Heidelberg Theater and Orchestra

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The Heidelberg Theater and Orchestra is a five-branch house with music theater, concerts, drama and dance as well as its own ensemble for children's and youth theater. For the 2012/13 season, the dance company Nanine Linning / Theater Heidelberg was again established at the Heidelberg Theater and Orchestra. In the 2018/19 season, the Spanish choreographer and former dancer Iván Pérez took over the artistic direction of the new Dance Theater Heidelberg (DTH), succeeding the choreographer Nanine Linning. The Philharmonic Orchestra of the City of Heidelberg has also been part of the theater since 2005 and forms its own division with numerous concerts and accompaniment to opera productions. Holger Schultze has been the artistic director since the 2011/12 season. On June 1, 2017, he extended his contract until 2026.

history

The Heidelberg Theater was built by the city architect Friedrich Lendorf in the late Classicist style and opened on October 31, 1853 with a performance of Friedrich Schiller's The Bride of Messina . In the 19th century, the building was expanded and rebuilt several times. In 1924 it was redesigned inside and out and reopened in 1925 with Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Egmont . Another restoration was carried out in 1978/79 and the foyer was expanded in 1990, restoring the state of the building to 1924.

Temporary closure 2006–2009 and renovation 2009–2012

In 2006 the theater was closed due to significant structural defects. In August 2009, the renovation of the theater and a new theater began. This was made possible, among other things, by an extraordinary civic commitment, in particular a large donation from the Heidelberg entrepreneur Wolfgang Marguerre . The total costs amounted to almost 60 million euros, about 19 million of which were donated, Marguerre alone contributed 15 million euros. The new hall of the building was named after him.

The renovation was carried out by the Darmstadt architects Waechter + Waechter. It encompasses the entire complex of the former theater. The listed auditorium at Theaterstrasse 8 and the historic buildings at Theaterstrasse 4, 6 and 10 as well as the listed building at Friedrichstrasse 5 were integrated into a modern theater building. All theater workshops, an orchestra and choir rehearsal room and four rehearsal stages are now under one roof. Thanks to modern stage technology, lighting and very good acoustics, artistic and technical ideas can now be implemented in high quality. The theater was also expanded to include a new second hall. Both stages have independent access for the audience. The replacement venues during the renovation were the opera tent (until mid-June 2012) and the theater cinema housed in the former castle cinema (until mid-July 2012). In addition, there are the regular smaller venues Zwinger1 and as a stage for the Young Theater the Zwinger³, for drama as well as smaller dance and chamber operas. The grand opening of the new old theater with the premiere of Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa took place on November 24, 2012 in the new Marguerre Hall, which has a capacity of around 600 people.

Philharmonic orchestra

In the 2015/16 season Elias Grandy was appointed General Music Director of the Heidelberg Philharmonic Orchestra. The orchestra of the Heidelberg theater has been awarded twice for the best German concert program. Internationally important soloists can be seen as guests at the concerts. The Heidelberg Philharmonic Orchestra offers a wide range of concert formats and, in addition to 8 philharmonic concerts, the traditional concert evenings on New Year's Eve and New Year's Eve, the Bach choir concerts in the St. Youth and family concerts. In addition to numerous concert and opera appearances in the repertoire of the theater, the Philharmonic Orchestra regularly takes part in the renowned Winter Baroque Festival in Schwetzingen and is the annual host of the Heidelberg Artist Prize.

Children's and youth theater

The children's and youth theater was opened in 1984 and celebrated its 30th anniversary in March 2014 under the patronage of Franziska van Almsick. As the fourth division of the Heidelberg Theater and Orchestra, the Junge Theater has its own venue (Zwinger 3) and its own six-person ensemble. Each season there are around six productions for children and young people of all ages, including a children's play on the big stage in the run-up to Christmas and an open-air production as part of the Heidelberg Castle Festival. Since the 2016/17 season Natascha Kalmbach has been the director of the Heidelberg Young Theater.

In each season there are different formats in which children, young people and adults can play theater themselves: play clubs, holiday clubs, group workshops and the theater laboratory. In addition, the Heidelberg School Theater Days are organized with performances, workshops and discussions.

Theater projects

As part of the “Theater and School” cooperation, introduced with the directorship of Holger Schultze, all pupils of the participating schools in Heidelberg and the surrounding area visit a theater performance at least once a year and also receive theater educational offers such as preparation and follow-up or theater tours. The Heidelberg model offers an encounter with the theater and its artists regardless of origin, religion, nationality or previous experience. Several thousand schoolchildren regularly attend performances of all genres, rehearsals and workshops every season and are accompanied by theater pedagogy.

Children and young people can become researchers during the Easter holidays. Together with artists from different disciplines, they investigate a certain topic in all its facets in experiments. At the end of the four-day “theater laboratory”, the participants who have become experts present their research results in front of an audience.

