In the organizer's words:

asphalt N° 14 is coming! Two stage highlights are already on pre-sale! The complete festival program will follow in May.

A YearwithoutSummer

Radical, lively, uncompromising: Florentina Holzinger's work is among the most impressive that the cultural scene currently has to offer. Holzinger will be representing her home country of Austria at the 2026 Venice Biennale, and from the 2026/27 season she will be part of the artistic management team at Berlin's Volksbühne. In excessive stage spectacles, the Viennese choreographer liberates the female body from beauty norms and role models to show it in all its vulnerability and strength. The asphalt Festival has been showing Holzinger's genre-busting works since the beginning of her career and is now presenting her latest work as a co-production.

Originally, 1816 went down in history as the "year without a summer". After the eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia, the sky is full of ash, the sun has disappeared, the harvests have failed - and the world is starving. 18-year-old Mary spends the cold summer months with other poets on Lake Geneva, where the storm and darkness inspire her to write scary stories. Mary imagines Dr. Frankenstein, a scientific genius who forces nature to bend to his will and ends up destroying his monster made of corpse parts.

Florentina Holzinger and her ensemble explore stories about the body, health and identity, our decay and our environment: the pursuit of immortality in the 21st century, medical promises of rejuvenation, through to the dangers of uncontrolled technological growth in a world shaped by AI, robotics and bioengineering. "A Year without Summer" tells of the improvement of nature to the point of perversion and is an attempt to play off the promise of eternal life against certain death. Holzinger's latest theater coup is a mixture of musical and horror story, a tightrope walk between absolute horror and great beauty with beguilingly quiet, gentle moments.

Dancingidiots

Ursina Lardi, Karin Neuhäuser, Sebastian Blomberg, André Jung: together with drummer Willi Keller, a top line-up of outstanding theater, film and TV actors embodies survivors on their way to the next catastrophe - in a ludicrous mixture of brutality and tenderness, anarchy and metaphysical instincts, pain of existence and lust for life. The new play by cult director Thorsten Lensing, co-produced by asphalt, will celebrate its world premiere in Berlin on January 15, 2026 and can then be seen in Düsseldorf in the summer. Lensing's great evening of theater includes texts by the important contemporary American author Denis Johnson and original quotes from the NASA Apollo missions to the moon.

Goldie is doing what she loves best: remodeling her house. Her joy is as infectious as it is disturbing, because Goldie is seriously ill. She represses the fact that she is dying and plans a future that she no longer has. Her cat Apollo enjoys her increasing weakness: at last he can lie on top of her undisturbed and snore endlessly. Suddenly the doorbell rings and Goldie's father, newly in love, is at the door with his lover. They are on their way to the seaside in their camper van and pay Goldie a spontaneous surprise visit. Completely unexpectedly, the father, almost bursting with happiness, finds himself at his own daughter's deathbed. He believes he is at the beginning, she knows she is at the end. In the course of "Dancing Idiots", the audience joins Goldie in experiencing everything that is hard to say goodbye to: wild kayak trips, sleeping hangovers, sauna visits that get out of hand, dancing people, the smell of fresh wood, energetic construction workers, forgotten memories of a baby and the dream of a moon landing ...

Director Thorsten Lensing has been staging independent productions since the mid-1990s, mostly in co-production with theaters and festivals. He always works with a permanent cast of extraordinary star actors, some of whom he has been working with for 20 years. Lensing has already been a guest at the asphalt Festival with "Unendlicher Spaß" and "Verrückt nach Trost". Lensing is successful throughout Europe and many of his works have won awards. Author Denis Johnson is highly revered by colleagues such as Jonathan Franzen, Philip Roth and David Foster Wallace for his "goosebump-inducing", "unpretentiously direct" and "brutally funny" prose. Denis Johnson said of his own work: "I would describe my characters the same way I describe myself: We are dancing idiots."