Shaping the future together 

We have a keen interest both in music and in the critical questions of our time – and we believe these go well together, central to both being diverse modes of expression and the understanding of these, questions and answers, thinkers, movers and shakers. We are especially interested in all those who wish to be part of change. Change consistent with the  SDGs is an integral element of the thinking that goes into the Festival – above all, enquiring, creative and intergenerational. Our credo is: Only those who think about tomorrow today still have time to make a difference.

In order to guarantee this approach in future, we want to act now together with the thinkers and movers and shakers of tomorrow. This is why we place special store not only by planning our agenda for our younger audience, but also and above all to discover their creative potential. With formats such as "Generation Zukunft Musik", we offer the young generations the opportunity of changing their perspective and, as creative artists or as communicators of information, to look behind the scenes of the Festival. To sum up, in the spirit of Aurelio Peccei, a founder of the Club of Rome: the first step in tackling future tasks together is participation. This attitude unites everyone in co-operation, dialogue and empathy, and above all provides the opportunity of assuming responsibility for what is to come.

The Ludwigsburg Festival, too, has decided to take an active part in change. Motivated by the 2030 Global Agenda of the United Nations, founded 75 years ago after WWII, we are adopting the 17 Sustainable Development Goals as a guide on the path to a fairer and more humane world. In a personal meeting, Amina J. Mohammed, UN Deputy Secretary-General, supported Jochen Sandig in the vision of opening the Festival, with its almost 90-year history, for the critical questions of our age, in the following words: "We created the roadmap and now we need music, dance and all the arts to set people in motion". So the Ludwigsburg Festival would like to invite you all to come together as a community in the context of the events. The idea is to encourage the exchange of ideas through music, dance and conversation, and to expand artistic experience to include socio-political stimuli.

Projects

You can find out how we put our vision into practice in concrete terms at our participatory projects. After its online edition last year, »Spoken Moments Poetry« finally made it to the physical stage in the 2022 season. In presence workshops, a dozen participants between 15 and 65 years old have developed poetic and organisational ideas together with pianist Hanni Liang and concert poet Timo Brunke to design the final concert on 14 May around different moments of in-betweenness. The concert film from 2021 can be found on our Digital Stage as well as an exciting documentary of this year's edition.

The »Generation Zukunft Musik« concert was preceded by a laboratory over the last nine months, in which young people outside the participating school ensembles were asked to come up with the framework for the concert. In the workshops, they were able to get to know and try out their own creativity and musicality more closely. This experience eventually led them to develop an overall concept for the concert that would reflect this joyful and bubbling creativity. On 3 June, there were not only wonderful contributions from the four school ensembles, but also improvisations, pictures, videos and a musical design of the transitions, the beginning and the end of the concert on the part of the young people who developed the concept.

In »Mini Mal Mut«, too, the around 70 participating children from four schools were able to contribute more to the final concert than »just« making music: The programme included their own group compositions. Four music teachers gave them ways and means to make music with everyday objects, instruments and voice/speech, but the final piece of music was invented by the classes themselves. You can learn more about this process and the children's impressions in the video documentary.

With »The 3rd Box«, we hosted a dance guest performance by the Junge Theater Freiburg, which was created in a participatory way by and with the four amateur performers and the choreographers Monica Gilette and Gary Joplin. The piece addresses the issue of diverse gender identities and the role played by the body, clothing, general appearance and our societal codes. Those people who don't define themselves as male or female have been able to tick the third box »diverse« on official papers since 2019. After all - but why is it so important for society to sort people into these categories in the first place? Outside of any boxes and pigeonholes, the »3rd Box Workshop« with Gary Joplin and two of the four performers offered the opportunity to reflect on oneself through movement, clothing/costumes, in exchange with the group and in body meditations with regard to the topic. People of all ages from 15 years upwards were cordially invited to the four dates, which were rounded off by a joint visit to the guest performance on 10 July.

In the 2023 season we would like to continue some of these projects and deepen our workshop offer.