Sommerblut is a cultural pioneer. The Cologne cultural festival is always trying to anticipate developments in society.
Sommerblut draws the edge into the centre and brings the centre to the edge. The cultural festival lives the vision of cultural participation for all people, regardless of physical or mental disability, ethnic and social origin, age, sexual identity, gender and religion.
Sommerblut is experimental and touching. The cultural festival is risky, breaks with conventional ways of seeing and performing and brings together a wide variety of perspectives.
Sommerblut is cross-divisional. Dance, music, visual arts, performance, theatre and literature create a vivid and inspiring mix, combine expertise with innovative art forms and open up new dimensions of experience.
SOMMERBLUT, the „Festival of Multipolar Culture“, sees itself as an inclusive cultural festival that combines different social and political points of view and identities. The concept of inclusion is deliberately broadly defined here: physical and cognitive characteristics, forms of life, value systems, traditions, beliefs – everything that determines the identity of every human being and the daily discourse in our society. The festival invites you to a change of perspective, in the direction of a cross-border, courageous art and culture.
The patron of the festival is Jürgen Roters, former mayor of Cologne. The chairperson of the non-profit organizational body, the association “Sommerblut Kulturfestival e.V.” is Andrea Asch.
SOMMERBLUT is a cultural festival with an international flair. Guest companies from abroad enrich the festival schedule every year. From 2013 to 2015, the international theatre project TABUROPA dealt with cultural, historical and everyday taboos in Europe. Twenty theatre-makers, choreographers, actors and dancers from Belgium, Poland, Portugal and Germany explored the meaning of taboos in four performances. The premiere of TABUROPA took place at Sommerblut 2014 and the ensembles then traveled on to the participating cities of Brussels, Lisbon and Warsaw (www.taburopa.eu).
In 2019 SOMMERBLUT had around 15,000 visitors who participated in the 18th festival edition with 35 events and over 220 artists at 25 venues. Guests included local, national and international artists.