and finding their own medium between theory’s timescale on one hand and activism’s on the other. Because while the former claims that it’s necessary to hesitate, to think and weigh things up, the latter warns that action is needed or else it will be too late.

The theater, in common with the whole of society, is searching for vantage points from which we can view the present. Where a brief pause might be possible, at least for a moment. From which one could plan the next step.
The works of the German-speaking scene in this year’s Impulse Theater Festival examine the present in trying to make sense of it, sometimes in documentary form, sometimes analytically, sometimes clearly and conceptually, sometimes poetically and imaginatively: Gintersdorfer/Klaßen, who are represented once again this year with a large ensemble of Ivorian and German performers, dancers and musicians, use the characters of German ambassadors in West Africa to investigate how colonial structures continue to operate today – a question which is also asked in a very different way by the young theatermakers Oliver Zahn and Julian Warner in ‘Situation mit Doppelgänger’.

The war in the Middle East, which is getting ever closer, is the subject of two other invited performances: while the Austrian choreographer Christine Gaigg together with the composer Klaus Schedl primarily examines our perception of war via the media in ‘untitled (look, look, come closer)’, the COSTA COMPAGNIE has collected words, sounds and images from the Hindu Kush in ‘Conversion / After Afghanistan’, which they use to pass on war, its consequences and entanglements to the spectator.
Rimini Protokoll director Daniel Wetzel places a very quiet, touching and playful work in contrast to the extremely loud discussion about refugees: in ‘Evros Walk Water’ we turn from an audience into representatives of absent refugee children who are stranded in Greece. The river Evros – as one of the borders of Fortress Europe – also stands in the center of andcompany&Co.’s radio play ‘Schlepperoper’, which is broadcast in co-operation with WDR during the festival. Dario Azzellini and the Austrian activist and theatermaker Oliver Ressler move into crisis zones of Europe as well with their video installation “Occupy, Resist Produce”, when they show, exemplified by shut down factories occupied by workers in Milan, Rome and Thessaloniki, how amid the economic crisis experimental direct democracy and collective decision making can be practiced.

Religion – whether through radical Islamic positions (or fear of these), through evangelical fundamentalism or other forms of political instrumentalisation – is also becoming increasingly influential. In ‘Martin Luther Propagandastück’, Boris Nikitin chooses a religious service for the enlightened white middle class as a medium for manipulation, faith and the search for one’s own freedom to act.
Also what was presumed personal always remains political: sexuality and the body are constantly historical, social constructions and a question of power, as She She Pop make visible with actresses and actors from the Münchner Kammerspiele in ‘50 Grades of Shame’. Bodies are also the center of attention in ‘Noise’, a work by Sebastian Nübling and the junges theater basel: for the young people on stage political movement is also always bodily movement – energetic, fast and loud. Can neoliberalism and its fake promises of freedom be accelerated so much that they crash into the wall with speed?

And so the future suddenly enters through the back door, at least as a concept, to set up an outer position opposite the present, from which it might become more understandable. And with it fundamental questions arise: Who will we have been? What will we have done? In retrospect it will have become clear what we are currently experiencing. Simply an episode or a change of the times, the prelude to catastrophe or to deliverance?
Two of this year’s invitations enter such a future – with the aim of looking back from it towards today: in their live film project ‘Germany Year 2071’ – one of the three international commissions which Impulse initiates in each festival in its three partner cities – the Nature Theater of Oklahoma imagines a Germany on the verge of collapse, in which revolutions come and go, in which extra-terrestrials are first welcomed before being turned into sausages. For this New York company, the camera becomes a tool with which to involve all the audience: everyone becomes part of the theater, part of the film which will be given its world premiere next year at Impulse 2017.

While the Nature Theater of Oklahoma directs the real, modernistic backdrop of Cologne, theatermaker Ariel Efraim Ashbel looks for the future in a black box performance space: a geometric landscape in black, put together from objects, people, sounds, movement, in which future visions of past times echo and concepts of race, identity, and cultural hegemony are questioned.

Impulse is also interested again in artistic works which involve themselves directly in social and political matters. Central to these is the Silent University Ruhr, an alternative university for refugee academics, whose knowledge has been silenced. The initiative begun last year by the Kurdish artist Ahmet Öğüt embedded this time within a summer academy: under the title ‘Learning Plays’ four artist-initiated schools, academies and theoretical platforms come together for the first time in Mülheim to compare their methodologies; the Performing Arts
Forum – PAF from St. Erme, the School of Engaged Art of the St. Petersburg collective Chto Delat, the Vierte Welt from Berlin and the Silent Universities from London, Stockholm, Hamburg, Athens, Amman and Mülheim. At the end the circle will be extended into a performative conference which asks whether it is possible to find other, more radical forms of education and dissident participation.

