Events  

South African playwright and director Mpumelelo Paul Grootboom whose work has gained him the nickname ›Township Tarantino‹, looks in ›It’s a rhetorical question‹ into his homelands recent past. He describes the fall of the intellectual president Thabo Mbeki, told through the speeches of the inflammatory young politician Daniel “Dada“ Mokone. more ...

Giuseppe Chico and Barbara Matijevic are the authors of the trilogy entitled “Theory of the performance to come, or the only way to avoid the massacre is to become its authors?” which challenges our understanding of society, politics and everyday life as narrations. In their new project ›The Speech‹ (working title) which is part of the ›Powers of Speech‹ series at PACT Zollverein, they approach speech as a mode of discourse that consistently reminds us of the unspeakability of nature. more ...

The Columbian Pablo Emilio Escobar, also known as the ›The Boss‹, is considered alongside his declared role model, Al Capone, as one of the most notorious, ruthless drugs barons of all-time. Although he held his home country and the international community to ransom over years, he was at the same time a much loved benefactor of the poorest neighbourhoods of the city of Medellín. America’s declared state enemy number one in the nineties, he was finally shot dead by a special commando while fleeing in 1993. more ...

›Although we fell short‹ is a speech for the performance artist Kate McIntosh created by writer and theater-maker Tim Etchells out of bits and pieces of other speeches. Etchells fuses scraps of text from historical and contemporary political campaigns, party congresses, debates, resignation speeches and revolutionary tracts into unexpected dialogues and collisions. Meanings are distorted and words twisted until they take on a meaning, lose it and then get it back again. more ...

Forced Entertainment’s latest performance explores ideas and clichés of hope. Writing and collecting future scenarios as well as small narratives concerning optimism and despair, the company investigate the speculative nature of anticipation and the myriad possibilities the future holds in store. more ...

›Lachen‹ is a piece about the phenomena of laughing. Exploring laughter as a form of expression disconnected from any particular causes, Antonia Baehr focuses on the very act itself - on the sound, shape, music, choreography, rhythm and gesture of laughter. Although comedy is not her aim, there is nothing more infectious than laughter! more ...

ATELIERS offer young artists of all disciplines from NRW, Germany and abroad a platform to present an insight into their work in the form of sketches, pre-premiers and extracts. more ...

In ›llámame mariachi‹ the Spanish choreographer and visual artist La Ribot, who last appeared at PACT Zollverein in the duet ›Gustavia‹ with Mathilde Monnier during the Ruhrtriennale 2009, continues her exploration of video and modes of visual treatment of the body. The piece starts with a frenetic film, set to an original soundtrack by Atom™ and shot in one fast-paced, disorientating take from the body perspectives of three dancers in succession. more ...

Phil Collins' diverse practice is informed by the visual traditions of cinema and television, exploring lens-based media from a singularly performative and personal perspective. His works posit the camera as an agent both of emancipation and exploitation, desire and betrayal. more ...

The Ruhr is a region that has derived its identity from the industrial revolution: a watershed equipped with massive infrastructure for the transformation of minerals and fossil fuels into goods and services. m7red open up a discussion on how regions in the process of changing can be "visualized" by showcasing the process of building a public cartography to represent another region that is shifting from an industrial wasteland into a complex environmental entity. The Matanzas Riachuelo river basin is the most polluted area in South America. more ...

Bartók/Mikrokosmos, created in 1987, is an evening of dance and music presented in three parts. The dance duet ›Mikrokosmos‹, set to a composition by Bela Bartók for two pianos, introduced the then radical development of a male dancer taking to the stage for the first time in De Keersmaeker’s work. This is followed by a musical work by György Ligeti, performed by two pianists, and a dance to the Fourth String Quartet by Bela Bartók. more ...

After the success of ›ROSAS DANST ROSAS‹ presented during the European tour of her Early Works project in 2009 at PACT Zollverein, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker returns to Essen this year with two more productions from the eighties. Both evenings, linked thematically by De Keersmaeker’s congenial pairing of music and movement, allow us to look back at the early career of one of the most influential and lauded choreographers of her generation. more ...

The Japanese choreographer and theatre director, Toshiki Okada, has gained much attention in his home country’s arts scene with works intersecting the boundaries of spoken and movement theatre and typically combining extremely colloquial everyday speech with equally everyday movements. more ...

What do sea anemones and sports stadiums sound like or how about New York, Bangkok or Bangalore? Can a work of art be both a representation and an intervention at one and the same time in a specific space? What is a performance like that follows its performers’ heartbeats? These are just some of the questions raised by students from the Walt Disney-founded and now world famous California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) who are presenting their work and representing their school for the first time in Europe at a unique 4 day interdisciplinary festival. more ...

What do sea anemones and sports stadiums sound like or how about New York, Bangkok or Bangalore? Can a work of art be both a representation and an intervention at one and the same time in a specific space? What is a performance like that follows its performers’ heartbeats? These are just some of the questions raised by students from the Walt Disney-founded and now world famous California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) who are presenting their work and representing their school for the first time in Europe at a unique 4 day interdisciplinary festival. more ...

ATELIERS offer young artists of all disciplines from NRW, Germany and abroad a platform to present an insight into their work in the form of sketches, pre-premiers and extracts. Each edition gives rise to a hybrid evening length programme featuring performance, art exhibits, music, dance, film, readings, photography, theatre, lectures and video art. To date PACT Zollverein has held 45 ATELIERS.   From and with: more ...

Emanuel Gat is one of the contemporary dance scene’s most sought-after protagonists. With the company he founded in 2004, the Israeli choreographer is a regular guest at leading international festivals. His latest production for ten dancers ›Brilliant Corners‹, which premiered in June this year at the Venice Biennale, functions as a seismograph of choreographic activity within a clearly determined square of light. Set to an original score by Gat, the performance flows in endless rhythmic and melodic layers. more ...

The world premiere of multi-award winning choreographer Meg Stuart’s latest work ›VIOLET‹ promises to be a fitting climax to the first half of PACT Zollverein’s season 2011. more ...

During the PACT summer festival, the group OBLIVIA, a unique force on the Finnish performance scene, presents their ›Entertainment Island‹ trilogy, created in part in residency at PACT Zollverein, for the first time in its entirety on a German stage. This minimalistic, suggestive, hilarious yet disturbing trilogy sets out to divulge and scrutinize the manifold word of entertainment and popular culture from its shiny surfaces to its darkest recesses. ›Entertainment Island 1‹ is an energetic and uncompromising take on the structures of the entertainment industry. more ...

Having opened at PACT Zollverein in 2008 and toured internationally to popular and critical acclaim, Forced Entertainment's ›Spectacular‹ returns to the stage in Essen for one performance only. more ...

As the conquering hero of the Wild West, the cowboy is an archetypal American symbol of the individual that manipulates, controls and uses his environment. In ›The Host‹, American choreographer Andros Zins-Browne questions the world we are living in today and the lack of ecological courage in his homeland. In a pleasant post-apocalyptic scenario flavored with slapstick and an overdose of testosterone, his cowboys battle to hold their ground while their surroundings seem to be turning against them. more ...

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ATELIERS offer young artists of all disciplines from NRW, Germany and abroad a platform to present an insight into their work in the form of sketches, pre-premiers and extracts. Each edition gives rise to a hybrid evening length programme featuring performance, art exhibits, music, dance, film, readings, photography, theatre, lectures and video art. To date PACT Zollverein has held 43 ATELIERS. more ...

Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion have created a performance that dances in your head. It's superb. De MorgenJonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion make a welcome return to the stage at PACT Zollverein with their latest double-bill programme. The duo last appeared here in 2009 when they presented their trilogy ›Both Sitting Duet‹, ›The Quiet Dance‹ and ›Speaking Dance‹. more ...

With his production ›Tanzstück#4‹, Laurent Chétouane, winner of the RUHR.2010 GmbH Wild Card Award, concluded his tetralogy on the theme of presence. Since he premiered ›Tanzstück #1 Bildbeschreibung von Heiner Müller‹, in 2007 at PACT Zollverein, he has continued developing a form of theatre that through questioning movement in terms of its necessity, meaning, legitimacy and ethics, moves ever closer towards dance. more ...

›Because I’m so beautiful!‹ Moving in a field of tension somewhere between self-selling and self-concealing, three performers present themselves as objects; try out being shaped and misshapened. ›Cheeeese!‹, poses questions about self-portrayal and self-manipulation which are also everyday handcrafts in the world of theatre. By trying to alter their self-images, the performers influence the audience’s sense of beauty. more ...

Through improvising and experimenting, choreographer Martin Nachbar, composer Benjamin Schweitzer and their team, created music and movement in an egalitarian exchange between the two genres. Subsequently, they used their material to realize a work with a concrete thematic idea. Both artists research source was the failed North Pole expedition undertaken by the Swedish engineer S.A. more ...

They’re silly, they’re wise, sometimes they’re a bit embarrassing, but most of the time they’re honest and brave. They often know things better than others because they’ve experienced them themselves.  Men around 50. Americans Jess Curtis and Scot Angus Balbernie meet to dance, to fantasize, to lament about their aging bodies, the onset of little aches and pains, their unused talents, unfulfilled hopes and dreams. Their summing up of their own 50-something generation is open and unconventional. more ...

Samir Akika’s production ›Me&myMum‹ opens, in true independent film style, to David Bowie’s song ›Heroes‹. What follows is a chaotic, ingenious mishmash of mother images. ›Me&myMum‹ is the second part of a trilogy about growing up. Following his internationally successful production, ›Extended Teenage Era‹, Akika now looks with humour, passion and a sure feeling for life’s peculiarities, at the complex relationship between mother and child. more ...

