Longing for tomorrow: The program of the Ruhrtriennale 2025

Dear members of the press, dear colleagues,

the second edition of the Ruhrtriennale under the directorship of Ivo Van Hove is about the question of how we want to live tomorrow and how we can discover and create connections and relationships with one another.

Intendant Ivo Van Hove: “Connectedness is more important than ever in a world full of hostile tensions. These conflicts are part of our lives, and of course at the Ruhrtriennale we deal with the question of how we can understand and shape this ever faster changing world through theater, dance, music theater, concerts and installations. The Ruhrtriennale 2025 has invited international artists who deal with the universal themes of our time, and I cordially invite our audience to discover these productions together.”

Culture Minister Ina Brandes: “Ivo van Hove has set the bar very high with his directorial premiere. With 70,000 visitors and the most successful opening production of all time, his first edition of the Ruhrtriennale was a gigantic success. I am very much looking forward to a thrilling new program: with world premieres, world-renowned artists and a strong participatory program for children and young people that whets the appetite for art and culture. We need programs like this to pass on the enthusiasm of the Ruhrtriennale to the next generation.”

The Ruhrtriennale 2025 opens on August 21 with the world premiere of I Did It My Way, a music theater production featuring the music of Nina Simone and Frank Sinatra, with the actors Lars Eidinger and Larissa Sirah Herden and with the choreography by Serge Aimé Coulibaly. Ivo Van Hove is thus continuing the new music theater concept he developed for the Ruhrtriennale, in which he combines acting, dance and music to create new narrative forms and in which music is the narrative core. 

Other world premieres this year include the multimedia theater piece Oracle by director Łukasz Twarkowski about the life of the visionary scientist Alan Turing, Sharon Eyal's new work for the Ruhrtriennale, Delay the Sadness, in which club dance and classical ballet meet, and Guernica Guernica by the innovative theater collective FC Bergman, which was awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2023 and which was inspired by Picasso's famous painting.

The 2024 Pulitzer Prize winner, Tyshawn Sorey, will perform two song cycles about the position of Black people in the USA. An eight-hour organ work by Jonny Greenwood, the guitarist from Radiohead, will be heard in the Katernberg church in Essen. Ruhrtriennale guests will experience another musical highlight with before and after nature, with which Chorwerk Ruhr celebrates its 25th concert anniversary.

This year, the Ruhrtriennale is organizing the Mortier Awards 2025 together with the Mortier Awards association. The prizes will be awarded to artists who combine bold artistic innovation and social dialogue in the spirit of the Ruhrtriennale's founding director. The winners will be honored on 21st of September at Jahrhunderthalle Bochum.

The Wunderland festival center next to the Jahrhunderthalle in Bochum will once again be the heart of the festival this year. Here, visitors can spend entire weekends, attend workshops in the morning, concerts or spoken art in the afternoon and celebrate parties in the evening. The Ruhrtriennale begins on August 21 and ends on September 21. This year there will be a total of 35 productions and projects with 136 events in Bochum, Duisburg, Essen and Gladbeck, 13 of which are in-house and co-productions as well as commissioned works. We welcome a total of 630 artists from 38 countries. Ticket sales start today, with a total of around 45,000 tickets available. 

Festival tickets are available at an early bird discount of 10 percent until May 11. The “Bring your friends” campaign is back again this year: for every full-price ticket, you can get up to three additional tickets with a 50 percent discount at selected events. Further information on the program and tickets can be found at www.ruhrtriennale.de/en.

Further information on the program can be found at www.ruhrtriennale.de/en/programme, detailed information on all productions can be found in our press kit at www.ruhrtriennale.de/en/press. Image material is also available there and will be constantly updated during the festival. 

We will be accepting accreditations from the summer on and will send you a reminder with the exact start date.

With best regards,

Your press department of the Ruhrtriennale                                                                   

Stephanie Noack, Anja Piotrowicz, Louisa Bücker, Janina Albrecht