Bochum (Germany)

For the Belgian director’s first edition as leader of the Ruhrtriennale, abandoned sites are “the starting point and the end point,” he says.The calling card of the Ruhrtriennale Festival of the Arts is to present shows in former industrial sites, like power stations or coal plants, among cities in the Ruhr region of northwestern Germany. For the theater-maker Ivo van Hove, who is presenting his first season as the festival’s artistic director, this is churning up feelings of déjà vu.“I was 20 years old at a time in Belgium when theater was the most old-fashioned thing you could imagine,” van Hove, 65, said. “My generation made a real change and we did that by, for instance, not playing in theaters. My first production was in an abandoned laundry. We played for 30 people and we had 30 actors onstage.”The scale is much larger at the Ruhrtriennale, but at least van Hove had staged five productions at the festival before taking the helm, so he is familiar with the artistic parameters.One of them is paying attention to musical theater, which can take on vastly different forms in Europe compared with English-speaking countries. According to Krystian Lada, a Polish director who helped van Hove put together the slate, the Ruhrtriennale is known for presenting “a new vision of music theater” in Germany, where so-called high and low cultures are often rigidly separated. Lada’s own entry in the 2024 festival, “Abendzauber,” combines works by Bruckner and Björk.Van Hove’s “I Want Absolute Beauty,” which kicks off the festival on Friday, revolves around the “Anatomy of a Fall” and “The Zone of Interest” star Sandra Hüller (whom he had directed in Eugene O’Neill’s play “Strange Interlude” in 2013) performing a song cycle pulled from P.J. Harvey’s back catalog. (Van Hove’s take on musical theater, or any theater for that matter, is often divisive: A recent review in The New York Times called his musical adaptation of the film “Opening Night,” with new songs by Rufus Wainwright, “a travesty.”)Other offerings of note at the festival include “Legende,” the dissident Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov’s take on the filmmaker Sergei Parajanov’s work; Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s new dance piece “Y”; and Philip Venables and Ted Huffman’s music-theater work “The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More