Two iconic artists of our times talk about their friendship, past collaborations and the upcoming premiere of their new joint creation I Want Absolute Beauty. Poet and singer-songwriter PJ Harvey and new Intendant of Ruhrtriennale Ivo Van Hove in conversation.

PJ HARVEY: I Want Absolute Beauty. Let us start with the title. How did you choose it?

IVO VAN HOVE: It comes from one of your interviews. I found it such a beautiful thing because it gives hope and future. Through all your songs shines always some kind of future, even when things are messy or if we have to fight for things that we desire. It's never disastrous. There is still a surge for beauty.

PJH: That's lovely to hear, Ivo. What both of us strive for is to make something of beauty. And by that, I mean something that touches and moves people, something that's pure. It always comes back to beauty and to love. This is the force that drives me to find that essential part of why we're here and what we can make of the time that we have here.

IVH: I know your work very well but I listened to all your albums again. I picked songs that I have immediate connection with. And through this process a story, a kind of storyline, evolved. I jumped between your albums. And sometimes, without me being aware of it, I organised the songs in the exactly same order as you intended. I selected 28 songs from various albums of yours and one poem for I Want Absolute Beauty. It’s still going on and we will continue during the rehearsals in Bochum. Through this exploration it became clear to me what your songs are about. Men are very central. But there is also you centrally there as different sub-characters.

PJH: As a writer I'm quite used to projecting into another character in order to explore some emotion or some journey. So I cast characters in my head and then move into them to become them. They might be male as well as female or they may be animals. It's leaping with the imagination into different conditions and different bodies so that you can explore the world in different ways. It's very freeing. I'm interested how much you chose the songs based on knowing rough outline of the narrative you were following already?

IVH: Usually I'm very rational but in this case I let it go and I follow my instinct and impulses.

PJH: I really believe in things like that when different paths come together at the right time. It feels like I Want Absolute Beauty was meant to happen because again, when you were in London for a short time, I happened to be there too and the dance collective (LA)HORDE who is now part of this production were performing at the Southbank Centre. So we saw them together. Just chances like that that suddenly happened.

IVH: The same goes to casting Sandra Hüller for the main part. The lucky thing was that I knew her already. We worked together on a play some 10 years ago in Munich. I knew that she could sing because she had been singing with somebody who made sound designs when I worked in Germany. So I knew she could sing. You were very specific about the type of voice that you envisaged singing your songs. And you were immediately convinced when I suggested Sandra.

PJH: Sandra is a force. And there's something extremely charismatic and forceful and very emotionally moving about whatever she seems to apply herself to. So I just knew that she would make the songs her own in the character she is on that stage at that time in a way that would be utterly convincing. And I think that is what was needed. I think often technically trained singers can somehow bypass the real emotional raw core which often isn't technically very perfect. I'd rather hear someone sing from the soul slightly out of tune than I would hear someone sing something perfectly with what I feel like there's no soul at all.

IVH: How would you describe the feeling when you're about to hear your songs and your lyrics in another interpretation?

PJH: I love when I've finished a piece of work and I put the songs out into the world that they're no longer mine and I don't feel I have to try and control them or hold on to them. They're out in the world for others to take, use, interpret, read their own lives through. And that's a wonderful reward for me to see the pleasure, exploration and what people confine through those works that I've just helped to put out into the world for others to use. Now it will become - how shall I call it, Ivo? A music theater piece?

IVH: I still am searching for a right word for that. It will combine music, theater, dance, video. I believe that pop and rock music tells very important stories today. It's not only the classical music that is full of meaning and value. Pop and rock can have that too and be also entertaining so it can move people. With Ruhrtriennale I try to widen the view on what music theater can be today. There are a lot of concept albums written in the 70s or by artists at this moment that bring important themes. I want to seduce other directors to go into that world and develop characters and storylines out of that music which tell something about people today and tomorrow.

PJH: A View From The Bridge was the first production of yours that I saw in London a long time ago. I was absolutely astonished. I'd never seen anything so powerful before in my life. What I found so beautiful was the kind of the simplicity of it and yet the power that emerged from that. I felt like you would stripped everything back to what was the absolute minimum that was needed. And then when you did use a bold stroke, it really was bold. Ever since then, I've followed what you have done. And over the years, we've become friends. I was absolutely overjoyed to be able to work with you on All About Eve that we created for the West Ende in 2019. It was the first time that I'd written songs for actors to sing. It was a doorway into the theatre world for me. And I love working with theatre almost more than anything else at this moment in time because I find it so freeing. What I love about your work is that you’re not afraid to experiment and go into it fearlessly in order to pursue what you want to try out.

IVH: Working on I Want Absolute Beauty feels to me out of my comfort zone. There is an actress on stage but not a one line text just the songs and music. For me, that’s a new way of telling stories on stage.