That art often avoids direct contact with real politics is taken by the Israeli choreographer Dana Yahalomi of Public Movement as a pretext to initiate a very concrete meeting of art and politics. ‘Make Art Policy!’ invites influential politicians from all the parties relevant in North Rhine-Westphalia to Düsseldorf town hall to articulate their cultural political stance, using the structural similarities of art and politics, the stage and the civic chamber.
The works shown by Impulse this year – as different as they are, as much as they may contradict each other – form part of a searching movement. And this is perhaps exactly what we can do artistically and politically: not stand still, not be resigned, not insisting on autonomy while lachrymosely protecting vested interests, but acting artistically and politically, even if we do not know exactly where we are going to end up. Setting off, even if it is unclear where we are. Or maybe it would be better to say: start cooking – a political solution Brian Eno recently suggested as it integrates both instant action with gradual development: “Start cooking … Recipe will follow.”
This may be a modest slogan – but it does express our need to be forward thinking and acting. Not only because it flies in the face of the widespread culture of depression and fear (chiefly an argument of rightwing populists) by raising the hope that the recipe will come. But also because if we stop complaining, we can find it in cooking ourselves.

Impulse 2016 is spread across numerous venues in Düsseldorf and has satellites in Cologne and Mülheim. You will be most welcome to come and take part in discussions at our festival center – a new space at the FFT Kammerspiele, designed by the creative collective based in Düsseldorf and Cologne Labor Fou – and in response to numerous individual works: to talk with us, think with us, cook with us and act with us. Join the old acquaintances and newcomers of the independent theater we have invited in their search for the world we want to live in – and what we have to do to make it happen.

For twenty-five years Impulse has been presenting the most important independent theater productions in the German-speaking world and has constantly redefined itself, much like the scene itself. “Independent” not only means that the works are produced outside the state theater system. It most notably means they develop aesthetic alternatives and search for new approaches and challenges. Artists such as Rimini Protokoll or René Pollesch were introduced to a wider audience for the first time at Impulse.

Over the past few years independent theater in Austria, Germany and Switzerland became part of a very international network and established a sophisticated discourse on art. Impulse is perhaps the most significant platform and at the same time the most powerful lobbyist of this scene in the German-speaking countries. The festival challenges the independent performance-based art forms to make use of their fundamental freedom. It challenges them to amplify, to try, to strain and overstrain the freedom of theater as medium; the freedom to start from scratch again and again; the freedom to create structures, hierarchies, stereotypes, processes, and collaborations in a way appropriate to each artistic endeavor – and not the other way around.

Independent theater provides impulses for an idea of theater that does not remain trapped in particular spaces of thinking and staging. It provides impulses not to simply accept the boundaries of genres set by the logics of grant applications, markets, and marketing. It provides impulses to reclaim theatricality in art, music, literature, film, and theory as theater. It provides impulses to think differently about theater as art. The task of independent theater is not to be the low-cost repertoire by the up-and-coming. It is not a special path as the German-speaking theaters and funding structures would suggest. It is an explicit alternative in its art as well as in its work structures.

Since 2013 the festival has been curated by the artistic director Florian Malzacher. The thematic orientation for each edition is supported by an advisory board consisting of experts from academia and arts. Alongside the program of selected visiting productions, an open call extends the focus to works beyond the beaten path. The festival is accompanied by theoretical and socio-political debates as well as by an online collection of material that takes up specific questions of independent theater and puts them up for discussion.

Florian Malzacher – Artistic Director
Felizitas Stilleke Kleine – Dramaturgy
Dominik Müller – Dramaturgy

Emily Keller – Production Management
Claudia Holthausen – Press and Public Relations
Charlotte Hesse – Artistic Assistance

NRW KULTURsekretariat
Dr. Christian Esch – Director
Judith Wollstädter – Administration
Martin Maruschka – Press and Public Relations

BIO

Florian Malzacher

Artistic Director

Florian Malzacher is Artistic Director of Impulse Theater Festival since 2012 as well as an independent performing arts curator, dramaturge and writer. 2006 till 2012 he was co-programmer of the multidisciplinary arts festival steirischer herbst in Graz (A).

After graduating at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Gießen he worked till 2005 mainly as a freelance theatre journalist for daily newspapers and has continued since then to contribute regularly to international magazines like Theater Heute (DE), Tanz (DE), Frakcija (HR), Didaskalia (PL) and Camera Austria (AT) etc. 


