version ofby Torsten Krug after Wilhelm Busch

Premiere: Folk drama Ötigheim, July 2021

An angel machine

by Torsten Krug



Premiere: the Wuppertal stock exchange, January 2021

For almost two decades, from 1850 to 1869, Friedrich Engels lived a life full of contradictions in Manchester. "Cotton Lord" by day, revolutionary socialist by night, he becomes a co-founder of a doctrine that contradicts his own class interests. In order to advance the communist cause, he supports Marx with regular alimony payments and supports him as a correspondent with research and expertise from capitalist practice when writing. For family and business partners he has to keep up the facade of the propertied citizen. As a bourgeois and capitalist with a representative apartment, he takes part in fox hunting; privately he maintains a secret second home as a lover of the Irish workers Mary and Lizzie Burns.

The Engelsmaschine makes the parallel worlds and their transformations the theme - as well as the "first class contradiction that occurs in history": "the antagonism of man and woman". A woman of today dives into the world of thoughts of Friedrich Engels, who has a lot to tell about our modern world. Surrounded by technology and cameras, Engels goes on the air, with all the contradictions.

Freely adapted from Homer

version by Torsten Krug,

Translation: Johann Heinrich Voss

Premiere: Wuppertaler Bühnen, January 2017

After ten grueling years of war, Odysseus sets out on his journey home – and is on the road for another ten years. The term "Odyssey" has become synonymous with a long odyssey, and Odysseus has become the epitome of the searching person.

A vision of peace is hidden in this primal myth of Western culture: the image of the garden, of agriculture - of the man who exchanges the oar for a spade...

by Torsten Krug

Premiere: Theater Chemnitz, October 2005

The jazz revolution started in Wuppertal - and continues

June 28, 2023

And another one left, it was about time. Apparently Peter Brötzmann died peacefully in his bed on Luisenstrasse in Wuppertal on the stormiest day of the year so far. It had been foreseeable for months, and yet it is always too early when it comes as a painful surprise.

For me, Peter Brötzmann is one of a number of people I was only allowed to meet when they were old. As part of the preparations for his eightieth birthday - still in the pandemic - we got to know and appreciate each other after I had seen him on stage a few times before. At the end of August 2021 Insel eV was able to host the three-day festival "BRÖtz 80!" in Ada, which celebrated the outstanding position of this exceptional artist. In Wuppertal it was the first major event after the lockdown. The musicians and – amazing for me at the time – the audience came from literally all over the world: people came from Poland, France, Scotland, Italy and the USA to experience these three days in our jazz city. It was an overwhelming success, almost his "famous last words" in hindsight.

I've been dancing like this for a thousand years

Culture needs participation

May 24, 2023

Last weekend I was once again very much in love with our "crumbling tooth city". On Friday, “die börse” invited companions from the last fifty years to their birthday party. Moving, Lukas Hegemann paid tribute to the "giants" on whose shoulders he stood, meaning people like Dieter Fränzel, who was able to open the evening and welcome fellow campaigners from the very beginning. But our gaze was quickly drawn to the future: in a relaxed world café, we listened to the stories of different people in several rounds, always ending with the question: What do we wish for the stock exchange for the next 50 years? That evening I realized again how much this place still lives from the participation of the city society: theater with senior citizens, writing workshops, political education - all this often takes place under the radar of the general public and yet forms the core of the commitment to this day at the cloud castle. In addition: As a large, established communication center with a thoroughly commercial program, the börse has long had the company form of a GmbH, but it is also backed by a non-profit association whose young, diverse board of directors we were able to get to know that evening and in which people from our city meet can and should contribute. Bringing this aspect back to the fore would be good for the old luxury steamer. Congratulations!

How music can connect us

April 19, 2023

Last Friday we used concert tickets that had been bought years before: Steve Hackett plus band plus symphony orchestra plus choir played three long-awaited concerts in the Stadthalle after, according to Mr. Hackett, “the little thing called the pandemic" had to be postponed further and further.

Exquisite worlds

March 15, 2023

Galeria Kaufhof in Elberfeld will close in January next year. The hospitals in Germany are in an existentially bad situation. Only two messages of many, alone in the last few days, which fit into the sober narrative of capitalism. Today's department store is online. Today's hospital has degenerated into a commercial operation (just imagine that the fire brigade or the police had to make a profit and chose the processing of emergency calls based on their profitability).

