The Impulse Theater Festival has been held in several cities in North Rhine-Westphalia since its establishment, currently in Düsseldorf, Cologne and Mülheim an der Ruhr.
[4] The selection and prize jury was abolished, an open call and an artistic advisory council supported the programming.
[7] In 2013, the advisory board included the curator Ellen Blumenstein, the ethnologist Thomas Hauschild, the theatre scientist Hans-Thies Lehmann, the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and the comparatist Winfried Menninghaus.
[8] For the 2015 edition, the Kunsthistorikerin and curator Beatrice von Bismarck, the philosopher Boris Buden as well as the sociologist Oliver Marchart form the advisory council.
[9] In 1992, the director of the NRW cultural secretaries in Wuppertal, Dietmar N. Schmidt founded the Impulse theatre festival as a theatrical meeting of the free scene.
[10] The curator and dramaturge has been shaping the festival since the first edition for which he was responsible, with three program focuses that rotate annually through the venues in Cologne, Düsseldorf, and Mülheim an der Ruhr: "Showcase," "City Project," and "Academy."
Presented are "challenging works that represent a variety of different theater forms and aesthetics, and precisely in this diversity are exemplary for the independent scene.