NEW YORK, NY.- The calling card of the Ruhrtriennale Festival of the Arts is to present shows in former industrial sites, like power stations or coal plants, among cities in the Ruhr region of northwestern Germany. For theater-maker Ivo van Hove, who is presenting his first season as the festival’s artistic director, this is churning up feelings of deja vu.

“I was 20 years old at a time in Belgium when theater was the most old-fashioned thing you could imagine,” van Hove, 65, said. “My generation made a real change and we did that by, for instance, not playing in theaters. My first production was in an abandoned laundry. We played for 30 people and we had 30 actors onstage.”

The scale is much larger at the Ruhrtriennale, but at least van Hove had staged five productions at the festival before taking the helm, so he is familiar with the artistic parameters.

One of them is paying attention to musical theater, which can take on vastly different forms in Europe compared with English-speaking countries. According to Krystian Lada, a Polish director who helped van Hove put together the slate, the Ruhrtriennale is known for presenting “a new vision of music theater” in Germany, where so-called high and low cultures are often rigidly separated. Lada’s own entry in the 2024 festival, “Abendzauber,” combines works by Bruckner and Björk.

Van Hove’s “I Want Absolute Beauty,” which kicks off the festival on Friday, revolves around “Anatomy of a Fall” and “The Zone of Interest” star Sandra Hüller (whom he had directed in Eugene O’Neill’s play “Strange Interlude” in 2013) performing a song cycle pulled from P.J. Harvey’s back catalog. (Van Hove’s take on musical theater, or any theater for that matter, is often divisive: A recent review in The New York Times called his musical adaptation of the film “Opening Night,” with new songs by Rufus Wainwright, “a travesty.”)

Other offerings of note at the festival include “Legende,” dissident Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov’s take on filmmaker Sergei Parajanov’s work; Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s new dance piece “Y”; and Philip Venables and Ted Huffman’s music-theater work “The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions.”

In a video conversation from his Ruhr home in Bochum, Germany, van Hove discussed his vision for the Ruhrtriennale, his collaboration with Harvey and whether a Broadway return is in the cards. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: You were artistic director of the multidisciplinary Holland Festival, in Amsterdam, from 1997 to 2004. What will be different about your approach in the Ruhr?

A: Venues are the starting point and the end point. Every artist I talk with, if they don’t know the festival very well, I start with explaining that if you just want to make a black-box production, don’t do it here. It makes no sense. You have to accept that the venue is a character in itself, and you better show it.

Q: And the sites are not neutral, in that they have a loaded past.

A: It was the venues of the steel industry from the Krupp family, which is of course infamous for having supported the Hitler regime. So there is this history that you cannot ignore, but at the same time, this very bad history can lead also to a better future. And that’s also what culture is there for.

Q: Did you want to go against the pervasive sense of doom about the future by adopting “Longing for tomorrow” as the motto for this year’s edition?

A: In German it sounds even better than in English: “Sehnsucht nach Morgen.” The literal translation is “nostalgia for tomorrow,” but it’s also longing for tomorrow. I think you can endlessly mourn for the lost paradise, but it’s better to also long for the new paradise. When I was applying, I was thinking about what would be interesting for a festival to deal with, while keeping it open enough that different artists can find a place or a connection.

The renewed importance of violence was very crucial. And of course, identity politics. I think that there is tension between the right to totally realize yourself the way you are, or want to be; being a community together; and not excluding other people. Another thing that’s important is that we have urgently to look at our relationship with nature.

Q: I heard that “I Want Absolute Beauty” came together relatively late. What happened?

A: I was trying for the rights to something and I couldn’t get them, so I had to dive into my mind! I thought immediately of P.J. Harvey — we had worked together in London on “All About Eve.” Her body of work is very personal, but it’s also very socially relevant. And the music is wonderful, of course. All the characters in her albums became one for me. I started to see a young woman who lives in the countryside. She goes to London and becomes a sex worker — the song “Angelene” is really dealing with that, for instance. Polly [Harvey] immediately agreed. She only asked me to send a list of the songs I was thinking of. We talked about what kind of singer it should be — she made it very clear to avoid singers with vibrato voices.

Q: One of your great champions in New York was producer Scott Rudin, who stepped back in 2021 after accusations of bullying. You haven’t had a show on Broadway since COVID closed your revival of “West Side Story” in March 2020, less than a month after it opened. Are we going to see you back there?

A: Since my 20s, when I went for the first time, I have had a deep connection with New York. I love the spirit of New York. I love the people. I love also the challenges. I always felt good when I produced in New York, I felt that I connected somehow with the city. It happens now that I work more in London because a lot of producers want to produce in London, see how it goes and then move it, because of expense. I can come tomorrow with a relevant production, a very good producer, a great text or whatever. And of course I did two operas at the Met last year, so I’m still there.

Q: One of your trademarks is adapting movies for the stage: “The Damned,” “Scenes From a Marriage,” “Network” — the list goes on. Why don’t you direct new plays that are not based on movies or books?

A: When I was young I did Botho Strauss, Marguerite Duras — but you are right: That never has been the most important thing for me. I only do a play when I think, “Well, I really understand what’s there and I can bring it out in a way that perhaps people haven’t seen yet.” That’s why I did “The Crucible,” “A View From the Bridge,” things like that. Movie scripts became my new plays. The challenge is enormous: Nobody has done it before you so you have to think, “How am I going to bring this to the stage?” Whereas when I do a “Crucible,” you can do research and find hundreds of interpretations.

Q: Even with a tighter budget than some previous editions, the Ruhrtriennale is still a wide-open canvas for an artistic director. What excites you about your stint there?

A: I’m famous for my theater and opera productions but now I can program dance, music. And I can work with directors that I would never have invited in the theater where I was artistic director before. I’m also at the point in my artistic life, and my life, where it’s very important that I keep going on. When I did the Holland Festival, I saw between 100 and 150 productions a year outside of Belgium and Holland and I got in touch with a lot of people. I was with John Zorn, Bang on a Can, Gail Zappa. It gave me new inspiration to go on as a director, because I have seen so many things, talked to so many people. As artists, you’re not isolated in the world. On the contrary, you’re totally connected.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.