Of passing on the flame

February 08, 2023

In my first column in the still fresh year, I wrote about the dialogue between the generations and asked myself: What remains? Today I'm getting nostalgic again and I want to share my amazement at how similar the pictures are:

Rainer Widmann recently brought us a copy of the “Wuppertaler Stadtbuch 86/87”. The elders will know. My wife and I – who only moved here twenty years later – didn't know it. The panorama of the buzzwords gathered there, backed up with articles and vast amounts of information, ranges from “environment”, “living”, “learning” to “culture”, “media”, “economy” to “old people”, “women” (eighteen Pages), "Men" (a blank page), "Peace" and "Sects and Sects". Atmospheric black-and-white photographs complement the typewritten book published by Sisyphos Verlag, with a drawing by Eugen Egner emblazoned on the cover. It is a journey through time into the history of the city of Wuppertal.

What remains?

About the dialogue between the generations and between the years

January 04, 2023

In the Upper Austrian town of Hallstatt, inside the oldest known salt mine in the world, an analogue archive for mankind has been in existence for around ten years. Analogue because it's supposed to last for thousands of years, and all our digital stuff, which pretends to be immortal, will have decayed in just a few generations. Vint Cerf, Vice President of Google and one of the people who helped shape what computer scientists call the "digital dark age," is convinced that in the next century, no modern digital artefact will be legible. Many data carriers have a short lifespan or become unusable if there is no technology to read them.

Culture strengthens democratic coexistence

November 30, 2022

I was recently at the ARD radio play days in Karlsruhe, a three-day festival just for radio plays. Unfortunately, listening to the nominated plays for the German Radio Play Prize together with the subsequent jury discussion, which I was always happy to attend, was removed from the program – probably due to the lack of money. You can only do that online now. This was originally triggered by the measures to combat the corona pandemic, i.e. contact restrictions. Now it was just left at that. Oh well.

Art gives truth a chance

October 26, 2022

Last weekend I went to the opera twice: the premiere of Luigi Nono's “Intolleranza” on Saturday and “The Merry Widow” on Sunday – it couldn't be more contrasting. Both were successful evenings. "Intolleranza" reminded me of the heydays of the Stuttgart Opera, which took this difficult-to-perform piece into its program and led to meaningful performances. The Sunday visit was a birthday present for my father, who is by no means a declared fan of operettas, but we all enjoyed this performance, which set the events in the staid, seemingly libertarian world of the 1970s, in which the transported gender images were just barely like to go through with it.

A city of diverse perspectives

September 21, 2022

Where there is a Wuppertal, there are also hills. Otherwise there would be no valley. In our city, things go up and down, haywire – if you are on foot or otherwise using your physical strength, you can sing a song about it. The nice thing about it is: through the ups and downs, the many winding paths, stairs and crests, this city constantly opens up new perspectives on life. So if the city marketing were to look for a new slogan for Wuppertal, my suggestion would be: Wuppertal – City of Perspectives.

In search of meaning

August 17, 2022

For a good year now, the actress Silvia Munzón López and I have been developing and rehearsing a play with the inclusive theater group “Bamboo”, which is scheduled to premiere on September 29th at the Färberei. I consciously write "shall", although I believe that this performance will take place. Because this year's theater work was as mixed as the overall situation: rehearsals were repeatedly canceled for a long time, our players were insecure, got sick, dropped out, came back. For some of the group, who were used to rehearsing only in the summer months, it was too dark for a while: they didn't come to the rehearsal when it got dark. In the end, a small committed bunch remained - and the good news is that their possibilities have grown enormously: players who used to be more in the second row are now thriving and asserting themselves; for the first time we work more with written text, also with film. Nevertheless, we still rely on the inimitable improvisational talent of this group.

The Tales of Wuppertal

June 09, 2022

Recently at the climate talks in the once beautiful theater, one participant said, with regard to Wuppertal, that this city does not have its own story. My colleague Tine Lowisch took up this thread in her column and continued it in the sense of: This city has many stories, is diverse, and that is exactly what makes it so charming and – yes – so rich. Perhaps that sentence also meant: "This city doesn't know what it has".

Pick the day, pick the art

May 04, 2022

If it is successful, art is a confrontation with the moment, with the sheer event that something is. A sound, a voice, a tone, a text, a color, a line - in the best case, they lead us into a more intense now, often together with others. This event can also evoke other moments in life, but in art people try to create it - to put it into action - so that it happens again and again, for other people.

We are many

Can spring come?

