Johan Simons

Johan Simons (2017)

Johan Simons (born September 1, 1946 in Heerjansdam , Netherlands ) is a Dutch theater and opera director and artistic director. From 2015 to 2017 he heads the Ruhrtriennale . With the 2018/2019 season he is director of the Schauspielhaus Bochum .

Life

Johan Simons was born in Heerjansdam in the Netherlands in 1946. At the age of seven he experienced the flood disaster of 1953; it was an experience that left a lasting mark on him. Simons trained as a dancer at the Rotterdam Dance Academy and trained as an actor at the Theater Academy in Maastricht . From 1976 to 1979 he was an actor and artistic director of the Haagsche Comedie, where he staged his first performances.

Since then he has directed various theater groups and city theaters: from 1979 to 1982 the drama collective Wespetheater, from 1982 to 1985 the Het Regiotheater, from 1985 to 2005 the theater group Hollandia (later ZT Hollandia), from 2005 to 2010 the NTGent, from 2010 to 2015 the Munich Kammerspiele, from 2015 to 2017 the Ruhrtriennale . In addition, he was artistic director of NTGent from 2015 to 2017. Since 2017 Simons has been a consultant for European cooperation at the newly founded Theater Rotterdam. With the 2018/2019 season he will be the director of the Schauspielhaus Bochum .

Simons lives with his wife, the actress Elsie de Brauw, in Varik in Gelderland . Together they have two sons, one of whom, Warre Simons (born 1990), works as a composer and director.

Netherlands and Belgium

In 1979, Johan Simons was one of the co-founders of the Wespetheater, an actor collective that toured the province of Noord-Holland in tents in the summer and performed regional and historical pieces that arose from improvisations. The style of play was expressive and physical, and inspired by the Commedia dell'arte . When the Wespetheater dissolved in 1982, Johan Simons founded Het Regiotheater and became its artistic director. The aim, working method and style corresponded to the wasp theater. However, the pieces no longer emerged from improvisations, but were written specially for the ensemble by experienced authors. The drummer Paul Koek worked as a musician on several productions.

In 1985 the Hollandia theater group was created from a merger of Het Regiotheater with the theater ensemble Acht Oktober, of which Simons became the artistic director. From 1987 Paul Koek appeared as co-director, in 1993 he became second artistic director. Hollandia produced and played shows far away from the big theater cities, deep in the provinces, in the country, in empty factories, stables and churches, in car scrapyards and under bridges. Simons and Koek mainly staged peasant plays by Franz Xaver Kroetz and Herbert Achternbusch , works by Pier Paolo Pasolini , Georg Büchner and Greek classics by Aeschylus and Euripides . They developed their own form of musical theater in which text and music should meet on an equal footing. Simons invented a musical style of play with his actors ( Jeroen Willems , Bert Luppes, Betty Schuurman, Elsie de Brauw). Her performances have received several awards from Dutch theater critics.

In 2001 the Hollandia theater group merged with the Zuidelijk Toneel from Eindhoven to form ZT Hollandia. The actors from Greidanus jr., Sanne van Rijn and Chris Nietvelt joined the ensemble. From then on, Simons' own productions were often co-produced with theaters and festivals in Germany. ZT Hollandia has received several awards. One of the highlights was the European Prize for Innovation in Theater , which Johan Simons and Paul Koek received in 2000. 2005 ZT Hollandia was dissolved; Paul Koek then headed the Veenfabrik in Leiden, Johan Simons was asked to give the public theater in Belgium a new artistic image.

From 2005 to 2010 Simons headed the Flemish Publiekstheater in Ghent, which he renamed NTGent (Nederlands Toneel Gent). He staged novel adaptations by Arnon Grunberg , Michel Houellebecq , Louis Paul Boon and JM Coetzee as well as adaptations of classics such as Orestie ( Aeschylus ), Das Leben ein Traum (Calderón de la Barca) or Kasimir and Karoline ( Ödön von Horváth ), which he wrote in 2009 also showed at the Festival d'Avignon . He took over the artistic direction of NTGent for a second time from 2015 to 2017, where he staged a. a. The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov , an adaptation of the novel Submission by Michel Houellebecq and co-productions with the Ruhrtriennale .

In 2017 the previously independent theater institutions Rotterdamse Schouwburg, Ro Theater and Productiehuis Rotterdam merged to form Theater Rotterdam. Since then, Simons has been responsible for coordinating European cooperation there.