Florian Malzacher has worked as a freelance dramaturge at theatres like Burgtheater Vienna or Mousonturm Frankfurt with artists like Rimini Protokoll (DE), Lola Arias (ARG), Mariano Pensotti (ARG) and Nature Theater of Oklahoma (USA). He is a founding member of the independent curators’ collective Unfriendly Takeover (2001 – 2008) in Frankfurt/Main. Florian Malzacher (co-)curated next to his festivals e.g. the 4th and 5th International Summer Academy (Mousonturm Frankfurt 2002 and 2004), the “Dictionary of War” (2006/07), the series “Performing Lectures” (Frankfurt, 2004-06), the 170 hours non-stop marathon camp “Truth is concrete” on artistic strategies in politics (Graz, 2012) as well as the performative conference “Appropriations” (Ethnologisches Museum Berlin/Humboldt Lab, 2014) and the congress “Artist Organisations International” (together with Jonas Staal and Joanna Warsza, HAU Berlin, 2015). He taught among others at universities and academies in Berlin, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Vienna, and is a member of the advisory board of DasArts – Master of Theatre, Amsterdam (NL), of Theaterkommission Zurich (CH) and of the advisory board for theatre of the Goethe-Institut.

He is (co-)editor of books like “Not even A Game Anymore. The Theatre of Forced Entertainment” (Alexander Verlag, Berlin, 2004), “Experts of the Everyday. The Theatre of Rimini Protokoll” (Alexander Verlag, 2008) or “Curating Performing Arts” (Frakcija/Zagreb 2010). His latest publications are “Truth is concrete. A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics“ (Sternberg Press Berlin, 2014), “Two Minutes of Standstill. A Collective Performance by Yael Bartana“ (Sternberg Press, 2014), and “Not Just a Mirror. Searching for the Political Theatre of Today“ (Alexander Verlag Berlin/Live Arts Development Agency London, 2015).

For Impulse Theater Festival 2017 again an interdisciplinary advisory board from academia and the arts has been selected. Visual artist Ulf Aminde, curator Ekaterina Degot, poet and music theatre dramaturg Christian Filips, academic Joy Kristin Kalu, philosopher Marcus Steinweg and activist and writer Margarita Tsomou support the festival team around artistic director Festival Malzacher in sharpening thematic questions and selecting the program for the upcoming edition.

BIOS

Ulf Aminde

is a Professor teaching at the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin. Here he initiated the *foundationClass for refugees. In his own artistic practice he experiments with human images. He uses photography, drawing, video and performance. His work continually enters a dialogue with people from the most diverse walks of life which questions his role as a director and initiator. His films and installations develop from this process. He employs strategies taken from the theatre, performative documentary film and Actionist art.

Ekaterina Degot

is Artistic Director of the Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne. As an art historian, art critic and curator she has focussed on aesthetic and socio-political aspects of art in Russia and Eastern Europe. She has taught at universities in Russia, Europe and the USA, curated the Russian pavilion for the Venice Biennale in 2001, the inaugural Ural Industrial Biennial in Yekaterinenburg (2010) and the first Bergen Assembly (2013). In 2012 she curated the discussion platform for the first Kiev Biennial of Contemporary Art Arsenale entitled Art After the End of the World.

Christian Filips

works as a dramaturg, performer and director. His first volume of poems Schluck auf Stein won him Austrian Radio’s Rimbaud Prize in 2001. Since 2010 he has edited roughbooks, a contemporary poetry series, together with Urs Engeler. He also works as a translator and since 2009 he has developed his own particular theatre evenings with similarities to happenings and social sculptures. Venues where he has presented his work include the Volksbühne Berlin, the Haus der Berliner Festspiele and the Maxim Gorki Theater. He has been programme director of Berlin’s Sing-Akademie since 2006.

Joy Kristin Kalu

is a Ph.D. with degrees in Theatre Studies and American Studies who researches and teaches at the Freie Universität Berlin. Alongside her academic career she is an active theatre practitioner and curator. In 2007 she was one of the initiators of the freitagsküche berlin and since 2014 she has curated the exhibition project Neue Heimat Berlin with Stephanie Keitz and RP Kahl. Theatres she has worked with include the Thalia Theater Hamburg, Volksbühne Berlin, the Actors’ Gang in Los Angeles, The Wooster Group in New York as well as Kunst-Werken Berlin. Her publications include The Aesthetics of Repetition (2013) and, as a co-author, Theatre as Invention (2015).

Marcus Steinweg

is a philosopher and visual artist. He teaches at the Berlin University of the Arts and has been a visiting lecturer at the AdbK Hamburg and the Braunschweig University of Art. He edits the magazine Inaesthetics for Merwe, which publishes articles on the field between art and philosophy in German, English and French. He has particularly close working relationships with the artists Thomas Hirschhorn and Rosemarie Trockel. His most recent publications include Evidenzterror and Gramsci Theater (both 2015).

Margarita Tsomou

works as a writer, dramaturg and curator. She is a co-founder and editor of the pop-feminist Missy Magazine and writes for German newspapers and radio stations (f.ex, Die Zeit, taz, WDR, SWR). Her artistic work has been seen at the Volksbühne and the Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin, at Kampnagel in Hamburg and the Goethe-Institut in Athens. In 2015 she organized the conference This is not Greece at Kampnagel in Hamburg and participated as an activist at Syntagma Square in Athens in 2011.