For children, adolescents, but also adults of all ages, the Heidelberg Theater and Orchestra offers a multitude of opportunities to be on stage themselves. There is an opportunity for this, for example, in the theater's extras, the various games clubs of the Heidelberg Young Theater or the children's and youth choir.

The “Club of Encounters” of the Heidelberg Young Theater continued the theater exchange with the city of Rehovot in the 2017/18 season. As part of the Heidelberg-Rehovot town partnership, which has existed since 1983, the different cultures came together. After visiting the club in Israel from May 22 to 29, 2018, the Israeli youths came to Heidelberg. In various workshops the aim was to process and visualize the cultural exchange through theatrical and musical means. At the end of the exchange there was a public presentation of the material in the theater. In addition, various activities were organized in and around Heidelberg to bring the city and theater culture closer to the Israeli guests.

Feedback and national recognition

Overall, the number of theater-goers, at over 170,000, far exceeds Heidelberg's 146,000 population. With around 300 permanent employees and around 150 regular guests, the theater is one of the city's largest employers. How much the theater is valued by the population can be seen most clearly in the fact that, thanks to the generous sponsors and donors from Heidelberg, the renovation of the municipal theaters was possible.

Public tours of the theater and orchestra in Heidelberg offer all theater enthusiasts the opportunity to “take a look behind the scenes”.

The response from the audience is extremely large. The theater management was able to record an occupancy rate of well over 80% in the 2012/13 season alone. The new dance division achieved a success rate of over 98%. Nanine Linning, director and chief choreographer of the dance company Nanine Linning / Theater Heidelberg, was nominated for the most important German theater award “ Der Faust ” in the 2012/13 and 2013/14 seasons . In the 2013/014 season, Linning directed Philip Glass's opera echnaton for the first time in Heidelberg (premiere June 6, 2014). Soprano Sharleen Joynt was also nominated for “Der Faust” 2013 for her role “1. high soprano / Ariadne ”in the second production of Wolfgang Rihm's Dionysos , a production of the operatic division, which Heribert Germeshausen has been artistic director of since the 2011/12 season. Another nomination for “Der Faust” in 2014 was for Victor Bodó's production of King Ubu in the drama category. Thus, within two years, the Heidelberg theater makers succeeded in being nominated for the "Faust" with all categories (opera, dance, drama).

In the annual critics' survey of the journal The German stage the theater and orchestra Heidelberg received more nominations than any other city theaters in Germany - including five votes in the category "unusual compelling theatrical work off large theater centers." For the unusually convincing theater work “away from the centers” and in the “dance” category, there were new nominations for the second year in a row in 2014.

In the 2014 yearbook of opera world , the theater managed to get six mentions in the survey. Rumor in the director's category and Iphigenia auf Tauris in the rediscovery of the year category, Akhenaten in four categories: performance, stage design, costumes and singers. In addition, the new Heidelberg choir director Anna Töller was named in the “Choir” category at the Vorpommern Theater.

Similarly, the Heidelberg Dance Company in the category "company or collective of the Year" has in the yearbook dancing 2014 re-naming obtained. The Heidelberg Theater and Orchestra has been involved with the Freiburg Theater since 2008 in the important international networks “European Theater Convention” and “Opera Europa”.

In the 2015/16 season, the Heidelberg Theater and Orchestra received two nominations for the renowned theater prize “Der Faust”: for Kangmin Justin Kim for his role as Pym in the opera of the same name and for Markolf Naujoks and his direction of a meal in the Junge Theater Heidelberg.

Festivals

The Winter Baroque Festival takes place in Schwetzingen every year from December to February . From the 2011/12 season it was under the artistic direction of Heribert Germeshausen, and since the 2018/19 season under the artistic direction of Ulrike Schumann (opera director dramaturgy) and Thomas Böckstiegel (opera director casting). Since the 2011/12 season, winter in Schwetzingen has undergone an artistic reorientation. A special focus was on the excavations of masterpieces from the Opera Napoletana . Since this cycle ended with the premiere of La verità in cimento , the Baroque Festival will break new ground in the coming 2019/20 season.

The Tanzbiennale Heidelberg , a project of the TANZallianz (cooperation between the theater and orchestra Heidelberg and UnterwegsTheater) takes place every two years, for the first time from February 21 to March 2, 2014 in Heidelberg. It is a festival for contemporary dance, national and international guest performances and companies from all over Baden-Württemberg.

On ten days in spring, the Heidelberger Stückemarkt has been presenting the avant-garde of theater since 1984 : New plays are read and outstanding premieres from German-speaking countries are invited to guest performances. Well-known theaters such as the Deutsche Theater Berlin, the Münchner Kammerspiele or the Burgtheater Vienna are regular guests in Heidelberg. Social discourses are initiated and aesthetic tendencies of the theater landscape are reflected. The international highlight of the Heidelberger Stückemarkt is the annually changing host country. The host countries in recent years have been Greece, Finland, Mexico, Belgium, Ukraine and South Korea. How the theater has changed under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the management team of the Stückemarkt asks itself and invited Turkey to Heidelberg in 2019.

