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    At the Ruhrtriennale, Searching for the Sublime Among the Ruins

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    In the abandoned industrial sites that serve as the festival’s venues, our critic witnessed beauty struggling to be born: fitfully, clumsily and sometimes stunningly.“I Want Absolute Beauty,” the title of the opening production for this year’s Ruhrtriennale, sounds like a mission statement of sorts.The event, one of Germany’s major arts festivals, lights up the former industrial sites that dot the Ruhr region, in the country’s northwest — though hulking power plants and abandoned steelworks aren’t where you necessarily expect to find beauty. Then again, this 22-year-old festival has always been about letting audiences encounter the sublime among the ruins. Everywhere I turned during the Ruhrtriennale’s opening weekend, I witnessed beauty struggling — fitfully, clumsily and sometimes stunningly — to be born.This summer, the Ruhrtriennale welcomes a new artistic leader, the acclaimed Belgian theater director Ivo van Hove. His three-season tenure kicked off on Friday night with “I Want Absolute Beauty,” a staged cycle of songs by the English singer-songwriter P.J. Harvey that van Hove has created for the German actress Sandra Hüller, presented at the Jahrhunderthalle, a former power station in the city of Bochum.Hüller, best-known for her Academy Award-nominated performance in “Anatomy of a Fall,” gives gutsy and full-throated renditions of 26 of Harvey’s songs accompanied by a four-person band. It’s a heroic performance over an intermission-less hour and a half. Van Hove doesn’t impose a narrative, in the style of jukebox musicals, but a journey of sorts can be followed through the titles (“Dorset” — “London” — “New York”) that appear on a screen where both live and prerecorded video is projected throughout the evening.The stage area is covered in dirt, and dancers twirl, writhe and gyrate around Hüller. The choreography, by the collective (La)Horde, is earthy and elemental, sometimes joyous and liberating, but often menacing and with hints of sexual violence. Hüller is always front and center, her voice tough but with an edge of fragility. Sometimes she joins the dancers in their primeval thrashing. The results can be exhilarating but are just as often exasperating. Despite the high caliber of the performances, it’s easy to lose interest. Occasionally there’s an earsplitting crescendo or blinding flood light to jolt us back to attention.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

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      At a Festival Amid Industrial Ruins, Ivo van Hove Takes Charge

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      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

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      ‘West Side Story’ Will Not Return to Broadway

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      The reimagined revival was closed by the pandemic, and then its lead producer, Scott Rudin, said he would step back from active participation in his shows after being accused of bullying.“West Side Story,” an ambitious, reimagined revival of the classic musical, will not reopen when Broadway returns this fall, the show announced Monday, making it one of the biggest productions yet to become a casualty of the pandemic.The show’s lead producer, Scott Rudin, announced in April that he was stepping back from active roles in his Broadway productions after he came under fire for a long history of bullying employees. But Rudin said at the time that while the decisions about the future of “West Side Story” and his other shows would be left to others, he hoped that they would return to Broadway when theaters were allowed to reopen.The “West Side Story” revival — put together by a creative team with avant-garde credentials, including the director Ivo van Hove and the choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker — opened in February 2020, less than a month before the coronavirus outbreak shut down Broadway and brought performances around the nation to a halt.“This difficult and painful decision comes after we have explored every possible path to a successful run, and unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, reopening is not a practical proposition,” Kate Horton, a producer on the show, said in a statement. “We thank all the brilliant, creative artists who brought ‘West Side Story’ to life at the Broadway Theater, even for so brief a time, especially the extraordinary acting company, 33 of whom made their Broadway debuts in this production.”News of the closure of “West Side Story” comes as Broadway is cautiously preparing for a return. Preview performances of the play “Pass Over” began last week, and are scheduled to be followed next month by the return of longtime favorites including “Hadestown,” “Hamilton,” “Wicked” and others.Several other shows produced by Rudin are planning to return to Broadway. Aaron Sorkin’s stage adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird” plans to resume performances on Oct. 5 with Jeff Daniels back in the cast; the production announced that the show would now be overseen by Orin Wolf, who would be given the title of executive producer.Scott Rudin, center, the lead producer of “West Side Story,” said in April that he would step back from active participation in his shows after he was accused of abusive behavior. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut even as Broadway prepares for a triumphant return, the departure of “West Side Story” offers a reminder of the toll the pandemic has taken on the industry.Last May, only two months into the pandemic, Disney Theatrical Productions announced that its stage adaptation of “Frozen” would not reopen. “Mean Girls,” a Broadway adaptation of the 2004 film with a book by Tina Fey, also announced it would not return.The “West Side Story” production, while daring, opened to mixed reviews. A new film adaptation by Steven Spielberg is scheduled to be released in December, but the Broadway show will not be around to capitalize on any interest that the new film version generates. More