Opening Speech by Ursula KrechelLast year, she was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize, Germany’s most prestigious literary award, for her extensive body of work: Ursula Krechel. Her debut was published more than fifty years ago and she has published over 30 books. She is perhaps best known for her trilogy “Shanghai fern von wo” (2008), “Landgericht” (2012, won the German Book Prize), and “Geisterbahn” (2018). In these painstakingly researched books, she recounts with great formal and historical density the expulsion and persecution of German Jews and Sinti and their return to a Germany in which exile causes experiences of alienation and non-belonging. Her most recent publication is the highly acclaimed novel “Sehr geehrte Frau Ministerin” (Dear Madam Minister): radically contemporary literature about the abysmal relationships between sons and their mothers that focuses on political violence and women in existential danger. Her much-noticed essay “Vom Herzasthma des Exils” (On the Heart Asthma of Exile) tackles the defining characteristics of our breathless present: flight, migration, and exile. Her oeuvre delves deep into political cultural history that inevitably reveals the contradictions of our time. Following in the footsteps of Judith Schalansky, Clemens Meyer, Enis Maci, Sharon Dodua Otoo, Anne Weber, Esther Kinsky, and Cécile Wajsbrot, Ursula Krechel will deliver the opening speech at Ruhrfestspiele this year.afterwards:HUANG YI & KUKAConcept and choreography: Huang YiHuang Yi Studio+Taiwanese dancer, choreographer, and inventor Huang Yi invites an industrial robot to dance. What initially appears to be an experiment unfolds into a milestone in the connection between dance and robotics, theater and new technology. Huang Yi has spent more than a decade researching this work: he programmed the KUKA industrial robot arm for thousands of hours until the quality of movement, precision, and reaction speed were so finely tuned that a poetic dialogue between man and machine became possible.