PJH: The only way we break forward and make great work is by going into the unknown, which is often fearful. But you've got to have the faith and just do it.

Love Palace in ruins

How should one describe the evening with which Ivo van Hove opened the Ruhrtiennale, which he directed? PJ Harvey donates songs, exceptional player Sandra Hüller interprets them, a director and three choreographers stage them, dancers accompany them, and a video wall produces images to go with them. An event!

By Andreas Wilink

17 August 2024. Imre Kertèsz spoke of the "metabolism of fates, which is life". This transformation process can find expression and expression in art. Of someone who sets out to live or learn to live: This is how Sandra Hüller's path to stations can be described in "I Want Absolute Beauty", which is a musical coming-of-age novel divided into four chapters ("Grow", "Love and Personal and Political Disappointments", "Big Exit", "Back Home"), set in 26 songs by PJ Harvey.

Project Human

"Teach me how to grow" is the first song. To whom is the request or invitation addressed – to Mother Nature, the divine principle, the seed of the developing self? How does someone become what he or she wants to be? Is belief in oneself the prerequisite or the result that enables success and grace for oneself and, with or without Nietzsche, the "dawn" of one's own autonomy and perfection?

The evolutionary project of man – of homo artista – is reflected in this performance several times. PJ Harvey donates her songs along her own biography, an actress reinterprets them, a director and three choreographers stage them, dancers accompany her, and a video wall produces images to go with them. Almost too much transformation. The stage in the Jahrhunderthalle Bochum is an elongated field strewn with earth that gets lost in the depths of the room. Everything gathers into a great movement and melody, into action and reaction, words that translate into notes that translate into bodies, into images, sharpened and blurred, concrete and symbolic.

Polly Jean Harvey, praying mantis, prophet of redemption, apostle of suffering and high priestess of her own life, body and heart story, gives the material from her albums of the 1990s and 2000s: this lady also sings the blues, evokes the landscape of her childhood Dorset, celebrates melancholy or soars – meditative and offensive at the same time – with her musique engagée to immerse herself again in the natural and inner world. Anyone who knows the longing will have an ear for its education sentimentale. She faces the pain, remembers it and washes it away, wanders through deserts of the loveless, celebrates the encounter with the Absolute that breaks over her like a monsoon in the tropics, mourns betrayal, or turns away from her ego to complain about the violence in the world and England that is becoming alien to her.

Dreamer, fighter, sky-stormer

What a connection: the charismatic PJ Harvey and the disturbingly unfathomable Sandra Hüller! The gently intrepid, encoded nature of her character, whose substance is so uncomfortable because it seems to be pore-deep clean on the surface, permeates her stage and film characters. They show control through intelligence and the ability to use the body as a precision instrument. The singer Hüller goes beyond all imagination and shows something other than her softly drawn face: slightly roughened voice, rumbling, siren-like longing, roaring, howling, moaning and roaring. Love songs, lamentations, songs of anger, songs of fear of a lost soul and a lonely child, a dreamer, a fighter, the desperate, the lost home, the heartbroken, the stormer of heaven. She celebrates excess ("Angelene", "The Dancer", "Meet Ze Monsta", "Rid of Me") and exorcisms it in equal measure, while the group of dancers show grimaces of pleasure and fall into the rhythm of copulation.


High above the topsoil, images shimmer across the projection screen: dilapidated gravestones, swaying grass, a tunnel, roads as escape routes, firestorms of a flaming inferno and floods of water, the chalk cliffs of Dorset, the lights of New York and the eye of an acting sorceress (more on that later). The dancers of the Ballet National de Marseille act as doppelgangers, amplifiers, supports, mediators. They have sex in their bodies, march, fall, pile up into a pile of corpses. The nine in their street credibility lead – dynamically and ecstatically – the trench warfare of the young bodies, in which Sandra Hüller keeps up as one of their own. The songs and their theatrical shaping by Ivo Van Hove tell that the world is crazy, love is chaos and "a mess", the heart is a lonely hunter.

Enter Isabelle Huppert

PJ Harvey's realm is the "Desperate Kingdom of Love". She shares it with two other queens in Bochum: with the brilliantly assertive, hardly recognizable, yet totally identical Hüller and with a third – in a magical moment shortly before the end. Like a mystical vision, the face of Isabelle Huppert appears on the screen. The ageless Circe sings and knows about the love palace in ruins and passes on her knowledge and back to the younger fairy, her, yes, heiress and continuator Hüller.

The experiences of the foreign country and the return to the homeland form the reason for Harvey's / Hüller's sense of self. In this way, freedom is achieved, which calmly looks at life as it is ("I have pulled myself clear") and submits to the elemental, breathed by Goethe's "Die and Become". Ivo Van Hove also seems to prescribe this process for the Ruhrtriennale as a duration in change.