Germany, Austria and Switzerland

Since the early 2000s, Johan Simons has been regularly invited as a guest director by German-speaking theaters. In 2000 his production of The Fall of the Gods after Luchino Visconti was a guest in a German version at the Festival Theaterformen in Braunschweig. The first new productions in German-speaking countries were the monologue Portable , which was based on motifs from Houellebecq's novel Expansion of the Battle Zone ( Schauspielhaus Zürich , 2001) and Hannibal by Christian Dietrich Grabbe ( Staatstheater Stuttgart , 2002).

In the summer of 2002 was Johan Simons at the invitation of founding artistic director Gerard Mortier in the first season of the Ruhr Triennale visits and showed the Backchen of Euripides and The Fall of the Gods. The following year, he staged in Bochum's Jahrhunderthalle Sentimenti based on the novel milk and coal by Ralf Rothmann . This production, with Jeroen Willems in the lead role and compositions by Giuseppe Verdi , is one of Johan Simons' most important to this day. Subsequently, under artistic director Jürgen Flimm , he was represented several times with new productions at the Ruhrtriennale: 2005 Fort Europa by Tom Lanoye (co-production with the Wiener Festwochen ), 2006 Das Leben ein Traum by Pedro Calderón de la Barca , 2007 Merlin or Das desert land by Tankred Dorst , 2008 Forgotten Road to Louis Paul Boon .

Johan Simons was invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen for the first time in 2004 with his Munich production of Heiner Müller's Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome . Elementarteilchen after Houellebecq at the Schauspielhaus Zürich was awarded the Nestroy Theater Prize for the best German-language performance in 2004 and was also invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen in 2005.

In the 2010/2011 season, Simons succeeded Frank Baumbauer as director of the Münchner Kammerspiele . He gradually expanded the traditional house into a European theater, in which more and more international directors worked and in whose ensemble Dutch, Belgian and Estonian actors were also represented. Experimental performances and dance productions shaped the program as well as large theater with modern and classical subjects. The Kammerspiele played worldwide with international co-productions by choreographers such as Meg Stuart or Alain Platel . During Simons' five-year management, the theater was invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen seven times; including twice with Simons' own productions: 2012 with Gesäubert / Gier / 4.48 Psychose by Sarah Kane and 2013 with Die Straße. The town. The attack by Elfriede Jelinek , a commission for the 100th year of the founding of the Kammerspiele, which deals with the myth of Munich's Maximilianstrasse . The magazine Theater heute voted the Münchner Kammerspiele 2013 theater of the year. Simons premiered pieces by Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek in Munich, with whom he has a long-term working relationship, including 2014 The Silent Girl , which addresses the NSU murders and the trial of Beate Zschäpe. In 2011, the multilingual production Three Kingdoms by Simon Stephens (director: Sebastian Nübling ), which was created in collaboration with Theater N099 Tallinn and Lyric Hammersmith Theater London, caused a lot of positive sensation among critics and audiences . Simons' staging of the play Die Neger by Jean Genet , which came out in 2014 at the Wiener Festwochen in co-production with the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, was already controversially discussed in advance , whereby the actual staging was then scandal-free.

In May 2014 Simons received the Berlin Theater Prize for his outstanding services to European theater; The jury's statement said: “If a director stands for a theater that jumps across borders - language borders, national borders, genre borders - then Johan Simons." In November Simons received the German theater award "Der Faust" for the best drama production ( Dantons Tod , Münchner Kammerspiele). In December 2014 he was awarded the Prince Bernhard Kulturfonds Prize, the highest artistic honor in the Netherlands.

Simons ended his directorship of the Münchner Kammerspiele in the summer of 2015. He justified the decision, among other things, with homesickness for his Dutch homeland.

Instead, Simons took over the artistic direction of the Ruhrtriennale from 2015 to 2017. He placed his directorship under the motto “Be entwined”, a quote from Friedrich Schiller's Ode to Joy . The leitmotif should express a “gesture of artistic, social and geographical embrace” and also include people beyond the cultural elites. Simons opened the directorship with a musical theater production by Accattone based on Pier Paolo Pasolini in the coal mixing hall of the Lohberg colliery in Dinslaken . In the run-up, there had been debates with local politicians about the sustainability of cultural use. In 2016, Simons opened up a new venue for the Ruhrtriennale and staged the music theater piece The Strangers based on the novel Der Fall Meursault - a counter-representation by Kamel Daoud in the coal mixing hall of the Auguste Victoria colliery in Marl. For its third and final season in 2017, Simons has announced an adaptation of the novel Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo .

