Weimar is a pocket-sized cultural hub

An interview with Rolf C. Hemke – Director of the Kunstfest Weimar

The Kunstfest Weimar arts festival is one of the town’s cultural highlights during the summer months. Internationally acclaimed artists join Weimar’s young, creative scene to transform its streets into a vibrant and inspiring stage. In this interview, the festival’s artistic director, Rolf C. Hemke, provides a fascinating look behind the scenes and also reveals which famous person from the past he would like to have coffee with.

Rolf C. Hemke, born in Cologne in 1972, is the artistic director of the Kunstfest Weimar arts festival. He studied law, German studies and philosophy, and has previously worked as a festival director and curator, as a theatre script editor and assistant director, and as a cultural journalist.

Mr Hemke, when the Kunstfest Weimar was founded back in 1990 it initially focused on notable Weimar residents such as Schiller and Bach. Over the years, and not least under your guidance as artistic director, it has taken a new direction. What is the concept behind it and what are you hoping to achieve?

The new direction I have chosen since 2019 takes us back to the roots of the festival’s name, but it also incorporates aspects of various of my predecessors’ ideas. We want to reflect the diversity of contemporary artistic endeavour across all disciplines, in particular through premieres by major artists.

The festival programme includes guest performances by regional and national theatre and dance ensembles, as well as various concert formats, literature, film, visual arts and art in public spaces. The festival has clearly embraced all forms of creative expression. What makes good art in your opinion?

Whether art is good or not lies in the eyes of the beholder. An audience of a hundred people will have a hundred different opinions. And I am only one of them, though I’m in the lucky position of being able to curate my own programme. Because of the number of premieres we host, many of which are the first time a show will have been performed anywhere in the world, we experience as many surprises year after year as our visitors do. That is why it is so important to follow artists, to discuss concepts and to have faith. These are long-term decisions, which is why some artists return to the festival again and again. Not every year, but at regular intervals and the viewers have learned to love them.

Trust and freedom go hand in hand here, because this freedom requires trust. Thuringia is putting the theme of “freedom” in the spotlight for tourism in 2025. What does this mean for the art festival? What aspects of freedom does the program address? How is the theme reflected in your selection of genres and in the individual artistic contributions?

Our program will tell us a lot about the concept of freedom and the dangers to which our liberal social order is exposed. As last year, our patron will be the exiled Russian opposition activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Irina Scherbakowa, who experienced great lack of freedom in her home country before emigrating. We will once again be presenting the dance and performance scene in Taiwan - a country whose existence and freedom is under constant threat from its large neighbor China - with an anticipated five projects. We will also be participating in the Weimar Faust Year 2025 with a number of projects - a figure who addresses human freedom in a very visionary way and also the dark side of the abuse of freedom.

Weimar was home to famous names such as Goethe, Schiller and Bach. The town remains a hub for arts, culture and theatre to this day, and it is the main protagonist and recurring theme of the Kunstfest Weimar. To what extent does the town’s history shape the festival programme?

You cannot plan a festival in Weimar without involving the town itself, without its spirit, without the notable personalities who have left their mark here, and without the townscape as a backdrop. Weimar is a one-off, a pocket-sized cultural hub. But there is more to it than just the splendour and the glory – there is also the dark shadow of German history, of which the Buchenwald memorial site is a permanent reminder. Consequently, the range of topics one is able to work with or use as inspiration is very broad.

Weimar celebrates Goethe's masterpiece “Faust” in 2025. How do you use your artistic freedom to stage “Faust”? Are current social discourses on freedom or the question of the limits of art taken into account when interpreting the freedom in “Faust”?

We will open the festival with a major “Faust II” paraphrase and close it with an equally free “Faust I” adaptation on the last weekend. Both projects will be directed by internationally renowned South African directors and will offer a kind of post-colonial questioning of Faust in a broader sense. There will also be the world premiere of a comedy on the subject of the reception of Faust and the school of the great Freiburg playwright Theresia Walser. We will also be devoting ourselves to quirky moments in the history of reception, such as Friedrich Theodor Vischer's “Faust III”, and offering concerts with “Faust” references... Let us surprise you!

In your career, you have probably met many artists you hold in high regard. Which artist from the past would you invite for a coffee, and why?

In my role, I have indeed been lucky enough to have coffee with some of the artists I hold in high regard. I have taken advantage of this time and again, and it just so happens that some of them also work for the arts festival. Looking back through history, there are a few writers I would have loved to have a conversation with, Thomas Bernhard being one of them. But an enigmatic figure such as William Shakespeare would also have great appeal for me.

Goethe's Faust

2025 - The anniversary year in Weimar

Faust in the theatre, Faust in the museum, Faust on the streets - Weimar is celebrating his main work everywhere 250 years after Goethe's arrival and invites you to approach the classic material in a new way, to recognise much of it and perhaps even to forget your own school Faust trauma - which is supposed to exist.

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Header picture: “Sounding Light” by the Cloud Gate Theatre of Taiwan - world premiere with the world-famous dance company at Festival 2024, ©Thomas Müller