Westart Report

Six weeks of music theater, drama, dance and concerts in front of the unique backdrop of industrial culture: this year's “RUHRTRIENNALE” opens on August 18th with Debussy's “Pelléas und Mélisande”, the Bochum Symphony Orchestra and star soprano Barbara Hannigan. The international art festival between Dinslaken and Dortmund is also the third and final season of director Johan Simons.

They are always there and almost everywhere: murals, spray and adhesive pictures on house walls and walls in our city. Street art is omnipresent, stimulates, excites and invites you to deal with this art. Street art has long since become a tourist attraction and an important indicator of a city worth living in.

The Ruhr area is getting a new literature festival: the lit.RUHR starts on October 4th and brings international writers to Essen in the Zeche Zollverein, the center of the festival. But there is also reading in Bochum, Dortmund and Duisburg.

People on the run, people abroad, strangers at home: The Westart Reportage follows the artists of the first Ruhrtriennale - for example the South African artist William Kentridge, the choreographer Serge Aimé Coulibaly from Burkina Faso and the Nigerian Documenta artist Olu Oguibe - under the Director of Stefanie Carp and Christoph Marthaler from Ghana to Gladbeck.

At the “Schlagernacht” of the year on November 3rd in Oberhausen, 13,000 fans celebrated their stars. Every third German between 18 and 25 years of age listens to Schlager, and not only at malls, in the festival tent or at carnival: Schlager has found its way out of the Musikantenstadl ghetto. What was long considered uncool is now again acceptable.

For some young actresses and directors from North Rhine-Westphalia this year it is their first time at the big show of film stars and starlets in Berlin. For a producer couple from Düsseldorf, it's about their greatest film to date. Westart is there when crucial contacts are to be made, the red carpet becomes a hurdle or a debut work becomes either a great triumph or a bitter personal defeat. From the stage to the screen: the actress Lou Strenger For Lou Strenger, the Berlinale is a high point of her career. She plays the young Helene Weigel in Heinrich Breloer's docudrama “Brecht” alongside Tom Schilling.

The name comes from simple, lanky, a bit brittle. “Ruhr Ding” is the name of the new exhibition format that is intended to get people in the Ruhr area moving in the coming years. 22 art projects - paintings, performances and installations - will be shown at the premiere. They can be seen until June 30th in Essen, Dortmund, Bochum and Oberhausen: freely accessible and free of charge for everyone. The artists designed their works for the places where they are exhibiting. In Oberhausen, tournaments of a different kind take place on a football field with three goals.

Dia Decadence is a burlesque dancer and loves extravagant costumes and sparkling eroticism. Birgit Mühlram learned ballet at the Vienna Conservatory and dances for world-famous choreographers. Both professional worlds have little in common, and yet both dancers share a love for an art movement that expresses itself with the body - once lascivious and almost naked, once aesthetically and technically perfect. Westart is now bringing both worlds together - an experiment: Will the ballet dancer get involved in performing at a burlesque show in Aachen - and undress on stage? Our team accompanied the two dancers in the preparation of the performance and observed where there are similarities, how high the inhibition thresholds are and whether high art and light entertainment can find a common language.

As "Stadtschreiber Ruhr", the Berlin reporter Lucas Vogelsang, accompanied by Laif photographer Philipp Wente, is out and about in the Ruhr area and discovers the many facets of the area and its people on campsites and on river banks, in football stadiums and fan bars, in drinking halls and social hot spots , tells their stories and publishes them in his magazine "Ruhr areas". The Westart report accompanied him and his photographer through the year with the camera. On the hunt for good stories: Lucas Vogelsang The 34-year-old Berliner is a reporter with heart and soul. In 2017 his collection of reports “Heimaterde” about migrants in Germany was published.