Julian Sartorius walked from Basel to Geneva, drumming on more or less everything he could find along the way, from petrol pumps to fences to rotten tree trunks. To open the percussion marathon, he explores the PACT Zollverein with his sticks, finding all kinds of surprising sounds.

With the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion by Béla Bartók, premiered in 1938, we can hear one of the first classical compositions to feature percussion as a solo instrument. With the percussionists Dirk Rothbrust and Brian Archinal and the pianists Virginie Déjos and Matthieu Cognet.

Main Stage

The writer and artist Thomas Rother has dedicated his work over decades to Zollverein’s past. It consists of archaic sound sculptures, which Peter Eisold will play in the garden of PACT Zollverein.

Dirk Rothbrust and Brian Archinal, two contemporary percussion virtuosos will perform three unique, pioneering works of the percussion repertoire that have since become classics: Karlheinz Stockhausen’s composition Zyklus No. 9, written in 1959, Morton Feldman’s The King of Denmark from 1964 and Psapha by Iannis Xenakis from the year 1975.

Main Stage

Etienne Nillesen understands how to coax complex and subtle sounds out of one little drum. With a minimalist approach and an extended playing technique, he pushes back the limits of natural acoustics.

Studio 2

A performance that moves along the border between minimalism, groove and spectral sounds: Julian Sartorius will prepare the instruments of Ensemble This | Ensemble That with a wide range of everyday objects. The result is a journey through a flood of sounds and tone colours.

Studio 3         

The Iranian musician Mohammad Reza Mortazavi is one of the world’s most skilful hand drummers. Using his own personal technique on the traditional Persian instruments the tombak and daf, he is able to magic up a breath-taking texture of danceable rhythms, fast beats and trance-like structures.

Main Stage

Every »accident« suggests an idea. Camille Emaille uses tin cans, guitar strings, stones and other objects to prepare her drum kit, developing a self-modulated collection of instruments full of unexpected sounds.

Studio 2

The writer and artist Thomas Rother has dedicated his work over decades to Zollverein’s past. It consists of archaic sound sculptures, which Peter Eisold will play in the garden of PACT Zollverein.

The Danish musician and composer Marilyn Mazur is an icon of jazz percussion. During her impressive career, she has established herself as a masterful percussionist and musical visionary. Her concerts and recordings with the trumpet god Miles Davis remain unforgotten to this day. She makes a guest appearance at the Ruhrtriennale with an extensive solo. 

Main Stage

A trio made up of Camille Emaille, Gabriel Valtchev and Pol Small. Each of them plays a tapan, a double-headed cylindrical drum from Bulgaria. OTTO is a music with a minimalist vocabulary, but whose energy is all the more intense: with complex polyrhythms, variations on tone colours, rhythms and timbres.

Studio 3

The Ivorian musician Aly Keïta is a master of the balafon. Together with the Cameroon-born Swiss percussionist Lucas Niggli, Keïta blends the traditional African repertoire with Western jazz and improvisation in a »brotherhood of vibes and grooves«.

Main Stage

Etienne Nillesen understands how to coax complex and subtle sounds out of one little drum. With a minimalist approach and an extended playing technique, he pushes back the limits of natural acoustics.

Studio 2

With his powerful and complex playing, the US-Panamanian drummer has had an almost unparalleled influence on the development of the jazz and fusion scene for half a century. He created jazz rock history with his first solo record Spectrum and over the course of his career has worked with greats such as George Duke, Michael Brecker and Peter Gabriel. Now this drum legend is a guest of the Ruhrtriennale.

Main Stage

As a response to the concert ban during the coronavirus pandemic, the Austrian composer and Siemens Music Prize-winner Olga Neuwirth, whose opera Bählamms Fest was presented at Ruhrtriennale 2021, created coronAtion, an immersive, hypnotic spatial music of several hours’ duration. As a late-night finale to the percussion marathon, Lucas Niggli will play sections from Part Four of the cycle in the foyer.

Foyer