On February 5, 2016, Bochum's head of cultural affairs, Michael Townsend, announced that Simons would be the new director at the Schauspielhaus Bochum from the 2018/2019 season . In his first statement, Simons announced a “theater without borders” with different cultures. At that time he had traveled to Bochum as a drama student; to return there as artistic director fills him with particular enthusiasm.

Simons has been a member of the Berlin Academy of the Arts since 2010 .

Opera

In 2006 Johan Simons made his debut as an opera director with Simon Boccanegra by Giuseppe Verdi at the Opéra Bastille in Paris. Since then Simons has staged operas again and again, including Die Entführung aus dem Serail at the Amsterdam Opera in 2008 and as a new production in 2017, Duke Bluebeard's Castle at the Salzburg Festival in 2008 and Fidelio at the Opéra Bastille in 2008, followed by Boris Godunow in 2012 at the Teatro Real in Madrid. As director of the Ruhrtriennale, he staged Das Rheingold in the Jahrhunderthalle Bochum in 2015 under the musical direction of Teodor Currentzis and with electronic music by Mika Vainio , “ Prometeo ” by Luigi Nono and, in 2016, the baroque opera Alceste by Christoph Willibald Gluck under the musical direction of René Jacobs .

Artistic classification

From the jury statement for the Berlin Theater Prize 2014 about Johan Simons: “His art is physical and always an act of often abstract translation - of a material or problem from originally another time or culture into ours. To do this, Johan Simons overcomes the boundaries of languages, genres and nations. With his legendary Hollandia theater troupe, he consistently performed in the village, at the gates of the city of Amsterdam, in order to break the concept of art of his time and thus change the spirit of the cities without succumbing to it. He still goes dancing beyond what we in Germany call city theaters. He transformed the well-calculated Kammerspiele in Munich back into a real artist's theater with an ensemble that speaks in many tongues and apparently effortlessly brings together the incompatible: repertory theater and project group work, provocative discourse and local roots. In Munich, Johan Simons created the most open-minded example of a German ensemble theater, a hybrid production model of the future. And at the same time a place of unconditional and primary love for the performers, the aesthetic obstinacy, for erratic personalities. "

Awards

• 1996 Albert van Dalsumprijs for Fenicische vrouwen, Theatergroep Hollandia (Amsterdamse Fonds voor de Kunst)
• 1997 Grote Festivalprijs for Twee Stemmen ( Two voices ), Theatergroep Hollandia (Het Theaterfestival)
• 2000 European Prize for Innovation in Theater
• 2000 bearer of the Order of Orange-Nassau
• 2002 Prosceniumsprijs, ZT Hollandia (Vereniging van Schouwburg- en Concertgebouwdirecties VSCD)
• 2004 Director of the Year ( Theater heute )
• 2004 Prijs van de Kritiek (Kring van Nederlandse Theatercritici)
• 2004 Nestroy for elementary particles , Schauspielhaus Zurich (Wiener Bühnenverein)
• 2007 Van Praagprijs (Humanistic Verbond)
• 2009 Honorary doctorate from the University of Ghent
• 2013 Theater of the Year, Münchner Kammerspiele ( Theater heute )
• 2014 Prize from the International Theater Institute (ITI Germany)
• 2014 Theater Prize Berlin ( Prussian Sea Trade Foundation )
• 2014 German Theater Prize Der Faust (category Best Director in Drama) for Dantons Tod , Münchner Kammerspiele
• 2014 AZ Star of Honor of the Year ( Münchner Abendzeitung )
• 2014 Prince Bernhard Cultural Fund Prize of the Netherlands
• 2017 Otto von der Gablentz Prize (Von der Gablentz Prize Foundation)
• 2019: Nestroy Theater Prize in the Best Director category for Woyzeck (co-production Burgtheater , Schauspielhaus Bochum , Akademietheater )

Invitations to the Berlin Theatertreffen

• 2004 Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome , Münchner Kammerspiele
• 2005 Elementary Particles , Schauspielhaus Zurich
• 2010 Kasimir and Karoline , Cologne Theater
• 2012 Cleansed / Greed / 4.48 Psychosis , Münchner Kammerspiele
• 2013 The road. The town. The attack , Münchner Kammerspiele
• 2017 The Schimmelreiter , Thalia Theater Hamburg
• 2020 Hamlet , Schauspielhaus Bochum

