Jürgen Kruse (director)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jürgen Kruse (born February 8, 1959 in Hamburg ) is a German theater director.

Life

After finishing secondary school in 1975, Kruse began his theater career as an assistant director to his cousin, the director and Schaubühnen actor Roland Schäfer. After that he was assistant to Hansgünther Heyme and Christof Nel, among others . In 1978 he was engaged at the Berlin Schaubühne on Halleschen Ufer and worked there for several years as Peter Stein's assistant . Since 1982 he has been a freelance director, including with Horst Statkus at the Basel Theater and the Lucerne Theater , but also remained loyal to the Schaubühne. In 1989, Friedrich Schirmer hired him as senior director at the theater in Freiburg im Breisgau , where Kruse cemented his reputation as one of the most interesting and consistent young German directors with important, style-defining productions. In 1993 he moved to Peter Eschberg at the Schauspiel Frankfurt am Main . His Frankfurt production of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler was invited to the 1994 Berlin Theatertreffen.

In 1995 Leander Haußmann appointed him to the management team of the Bochumer Schauspielhaus and he remained there as senior director until the end of the artistic director Haußmann in 2000. Since then he has been working as a freelance director again; in addition to other productions in Bochum at the Thalia Theater Hamburg , at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and at the State Theater in Mainz . He lives in Berlin-Charlottenburg .

Jürgen Kruse became famous and notorious for his often gloomy and self-referential interpretations of tragedy, "which are not afraid of the dark" and often represent an aesthetic challenge for the audience. In every production, Kruse uses rock music from his record collection, which is legendary in theater circles, and often brushes texts against the grain in terms of sentence position and emphasis. Characteristic of his work are also the historical-anachronistic costumes, which are often designed by his partner Caritas de Wit.

Kruse's most important dramaturgical collaborators were Carl Hegemann and Andreas Marber . Kruse has worked continuously with some outstanding actors. The interaction in the joint theater work has made a decisive contribution to the uniqueness of the Kruse Theater. The most important protagonists were or are Jürgen Rohe, Traute Hoess , Anne Tismer , Ralf Dittrich , Wolfram Koch , Steve Karier, Judith Rosmair and Peter Jordan .

Working method

The theater scholar Kay Philipp Baronowsky on Kruse's working method:

“Jürgen Kruse's theater does not claim to be an avant-garde revolt, but creates an art world with a very personal touch, characterized by an agglomeration of symbols and materials. The unrestrained access to the reservoirs of symbols in literature and pop culture and their connection with the dramatic text, embedded in visual materials that refer to world and art history, enables the theater to create a panorama of memories in which the senses like walk in the aisles of a museum. Here there is no representation of a higher-level concept, but the synopsis of cultural fragments that is only accompanied by the drama. Kruse challenges his audience - and himself - to work on memory. The resulting overall picture appears unassailable from the outside due to its complexity, but is inherently extremely fragile. The great risk that Kruse takes in every work process - and not through the presentation of the finished staging - is the approach to looking for references to his own, very personal situation based on the pieces and figures and to the recipient by composing them using the various complexes of signs to offer. After all, there is no longer a fixed point of reference for the eye of the beholder; the scattered masses of furnishings require selective viewing. As a program, this aesthetic impertinence cannot be separated from the treatment of the text and it makes perfect sense in view of the mood created - perplexity and sadness that ultimately dominate every Kruse staging. ”(Catalog article on: Leander Haußmann in Bochum - A retrospective . Bochum 2000.)

The theater critic Christine Dössel on Kruse's productions:

“All Kruse productions thrive on an overabundance - an overabundance of music and decoration, optical and acoustic signs, simultaneous processes and complex perception options. His stage sets (often built by Steffi Bruhn) are like junk rooms: crammed with props and found objects, illuminated in a twilight in which contours disappear and images begin to haunt. Behind this lies an aesthetic of deconcentration, rupture, and shift in perception. Nothing is what it seems and more is happening all the time than can be grasped. Kruse's best works are like dream structures, one would like to lose oneself in them. "

The theater journalist and dramaturge Alexander Kohlmann about Kruse:

“A Kruse premiere is like meeting an old friend again. There is hardly a director in Germany whose personality is so consistently linked to his stage art, who invites you to the same world over and over again, with countless characters, set pieces, puzzle pieces and allusions, the generations of (ex) guest students, Actors and Kruse disciples know how to interpret reliably. A reliable world like a kind of Kruse Neverland that stopped somewhere between the sixties and eighties. An empire where records are still being heard, computers were never invented and the Stones are much younger than they are today. "

Productions

1980s

1990s

2000s

2010s

literature

  • All publications of the Bochumer Schauspielhaus 1995–2000; In addition:
  • Kay Philipp Baronowsky: Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Man of Sorrows. Catalog contribution to Leander Haußmann in Bochum - A retrospective. Bochum 2000.
  • Hans-Thies Lehmann: Post-dramatic theater. Frankfurt am Main 1999.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.goethe.de/kue/the/reg/reg/hl/kru/por/deindex.htm
  2. ↑ http://www.nachtkritik.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=10548:2015-02-08-08-57-21&catid=83:schauspiel-frankfurt&Itemid=100190
  3. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from September 22, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.schauspielfrankfurt.de
  4. ^ Deutsches Theater Berlin: Deutsches Theater Berlin - The misunderstanding, by Albert Camus. Retrieved August 12, 2017 .
  5. ↑ Gabi Hift: Jürgen Kruse's dream theater with Ödön von Horváth: Dreams are conspiracy theories , review on nachtkritik.de of October 27, 2019, accessed July 27, 2020
personal data
SURNAME Kruse, Jürgen
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German theater director
DATE OF BIRTH February 8, 1959
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg