Editorial

The new Impulse is here!

We will celebrate the 2025 edition of the festival on three long weekends – one after another in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Cologne and Düsseldorf – and are very excited to see this new programme architecture come alive with you.

The last year has been extremely challenging on a political, social and interpersonal level: the proposals for cuts that are threatened make the work of independent artists particularly difficult. Looking ahead into the future and a range of possible outcomes requires more courage and caution than usual. So the moments when we can come together to experience and celebrate performance, theatre and dance collectively at this leading platform for independent theatre in the German-speaking region seem all the more precious. 

The Showcase has been selected from over 500 productions that were viewed from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The artists invite us in very different ways to encounter the life we share and its virulent crises and dangers and to reinforce human values. Some of the works connect highly personal stories with themes about the structure of society, such as Hendrik Quast for example, who allows us to participate in the process of his hair transplant and links this to issues of background. Or Simone Dede Ayivi & Kompliz*innen, who try to find out who is responsible for her miserable living conditions. Jaha Koo invites us on a culinary journey between South Korea and Europe, while Claire Cunningham wanders with us through (stage) landscapes filled with grief and beauty. In their evening of anti-entertainment to open the festival, Joana Tischkau and her bravoura team dissect the homeland narratives of Black showbiz and that icon of German high culture, Pina Bausch. With the remarkable VR-work ‘[EOL.]. End of Life’ by the company DARUM from Vienna, we enter the kingdom of the undead in the digital space and travel through virtual worlds. Arkadi Zaides connects AI clouds with the radioactive cloud following the reactor explosion at Chernobyl to consider the severe dangers posed by supposedly controllable technologies. Rabih Mroué and Lina Majdalani undertake a critical examination of the subject of freedom of speech using the transcripts of Bertolt Brecht’s hearings in exile in the USA. Studio Urbanistan has conducted a series of interviews with people who are living among us with the trauma of war and, while peaceful on the outside, will never be free from war in their minds. And by no means least there are also great utopian moments, for example in Jen Rosenblit’s philosophical rhapsody of desire about a place that is “elsewhere” or in the high-energy Afro-futurist utopia created through the choreographer Jeremy Nedd and the company Impilo Mapantsula’s improvisations between jazz music and South African pantsula dancing.

In our new programme strand Post-West, artists from East Germany, partly in exchange with artists from NRW, will reflect on changes to society and experiences of transformation. With Impulse meets… we create additional spaces for reflection, encounters, discourse and parties together with local partners and friends of the festival. 

Let’s have some inspiring impulses together! 

Franziska Werner with Joshua Wicke
& the whole Impulse team