Virtuoso Fusion Director

Rolf Heim (CH), director (born 1961) and artistic director of Bådteatret. Trained as an actor at the Institut för Scenkonst, Sweden, 1984-1986, and as a director at the School of Stage Arts, Teater Cantabile, Denmark, 1989 – 1992. Since 1993, Heim has toured regularly in Germany.
Rolf Heim received a the Performance of the Year - Reumert Award 2007 for his Nick Cave Theatre Concert. Recently he took part in opening the new Royal Danish Playhouse with the new written text SULT by Jon Fosse.   

Artist Profile
Rolf Heim is known for his poetic and visual staging that merges elements from performance art and classical text theatre.  He does productions in which he maintains his focus on the story and the content in a formal blending of genres.  He often collaborates with choreographers – including Danish choreographer Tim Feldmann.

The staging is characterized by humour in an interplay with tragedy, movement that blends with text, players who interact with dancers, and actors who play with the audience.  Heim creates precise, abstract images that have their own rhythm – often with a glint of absurdity.

He is an auteur with the ability to put his characteristic stamp on the staging and dramatic texts.  Along those lines, he adapts classical artistic techniques with out-of-the-box innovative thinking and inventive abundance.  He writes many of the pieces himself but enjoys throwing himself into difficult challenges, such as his production about the pop icon Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol, his production of Hide and Seek based on an original text by Paul Auster, or his adaptation of August Strindberg’s classic Miss Julie.

The productions vary in size to match an intimate stage or a large hall.  The variation testifies to a mastery of theatre handicraft and an artistic courage that promises much for future projects – national as well as international.

Review Extracts

”It doesn’t feel as if the director was searching for his text but that the text was searching for a producer.  A courageous and perfect staging.”
Berliner Morgenpost (DE), Hide and Seek

”... Rolf Heim’s staging makes an unusually strong impression, as the boundaries between reality and illusion change places.”
Hannoversche Allgemeine (DE), Andy Warhol

“It’s all about communication from the senses, physics and the body in this performance that is as unique and alien as a Chinese opera with characters magnified into the grotesquely theatrical.”
B.T. (DK), Miss Julie

”The performance is a one and a half hour of splendid and originally staged dressage in the universe of Nick Cave...If is wasn't as brutally, infernally, and millingly good the performance would have been a depressing affair. Now it's the complete opposite...” ******
Århus Stifttidende, dec. 2006, Nick Cave Theatre Concert