How did that go again?
Talk Talks & Workshops Place to be
In our How did that go again? series, we remember special moments from 25 FFT years. This time, as part of the ON/LIVE festival, we will talk about digital, interactive performances at the FFT before, during, and after the pandemic.
Since 2010, the FFT has been in a close working collaboration with media theatre collective machina eX, which interweaves participatory performances with narrative stylings from computer games, in turn appealing to a completely new audience. At the FFT, we have been designating these and similar forms of theatre as „theatre of the digital natives“ in reference to the research conducted by art didactics expert Torsten Meyer.
Five years after the pandemic, the field of digital, interactive performance has changed in many ways, a fact that is also reflected in our programme. Nevertheless, we will never forget the experiments that enabled us to come together digitally during the lockdown despite contact restrictions.
We talk to Susanne Schuster, Torsten Meyer, and Clara Ehrenwerth about theatre games, lockdowns, and „the people formerly known as the audience“.
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Clara Ehrenwerth, born in Blankenburg/Harz in 1987, studied creative writing and cultural journalism at the University of Hildesheim. From 2008 to 2011, she served as co-editor of the BELLA triste literary magazine while also working as a member of the artistic direction and project manager of the PROSANOVA 2011 literature festival. She has received several awards for her literary work including being an awardee of the Young Literature Forum Hesse-Thuringia, and was supported by an author’s work scholarship from the State of Thuringia. She has been working with machina eX since 2014, becoming the managing director of the collective in 2018. As a freelance author and game developer, she also writes radio plays (for the WDR and others), visual novels (for the University of Göttingen and others) as well as essays and prose texts.
Susanne Schuster has been working as a dramaturge and curator in the independent performing arts since 2014. From 2017 to 2020, she was co-director of the „Hauptsache Frei“ festival in Hamburg. As a curator at the intersection of digital and performative art, she has most recently worked for the German Federal Cultural Foundation, Fonds Darstellende Künste, HAU Hebbel am Ufer, and the Performing Arts Programme Berlin, among other stations. Susanne is the artistic co-director of media and performance group OutOfTheBox with which she creates speculative experiential spaces in which participants can try out scenarios of a digitised society.
Torsten Meyer, Dr. phil., Professor of Art and Art Didactics, focus on current media culture, at the University of Cologne. Main areas of work: post-internet art education, teaching after the end of the perspective, school and university development within the horizon of a fundamentally changed media culture. He is the author and (co-)editor of various books, including Where the Magic Happens – Bildung nach der Entgrenzung der Künste (Where the Magic Happens – Education After the Dissolution of the Arts) (2016), Arts Education in Transition (2020), Curatorial Learning Spaces (2023). https://medialogy.de
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ON/LIVE is organised in cooperation with the medienwerk.nrw office. The guest performance of In Skills We Trust as well as the ON/LIVE accompanying programme receive support from Fonds Darstellende Künste, with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. You and A.I. is funded by the NRW KULTURsekretariat and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.
How did that go again? is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as part of the Alliance of International Production Houses.