Impulse Festival 2027

Since 1990, the Impulse Festival for Theater, Performance and Dance has been the central platform for the independent performing arts in the German-speaking world and takes place in four cities in North Rhine-Westphalia (Düsseldorf, Cologne, Bochum, Mülheim an der Ruhr). The showcase presents outstanding, innovative and transdiciplinary productions from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland of the past year, selected by a jury consisting of five external experts, artistic director Franziska Werner, and festival curator Alina Buchberger. The festival has reinvented itself several times, keeping pace with developments in the independent performing arts. Its purpose remains the same: to give greater visibility to works from the independent scene, as well as to bring international aesthetic developments in the performing arts and political discourses into dialogue with the local scene and a broad audience in the various festival cities.

Since 2025, the festival holds an additional curated program strand called “Post-West”, built to be a forum for artistic and discursive engagement with processes of social transformation, political upheavals, and possible visions of the future, ranging from intra-German East-West relations to international perspectives. The starting point for „Post-West“ is the diverse range of experiences of social transformation since 1989 in Germany. The 2025 edition of “Post-West” focused on inter-German relations between East and West, while the 2026 edition expanded its focus to Eastern European perspectives. In the 2027 festival, we are broadening the perspective once again and bringing global perspectives into dialogue with one another and regional voices. 

The discussions and artistic works from the 2026 edition raised many questions that we would like to address in 2027 and which can only be answered globally: What happens when the political and social promises upon which “Western democracies” have been based lose their effectiveness? How can we imagine and shape the future in an era marked by the climate crisis, wars, social polarization, and the global rise of authoritarian movements? How do the consequences of these crises affect all of our daily lives in very different ways? “Post-West” is aiming to shift perspectives: the future is no longer universalized from the standpoint of so-called Western democracies. Diverse experiences of colonialism, migration, systemic changes, environmental disaster and economic exploitation and inequality are not only interconnected as equally valid bodies of knowledge: we need to learn from this knowledge in order to transform sociatey towards a more equal future. Because the crisis of Western values and promises for the future cannot be resolved solely by defending them. What is needed instead are new, solidarity-based visions that offer alternatives to colonial hierarchies and capitalist exclusion and that draw on diverse local and global experiences. Art opens up a space in which alternative forms of coexistence are not only discussed but also experienced physically, spatially, and communally.