About cultural funding and Corona aid

February 23, 2022

Do you feel the same way? For days I've been trawling through the programs of various cultural venues in the valley and noting possible events on the calendar. I got as far as April. My thirst for culture is great, and the hope of being able to take part in performances, readings or concerts “like before” is growing. There is a wide range on offer: in addition to the regularly planned events, all those that have been (again) postponed in recent months come. In addition, there are increasing signals from cultural policy that Corona support for artists and cultural venues will be extended. The coming spring seems to offer a cornucopia of opportunities for culture in every respect.

We narrate monkeys

January 19, 2022

The story goes like this: Hemingway sat down with some friends and bet them that he could tell a story in just six words. Everyone puts their ten dollar bets on the table and Hemingway writes on a napkin: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

What is missing if culture is not allowed to connect us

December 15, 2021

Before writing this column, I checked: it's already the fourth one in December! Since January 2018, the Westdeutsche Zeitung has given this stage to members of ")) frei netz werk )) KULTUR" every week. Freedom for the personal thoughts of individual cultural workers, for observations that otherwise remained under the reporting radar.

Are we ready for something new?

About sustainability in culture

November 10, 2021

For a few weeks now, my wife and I have been cultivating a ritual that we've only given space to on vacation: we start each day by drinking a pot of coffee together in bed and talking about whatever comes to our minds during the night . We enjoy this half hour as a gift – small islands of reflection or also for silliness. Sometimes they make me feel like I can slow down time.

have we lost each other

October 06, 2021

This column is actually about the so-called free cultural scene. Currently, the Wuppertal Opera is also a little part of it. Last Sunday she opened her season with the Handel opera Julius Caesar. When we were welcomed in the painter's hall on the premises of the Riedel company, I heard the artistic director Berthold Schneider express the special emotionality of this event: Since October 2020, the singers have not been able to come into direct contact with their audience! After the turmoil of the ever-extended closures due to the corona protection measures, it was “land under” for the opera in the summer, and so the ensemble makes do with alternative quarters, unfortunately also outside of Wuppertal.

Our common breath

September 01, 2021

It's a crazy time. The summer of relief seems to be over, for those who have been vaccinated and those who have recovered it should be followed by an autumn of normality, without masks, distance and fuss. The unvaccinated, on the other hand, are threatened with a lockdown that is not just symbolic: they should stay at home – or be vaccinated. Because the pandemic continues almost entirely among them. They become infected faster and faster and also cause the numbers in the intensive care units to rise again.

Don't worry, nothing stays the same

August 04, 2021

Today I can see the Wupper valley from a high vantage point. A hiking holiday in the mountains of Styria transports you away from cultural life at home. The view into the vastness lets some worries fall into place or even vanish into thin air.

However, I can't let go of one question: How will we be able to create art and culture in the near future and how important will we be to it?

The visit of the old lady in Wuppertal

June 23, 2021

Summer is here and it's hard to believe. For months we have been looking forward to the end of that lockdown light - soon the whole pandemic will seem like a fleeting ghost. But like a good horror movie, he comes back just before the credits roll, and we all know it's not over. Quite apart from the misery that will now befall the poorer regions of the world. Because the pandemic has also clearly highlighted this again: the gap between rich and poor.

We renovate and count the days

What does a closed cultural venue do?

May 19, 2021

Today I am not writing as a solo freelancer in my guild, but as a team member of a cultural association, Insel eV What does such an association do, what does a cultural venue like Café Ada do after six and a half months of “lockdown light”, in which no public and almost no internal meeting was and is possible?

The pandemic drives processes forward

April 14, 2021

A singer recently told me about a rehearsal where a tenor was quite indisposed. He then admitted that in the times of Corona he hardly sang, let alone practiced. Recently I read in this newspaper about a streamed concert, the baritone didn't have an easy pitch, so I had to think about it again, even if it maybe had nothing to do with it. From my own experience I can say: For months I hardly managed to motivate myself to practice or study new repertoire. As artists, too, we work towards a goal, again and again. If this goal is lost, a crucial moment is missing. Female singers rehearse an opera, which is then put on hold and suddenly weeks later is to be performed in a field test in front of a tested audience. So get everything back up!

Comfortably Numb?

Torsten Krug on the longing for resonance

March 17, 2021

There was a technical innovation at the last New Year's concert of the Vienna Philharmonic: 7,000 people from all over the world had previously been able to register in order to applaud at the end of the concert via mobile phone. It must have been a spooky moment when the conductor Ricardo Muti and the orchestra heard this virtual applause in the empty Golden Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna. Muti commented that Strauss's “Fast Polka” was “like a fast train pulling into a station. You expect someone to be there waiting for you and reacting”.