It’s starting! – Tonight, 19:30 h Impulse Theater Festival 2017 opens it's stage program
22 June 2017
Already before tonight’s opening, Impulse 2017 began with a world premiere, for which there is no need to travel to Cologne, Düsseldorf or Mülheim an der Ruhr: At 19:04 h WDR 3 broadcast the first radio drama by the New York theater company Nature Theater of Oklahoma: the radio version of ‘Deutschland 2071’ – a playfully dystopic work of zombie science fiction about art, love and political action filmed (backwards) last year with the citizens of Cologne and Berlin. To listen to the radio play click here.
The film’s world premiere will happen on 25 June, 19:30 h in the big hall of WDR Funkhaus.
The stage program and the festival proper starts tonight on 22 June, 19:30 h in the Depot of Schauspiel Köln with theatre history’s greatest non-decision-maker: the ‘Hamlet’ of Swiss director Boris Nikitin is not Shakespeare’s Danish prince, he speaks barely a word of the famous text and yet he is a prototypical Hamlet for our times. To be or not to be is no longer a question of making a decision – it is a tension that must be withstood. Accompanied by baroque musicians from Cologne the performer and musician Julia*n Meding embarks on a performative tour de force. On the same evening, from 18 h, with ‘state-theatre #4– 6’ the filmmakers Daniel Kötter and Constanze Fischbeck will also show how theater buildings elsewhere have been reused as underground car parks.
Our festival center will then open on Friday, 23 June at studiobühneköln. At 19:30 h in ‘Du gingst fort’ (‘You Went Away’) the Austrian Rabtaldirndln investigate how anyone can leave behind their homeland – the Rabtal! What makes the temptations of urban life so compelling? This performance collective of women from Styria who started life as country bumpkins tracks down those who have left. Afterwards Richard Lowdon (Forced Entertainment), accompanied by Phil Hayes, invites everyone to the ‘Sideshow’, the festival center he has designed complete with bar, stage and garden. Now the party can get going – and it continues on Saturday with ‘7 Promises’ in which – in exchange for vodka – Davis Freeman and Jerry Gillick elicit promises from us to make the world a better place.
The first weekend also sees the opening of Dries Verhoeven’s political and poetic live installation ‘Guilty Landscapes’, that confronts us in a direct and entirely personal form with the images of masses in crisis that appear in the media every day.
If you don’t already have tickets, book them fast! The first performances are already sold out.
We look forward to seeing you!
