Impulse Festival

For 35 years, the NRW KULTURsekretariat's IMPULSE has been the most important festival for independent theatre in German-speaking countries and the platform for the independent performance, theatre and dance scene in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (DACH region).

The IMPULSE has often reinvented itself, reacting to current developments in the independent performing arts. What remains constant: The festival presents outstanding, noteworthy productions from the DACH region over the course of a year, thereby giving visibility to the work of the independent scene. It invites a broad audience to encounter innovative and transdisciplinary working methods and aesthetics in performance, theatre and dance.

In 2025, dramaturge and curator Franziska Werner took over as festival director. With its first festival edition, IMPULSE has undergone a restructuring of the programme architecture: while the local partnerships with Ringlokschuppen Ruhr, studiobühneköln and FFT Düsseldorf will remain in place, the showcase productions will no longer be presented alternately in just one city each year. Instead, between 18 June and 6 July 2025, each of the three IMPULSE cities of Mülheim an der Ruhr, Cologne and Düsseldorf will host a programme of productions selected by a seven-member jury on a weekly basis. In addition to the showcase works, Franziska Werner has focussed her first festival edition on the exchange between East and West and created meeting spaces between the independent scenes and artists in the host region of North Rhine-Westphalia and East Germany.

As usual, the Impulse Theatre Festival 2025 was organised and supported by NRWKS, together with the cities of Mülheim an der Ruhr, Cologne and Düsseldorf, in cooperation with Ringlokschuppen Ruhr, studiobühneköln and FFT Düsseldorf. The festival was significantly supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Kunststiftung NRW and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

In 2026, the city of Bochum will also return to the Impulse Festival city community after a lengthy interruption from 2015 to 2025.