The idea that cultural investment can revitalise decaying city centres is an orthodoxy of the new Europe. Think of Glasgow's makeover during its 1990 reign as European city of culture, or the effect of the Guggenheim on Bilbao's fortunes.
The ambitions of Germany's RuhrTriennale are even bigger. The aim of the festival is to breathe new life into the entire area of the Ruhr valley, and it takes place in more than a dozen venues in ten different towns stretching from Duisburg in the west to Dortmund in the east. Once the industrial powerhouse of Germany, the Ruhr is now a vast open-air museum to a vanished age, its landscape littered with disused coal-mines and factories. And it is these very buildings which are providing the focus for the new festival, now in its second year.
Its director, Gerard Mortier, has the estimable ambition to bring culture off its bourgeois pedestal and bring it back into living relationship with the people. That aim got him into trouble when he was artistic director of that most haut-bourgeois of artistic events, the Salzburg festival, where his disrespectful productions of Cos? Fan Tutte and Jenufa caused outrage among its patrons. He gave up, predicting that Salzburg would soon revert to its usual diet of Mozart and Puccini, and took on the job of directing the triennale (the festival actually takes place every year, and is "triennial" only in the sense that the artistic director has a three-year tenure).
What he has created for its second year is a six-month programme of installations, opera, theatre and music which is just as uncompromisingly high minded as his Salzburg programme. There are no pop or world music events, no big-name tenors in open-air stadia. In fact, some of the events seem low key; the Duisburg and Bochum Philharmonics, hardly stars among orchestras, are mainstays of the operatic part of the festival. So you might wonder why it needs such a lavish budget: e41m (?29m) over the three years of Mortier's reign, of which e8m has come from the EU, and most of the rest from the government of North-Rhine Westphalia.
Mortier believes in high art only when reinterpreted for the times and rooted in its locale. Here, this means creating productions and installations tailored to the extraordinary venues he has available. Take the magnificent gasometer in Oberhausen. It has become a vast circular exhibition area, which for the six months of the festival will host Bill Viola's biggest ever video installation, Five Angels for the Millennium. Designing a new installation to fit a venue is one thing; adapting an existing work like an opera to fit a disused power station is a tougher proposition. Mortier believes such venues serve well for a "theatre of ideas"-works such as Faust, Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute, Saint Fran?ois-but not for "bourgeois drama" like La Traviata or Tristan. But surely it's perfect for Wagner? Not so, says Mortier: "To see the Ring performed in front of a disused blast furnace to me seems as embarrassing as performing Aida in front of a real Egyptian pyramid."
The biggest of these industrial cathedrals is the Jahrhunderthalle in Bochum, a gas power station converted into three flexible performing spaces. This has been the venue for Patrice Ch?reau's new production of Ph?dre and Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal. Still to come are Begehren (Desire), a new opera by the Austrian composer Beat Furrer with sets by Zaha Hadid (17th, 19th, 21th September), a new coproduction by Teatro Real Madrid of Mozart's Magic Flute realised by that visionary theatre company La Fura dels Baus (7th September to 5th October) and the Peter Sellars production of Messiaen's Saint Fran?ois d'Assise with Jos? van Dam (13th-27th September). At the old blast furnace (Gebl??sehalle) in Duisburg-Nord a new opera with a libretto by Roddy Doyle will run from 6th-12th September. Mortier believes that by honouring the buildings of the Ruhr, he is overcoming a fear of the arts in the people who live amid the ruins of industry.
For the RuhrTriennale programme see the website or call 00 49 700 2002 3456