What is appearance? Outward manifestations like make-up, colour, light and shadow... A transient, ›empty‹ surface which allows people not only to notice one another, but also identify one another and even fall in love. In her solo ›Die Scheinwerferin‹ visual artist and performer, Naoko Tanaka, employs light and shadow to reveal new dimensions of ›appearance‹ and ›reality‹. Carrying a torch, Tanaka departs on a fictive journey into her inner self. more ...

A recurring principle in media artist Daniel Burkhardt’s work is a flood of perceptual stimuli which the human brain, through the processes of abstraction and selection, recognizes as known and rearranges in new groupings. Due to the sheer abundance of images, it is impossible for the viewer to take in everything and blind spots come into being. In ›Untergrund‹ Burkhardt, who has already worked several times in residency at PACT Zollverein and received awards including The Marl Video Art Award of the Sculpture Museum Glaskasten Marl, focuses on this blindness. more ...

The Cologne based American artist Peter Miller focuses frequently in his photographic and film work on the phenomenon of magic, optical illusions and the constitutive elements of film such as lenses, light, audiences and projection. more ...

Hosted in collaboration by different cities in the region and also serving as NRW’s dance platform, the biannual festival tanz nrw presents a wide range of recent dance productions created in NRW. The third edition taking place from 5.–15. May 2011, links 8 cities in North Rhine-Westphalia in a regional festival with international flair. Tanz nrw 11 opens over a long weekend at PACT Zollverein and tanzhaus nrw in Düsseldorf with a concentrated programme focusing on productions at the interface between dance, performance and installation. more ...

At the core of ›The Agora Project‹, an interdisciplinary incentive directed by the well known Dutch theatre maker Jan Ritsema, lies the performance ›Oedipus, my foot‹. Created by Ritsema in collaboration with 15 artists from 11 countries who are all on stage - including renowned choreographers such as Xavier Le Roy and Christine de Smedt – the work approaches Oedipus from completely new perspectives to those of Sophocles’ drama. This version’s Oedipus takes his fate into his own hands; his potential destinies are infinite. more ...

Where are we? Or where at least is a point from which we can get our bearings? In maritime language ›dead reckoning‹ refers to a method of navigation that is not based on absolute fixed points outside of the ship such as lighthouses, stars or poles. The current position is estimated on the basis of the last determined course and elapsed time – orientation thus becomes a constant forecast that proceeds from the last certainty. more ...

Walking, talking, improvisation and reflection - the ›walk+talk‹ performance lecture format curated by Philipp Gehmacher offers an insight into individual choreographers’ thoughts and movement language. Rather than proffering explanations, the resulting works question and reformulate the featured artists’ approaches to movement in words. Developed at Tanzquartier Wien in 2008, the series includes works by Gehmacher, Milli Bitterli and eight other well known choreographers. more ...

The relationship between self and other. Touching implies care but also distance. The distance between one’s own body and another is very much a part of our reality and something that we feel constantly. It is an insurmountable boundary and, at the same time, an important mirror. In his work, the Austrian choreographer Philipp Gehmacher poses very precise, fundamental questions – questions of dance and of human relationships in general. His movements connect the dancing body with the everyday body without ever generating simple, representative images. more ...

Ioannis Mandafounis, Fabrice Mazliah and May Zarhy met in various contexts through The Forsythe Company and have been collaborating and developing their own distinct choreographic signatures together since 2007. Following ›ZERO‹ in spring 2010, this is their second production to be shown at PACT Zollverein. In ›Cover Up‹ the trio attempts to alter the perceived image of the body by having the audience re-examine their assumptions and impressions. more ...

Choreographer and dancer, Eszter Salamon’s latest work, ›Dance for Nothing‹, is based on John Cage’s ›Lecture on nothing‹ from 1949 which, like much of Cage's music, follows a complex strategy in terms of time length. Salamon recites the world famous lecture while dancing. Her movements unfold in parallel to the text but follow an autonomous trail and never become an illustration or commentary on the text. ›Dance for Nothing‹ gives room to the intentionally unintentional and, through Salamon’s hearing, speaking and moving body, explores the desire for non-interference in interaction. more ...

ATELIERS offer young artists of all disciplines from NRW, Germany and abroad a platform to present an insight into their work in the form of sketches, pre-premiers and extracts. Each edition gives rise to a hybrid evening length programme featuring performance, art exhibits, music, dance, film, readings, photography, theatre, lectures and video art. To date PACT Zollverein has held 43 ATELIERS. more ...

What is a community? How does one go about constituting a community? What are the limits, the borders of sharing? How can one be oneself and share at the same time? How much piracy does a community need? more ...

The symposium ›Beyond Curating‹, organized by tanzplan essen 2010 at PACT Zollverein, is the first of its kind in the field of dance in the German-speaking world. Against the background of a successive dissolution of branches of art and increasingly hybrid artistic forms of expression, the symposium seeks to bring together artists, curators, and theoreticians with their respective specific experience in the areas of performing and visual art. more ...