Theater: “The future of digital is analog”

2023-09-09 18:55:33

In the beginning there was probably the disco ball. The ball, which, peppered with tiny, offset mirrors and illuminated by a single light, conjures up a world of stars in every room – it is perhaps the forefather of everything we call advanced stage technology today. A device that turns shallow into deep, a conqueror of dimensions, a magical machine.

This disco ball hangs on a good three-quarters of the whopping nine meter high ceiling in the largest hall of the “Academy for Theater and Digitality” in Dortmund, which is being opened, one might say, inaugurated on this day – as an almost unique institution in the world that combines analogue and Digital.

Or to speak olfactorily – the holy union of the wonderful musty smell of wooden props and heavy curtains with the cold, burning smell of highly stressed cables and the dry fan dust of computers running at maximum performance. Clearly a contradiction in and of itself.

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Was the analog disco ball perhaps hung up as a deliberately ironic allusion to the naive yet effective beginnings of three-dimensional stage technology? On the other hand: Irony is over. Or maybe it is simply a must-have for every party (that followed the opening in the evening) that solves the mystery and, on a meta level, is a metaphor and symbol for the new world of theater?

Marcus Lobbes, the director of the academy – at this point I have to admit that we are good friends and comrades in arms in Bayreuth Festival matters – says a strange sentence that seems so clever but also contradictory to me that I have it confirmed. That’s right, says Lobbes: “The future of digital is analog.”

Anyone who has spent a day at the academy understands how serious he is and how right it is: everything that appears as technology in the theater business has its beginnings in the heads of people in exchanges, in coffee breaks, beer evenings or over the weekend -Hallway friendships that only develop at a real academy. All the projects that amaze us in the afternoon prove this. But more on that later.

Virtual Reality-Projekt „Palimpsest – ALL IS TRUE“

Source: Florian Dürkopp

Relatively rusty in the opening reporter’s situation, I’ll just throw out a few numbers: 17 kilometers of cable were laid in the building at Dortmund harbor, 70,000 liters of water can be stored on the roof, where a mixed forest grows. The project cost 8.9 million euros.

It will often be emphasized how much the matter was done within budget and on schedule. This is of course an allusion to all the metropolitan projects from “Elphi” to “BER” that got out of hand. Here, in Westphalia, they can do something like that.

And that takes courage! And self-confidence. This resonates in every politician’s speech this afternoon (culture minister, mayor, treasurer) – and, hey, you’re right. The academy’s project was not talked over and down-discussed or fundamentally misunderstood, as it would have been elsewhere, but rather embraced.

The capital city resident is surprised

In 2017, Kay Voges, then director of the Dortmund Theater, now in Vienna and from 2025 in Cologne, initiated the project and is celebrated on this day as the visionary that he is, arriving in a “Slayer” T-shirt . A bit like Bono coming to his home village. Includes glasses.

The academy is also a success in an area that is often despised as a province, even though the Rhine-Ruhr region is of course Germany’s only real metropolitan region. Here, the capital city resident is amazed, they get things done together, and together. A promise like the “Academy for Theater and Digitality”, whose purpose is difficult to explain but easy to understand when you look at the work, is gratefully accepted here.

All groups in the council voted in favor. Except for the AfD, of course. After twenty-five years in the capital, people are honestly touched by such a cross-party understanding of the vision. Dortmund is taking the digitization project in the port very, very seriously. The Fraunhofer Institute is there, an entire building for start-ups, the academy. Unlike in Berlin, where the number of such planned project zones is greater than the number of closed airports, here there is no chatter, but rather action.

Drone shot of the new building of the Academy for Theater and Digitality

Source: Academy for Theater and Digitality/Hendrik Fellerhoff

But what now? Well, it’s not entirely clear now. Claudia Roth, the Minister of State for Culture, who appeared in a very funny video greeting and a few ideologues at the panels want to “bring people to the theater who otherwise wouldn’t go to the theater.” More diversity and stuff.

Still others, like Dortmund Mayor Thomas Westphal (red cap in hand during the speech, EsPeDe-Defiance), want the networking of culture and science. Lobbes wants to “make things come alive” and thus sums everything up perfectly.

Completed projects were presented in the academy’s many laboratories – which, by the way, were transparent for everyone to view – including a collaboration with the Helmholtz Association, in which data on climate and climate change were poured into a (somewhat) complicated but almost meditative session.

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The very charming “Invisible Cities” project is completely different, in which a tiny, analogue-digital theater can be delivered to anyone’s home in a pizza box. Corona has left deep traces. But in this context – can we even say this – the pandemic was a booster for innovation. Lobbes estimates that the drama has boosted the importance and goals of his academy by ten years.

There was a lot of virtual reality, of course: from crowd-pleasing races across a ringed planet to meditative immersion. Or simply a “Pong” game, the grandfather of all video games, here as a variant in which the body became a joystick. Some things, like the motion capture performances or the lava lamp-like alienation of the actors, are almost immediately suitable for the large audience stage, others, like Kathie Hawthorne’s invitation to imagine your own piece, are theater-to-go for the home, but different than the coffee mugs -Industry, strictly without a disposable character.

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Everything that was shown is more of a playground than a performance show, some things remain vague, others are just fun. And some things don’t work at all. Like the avatar of the Dortmund “cooperation office” including sympathetically desperate nerds. This is exactly what the academy is all about.

You don’t want sharp projects, explains Lobbes, that are specifically aimed at individual theater productions, but rather general ideas that can then be anticipated, modified and tailored by the respective users. This is about prototypes; there is no stage and no performances, but, says Lobbes, only preliminary stages. Technical-artistic-scientific research is carried out here, “will and structure formation”, networks and advice.

I love Dortmund

A concept that was already successful at the old transition location: the list of references, i.e. institutions that drew on the Academy’s expertise and opportunities, was far too long to be read out. Geographically, it stretches from China through South America to Europe and also to Franconia, the hub of musical theater. Let’s see what happens.

The disco ball? Certainly made her big appearance at the party, which rounded off the rightly satisfied Dortmund evening in a completely analogous and different way.

By then the reporter was already on his way back to the capital. Back to a city in which it is not even possible to simply go through with a no-brainer decision like the appointment of Christian Thielemann as head of the State Opera. It has almost nothing to do with football: I love Dortmund.