Web links

Commons : Johan Simons  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Johan Simons: 50 directors in German-speaking theater. Website of the Goethe Institute
• Information about Simons on the Ruhrtriennale website
• WDR 3 (Westdeutscher Rundfunk) Saturday's talk on August 8, 2015: Ruhrtriennale boss Johan Simons "I am a dreamer"
• Deutschlandfunk (DLF) cultural issues. Debates and documents from August 9, 2015: Back to the roots - About theater in former industrial halls. Johan Simons, the new director of the Ruhrtriennale, in conversation , at the microphone Karin Fischer
• Johan Simons in the Internet Movie Database (English)

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1. ↑ Johan Simons , at the Berlin Academy of the Arts
2. ^ Johan Simons | Ro theater. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on November 4, 2017 ; Retrieved July 20, 2017 (Dutch). 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.  
3. ↑ Christine Dössel: Heim in den smaller Verein , Süddeutsche Zeitung , May 18, 2013, p. 14
4. ↑ Warre Simons. Retrieved July 20, 2017 . 
5. ↑ 50 directors in German-speaking theater - S - Z - Simons, Johan-Goethe-Institut. Retrieved July 20, 2017 . 
6. ↑ Ruhrtriennale director Johan Simons in conversation about democracy, art and "being embraced" | Ruhr barons . In: Ruhrbarone . February 23, 2015 ( ruhrbarone.de [accessed July 20, 2017]).
7. ↑ Münchner Kammerspiele ( Memento of the original from October 29, 2012 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. , accessed October 28, 2012  
8. ↑ Christine Dössel: Speech fans against the terrible silence . In: sueddeutsche.de . September 28, 2014, ISSN  0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed July 20, 2017]).
9. ↑ Review of "Three Kingdoms" at the Münchner Kammerspiele. Retrieved July 20, 2017 . 
10. ↑ Christine Dössel: The N-word . In: sueddeutsche.de . April 1, 2014, ISSN  0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed July 20, 2017]).
11. ↑ Press release Prussian Sea Trade Foundation. (PDF) Retrieved July 20, 2017 . 
12. ^ Eva-Elisabeth Fischer: Director Johan Simons is homesick . In: sueddeutsche.de . May 17, 2013, ISSN  0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed July 20, 2017]).
13. ↑ New director Johan Simons - A Ruhrtriennale for everyone . In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur . ( deutschlandfunkkultur.de [accessed on July 20, 2017]).
14. ↑ "Art is the last bastion of freedom" - WELT. Retrieved July 20, 2017 . 
15. ↑ Johan Simons elected artistic director in Bochum (Der Westen). Retrieved July 20, 2017 . 
16. ↑ Andreas Rossmann: Johan Simons becomes artistic director: Mythos Bochum . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . February 8, 2016, ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed July 20, 2017]).
17. ↑ Johan Simons becomes the new artistic director at the Schauspielhaus Bochum . In: Coolibri magazine . ( coolibri.de [accessed on July 20, 2017]).
18. ↑ Press release Prussian Sea Trade Foundation. (PDF) Retrieved July 20, 2017 . 
19. ↑ Theatergroep Hollandia krijgt Van Dalsumprijs - Archief - Voor nieuws, achtergronden en columns. Retrieved July 20, 2017 (nl-NL). 
20. ↑ Hollandia wint grote festivalprijs met 'Twee Stemmen'; Fusie Theaterfestival met Holland Festival 'mogelijk' - Recensies - Voor nieuws, achtergronden en columns. Retrieved July 20, 2017 (nl-NL). 
21. ↑ Omnisite: Van Praagprijs. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on November 7, 2017 ; Retrieved July 20, 2017 (Dutch). 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.  
22. ^ The shared price in FAZ of December 8, 2014, page 14
23. ↑ Otto von der Gablentz-prijs: Dankwoord Johan Simons . In: Duitsland Instituut . ( duitslandinstituut.nl [accessed July 20, 2017]).
24. ^ Theater awards: Best federal state production: Nestroy for the Graz Schauspielhaus. In: Small newspaper . November 24, 2019, accessed November 24, 2019 .