In February 2017, the theater and orchestra hosted the Ibero-American theater festival ¡Adelante! from, which showed twelve guest performances from Latin America and Spain as well as a German-Chilean co-production (world premiere). ¡Adelante! Threw across the Atlantic Ocean the view of a continent full of contradictions and potentials - and thus of a multitude of different theatrical landscapes, most of which, apart from Spain, are comparatively unknown in Europe: there were productions from Chile, Argentina, Uruguay to Brazil and Peru to Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba and Mexico as guests.

The Heidelberg Castle Festival attracts both Heidelberg residents and numerous tourists from all over the world every summer. Drama and music theater productions, concerts and programs for children and the whole family are offered - all of this against the picturesque backdrop of Heidelberg Castle .

The Heidelberg Theater and Orchestra also regularly organizes festivals for young audiences. At the Heidelberg Student Theater Days, students from Heidelberg and the surrounding area have the chance to stand on the theater stage and present their own productions. The Young Theater in Delta Festival is a cooperation between the Mannheim National Theater, the Theater im Pfalzbau Ludwigshafen and the Heidelberg Theater and Orchestra and takes place in the respective theaters under an annually changing motto. Heidelberg last hosted it in the 2016/17 season.

International cooperation

The Heidelberg Theater and Orchestra has been involved in the international networks European Theater Convention and Opera Europa since 2008 .

Since the 2013/14 season, the opera division of the Heidelberg Theater and Orchestra has been making guest appearances - including one in Winterthur, a collaboration designed over several seasons.

But the other branches of the theater are also traveling: The German-Chilean co-production of the Heidelberg Theater and Orchestra with the Colectivo Zoológico, Nimby , which was part of ¡Adelante! was a guest at the major international theater festival in South America, Santiago A Mil , from January 15 to 17, 2018 . For three weeks, productions and productions from all over the world were shown. On September 6th and 7th, 2018, the artists went to the Mirada Festival in São Paulo, Brazil.

The Good Man of Sezuan , a German-Hungarian co-production, staged by the Hungarian director Victor Bodó , was played on April 19 and 20, 2018 at the 38th Budapest Spring Festival (March 30 to April 22, 2018). In the József-Katona-Theater in Budapest, the Heidelberg actors and their Hungarian colleagues presented Bertolt Brecht's parable.

The Heidelberg production Beben was invited to the 43rd Mülheimer Theatertage 2018, where the author of the play Maria Milisavljevic was nominated for the Mülheim Dramatist Prize endowed with 15,000 euros. This was the first time that the Heidelberg Theater took part in the traditional plays competition in Mülheim an der Ruhr. In 2018 Beben went on a major tour through Mexico (September 17/18, 2018) and Cuba (September 21/22, 2018 at the Teatro Trianon).

The youth dance project "Trans Lucent" by Gary Joplin was invited as one of six productions to the "Dance Meeting of the Young" 2018 in Berlin. The festival took place for the fifth time in the capital from September 21 to 28, 2018.

The Heidelberg Theater and Orchestra lives internationality not only in the daily interaction of the various nationalities of its employees, but also in the concrete work through cooperation and festival invitations. In addition, the International Theater Institute (Center Germany) awarded its prize to the Hungarian director Victor Bodó in the Marguerre Hall of the Heidelberg Theater in 2018. Every year since 1985, the German ITI has honored personalities with outstanding performance and international charisma who are active in the German-speaking theater region.

management

Directors
General Music Directors

literature

  • Claudia Baer-Schneider: The “new old theater” in Heidelberg. New building and historical stock . In: Preservation of monuments in Baden-Württemberg , 42nd year 2013, issue 2, p. 123 f. ( PDF )
  • Oliver Fink: Theater on the castle. On the history of the Heidelberg Festival . Verlag Guderjahn, 1997, ISBN 3-924973-54-7 , 120 pages.
  • Thomas Schipperges: Music theater in Heidelberg. The years around 1830 to around 1930 . In Heidelberg. Yearbook for the history of the city vol. 6, ed. from the Heidelberger Geschichtsverein, Heidelberg 2001, pp. 37–60.

Web links

Commons : Theater und Orchester Heidelberg  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Iván Péréz is the new head of dance at Theater Heidelberg , die-deutsche-buehne.de, accessed January 25, 2020
  2. ^ Rüdiger Soldt: Heidelberg benefactor entrepreneur donates one million euros for refugees . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . September 14, 2015, ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed January 8, 2016]).
  3. ↑ PD_2012_05_Project budget increased to 59.8 million euros. In: heidelberg.de. Retrieved January 8, 2016 .
  4. ↑ Opening of the theater: A modest sign for the major sponsor. In: www.rnz.de. Retrieved January 8, 2016 .
  5. ↑ PD_2012_11_23_19 million euros in donations for theater. In: heidelberg.de. Retrieved January 8, 2016 .

Coordinates: 49 ° 24 '38 "  N , 8 ° 42' 12.9"  E