There could have been something like the North Rhine-Westphalian "Everyman," the annual Salzburg festival ritual in the cathedral square about the death of the rich man. When Gerard Mortier founded the Ruhrtriennale, Johan Simons was there from the beginning. The Flemish man from Ghent and the Dutch man from Gelderland already knew each other well.
Mortier provided him with the material that would become one of the most beautiful Triennale productions in 2003 to this day: “Sentimenti” based on Ralf Rothmann's novel "Milch und Kohle" about the Ruhr area and youth, musically accompanied by arias from Verdi's operas. Simons directed the creation with Jeroen Willems and his Europe-wide acclaimed group ZT Hollandia. The playing field in the Jahrhunderthalle Bochum was laid out with briquettes. But here, no working-class milieu was realistically unrolled; rather, the space was set for transcendence, suffused with an emotional current. Unlike especially younger colleagues, Simons has no reservations about an emotion on stage.
Johan Simons has since become a well-known figure in North Rhine-Westphalia; he has directed several productions for the Ruhr Triennale, in 2007 he presented Calderón's "Life is a Dream" in the Halle Zweckel, then took over the artistic direction in 2015 and – after a southern German intermezzo at the Munich Kammerspiele – took over the directorship at the Schauspielhaus Bochum in 2018/19.
Born in 1946, Simons was one of the first to seek out alternative venues in the early eighties and introduced different spaces and formats to the stage, initially with his "Wespetheater", later with the ensemble "ZT Hollandia", for which he created more than 40 productions over one and a half decades and which received the European Prize for Innovation in Theater in 2000, among others. Later, he led the NT Gent. He has directed simultaneously in Zurich, Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, and Paris. As a director, he has been invited multiple times to the Berliner Theatertreffen, most recently with Elfriede Jelinek's "The Street. The City. The Attack" from Munich and during his time in Bochum with "Hamlet", performed by Sandra Hüller. Besides others, Hüller is also his Kleist "Penthesilea" in a body duet with Jens Harzer, and in turn, Harzer is Simons' acclaimed "Ivanov" in Bochum.
Simons has always advocated for open projects, but he also engages with Shakespeare, Chekhov, Büchner, Genet, and Houellebecq, whose plays he partly shifts radically in perspective. A man of spoken theater, but not in the classical sense of proscenium theater or even just traditional drama. For him, "international, European theater is a model in transformation, an experimental chamber," he said in a speech in Vienna.
Early on, he worked with drummer Paul Koek as co-director and musical director. At that time, the mandate was to bring theater to the people. This was the case in Holland, where "theater has no effect whatsoever," as a critic of an Amsterdam newspaper harshly judged. Groups traveled like a nomadic people through the lands, performing in a circus tent – as part of the model of regional theater and so-called workers' theater. Often, Simons' company featured German playwrights of the time: Achternbusch, Valentin, Dorst, Kroetz Laederach, and also Büchner – plays from below, folk plays, milieu studies.
Realities need little justification. A mound of earth, a hall that does not need to be upgraded like the century hall. A simple playing area, stages, a rugged fire wall, or a car graveyard and chicken house, like at Hollandia, is enough. In this respect, the production of Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Accattone" for the Ruhr Triennale 2015 in an inhospitable hall at the Lohberg mine in Dinslaken was the work closest to the spirit of Hollandia.
In the stable, hefty man, who is not coarse at all – a glance into his eyes is enough to recognize this – a sensitive character becomes perceptible behind the heavy physiognomy. As a young person, he thought about becoming a pastor and missionary in Africa. When he became a skeptic of faith, he chose art, began at the Rotterdam Dance Academy, and continued his studies at the Theater Academy in Maastricht.
He moves as if his body is concentrating and tensing at a point of rest. Deeply rooted in his homeland by the dyke with the wide horizon. "For my eyes, this landscape is the best. The emptiness is important to me." It is not an emptiness of lack, but of fulfillment. Simons' father was a baker – and used to gamble on horse racing. Later, the son directed Dostoevsky's novel "The Gambler" in Berlin at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz under Frank Castorf. It is always a veiled autobiography.
