is the knowledge-sharing platform for the Academy for Theatre and Digitality. Explore the experiments and bold ideas behind the Academy's Fellowship programme, delve into the science behind the projects of our HIDA researchers, and explore the results of international collaborations.

is a platform for discovery and documentation. Each 

showcases a unique artistic-technological research project, with topics as diverse as the use of AI in theatrical design, choreography for and with robotics, and the possibilities for theatre in virtual spaces. Each 

 offers the chance to learn more about the members of our artistic research network. By pooling our knowledge in such a way, creative research into theatre, performance and digital technologies can become more accessible, sustainable, and artistically innovative.

Funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation, the Academy will award a total of 54 fellowships between 2019 and 2022, each lasting for five months. The 

 are designed for people interested in artistic-technical research which explores the possibilities for digital narratives in theatrical spaces, as well as their practical implementation. Fellows have researched a variety of digital methods (motion capture, coding, XR, VR, AR, sensor technologies, robotics, and more) across artistic fields including opera, dance, orchestra and drama. 

Helmholtz Information & Data Science Academy

(HIDA), the Academy for Theatre and Digitality has offered joint research fellowships at the interface of digital art and cutting edge scientific research since 2021. The HIDA fellowships are kindly supported by the 

Performance

Installation

Opera

Interactive

Stage Design

Artificial Intelligence

Sound Design

VR (Virtual Reality)

Theater Dortmund
Theater Karree 1-3
44137 Dortmund
Germany
Fon: +49 (0) 231 226 14330

Address and location of the Academy for Theater and Digitality:
Speicherstrasse 17
44147 Dortmund
Germany

E-Mail: akademie@theater.digital
Web: theater.digital

Tax number: 314/5702/9367
Sales tax identification number: DE 124643894

Management Team:

Executive Director
Tobias Ehinger

Administrative Director
Martin Lizan

Director of the Opera
Heribert Germeshausen

Director of the Ballet
Xin Peng Wang

General Music Director
Gabriel Feltz

Artistic Director of the Schauspiel
Julia Wissert

Director of the Children's and Youth Theater
Andreas Gruhn

Director of the Academy for Theatre and Digitality
Marcus Lobbes

Please also note our privacy policy.

 as the sixth division of Theater Dortmund (hereinafter referred to as "Theater", information about Theater Dortmund can be found 

), is pleased that you are visiting our website. Data protection and data security when using our website are very important to us. We would therefore like to inform you at this point, in accordance with Article 13 of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (DSGVO) and Section 13 of the German Telemedia Act (TMG), which of your personal data we collect when you visit our website and for what purposes it is used. Since changes in the law or changes in our internal company processes may make it necessary to adapt this data protection declaration, we ask you to read through this data protection declaration regularly. The data protection declaration can be accessed, saved and printed out here at any time.


§ 1 Scope of application

This data protection declaration applies to the Internet offering of Theater Dortmund, which can be accessed under the domain www.theaterdo.de and the various subdomains (hereinafter referred to as "our website").


§ 2 What is personal data?

Personal data is individual information about personal or factual circumstances of a specific or identifiable natural person (data subject). This includes, for example, information such as your name, address, telephone number, date of birth or e-mail address. Information for which we cannot establish a reference to your person, e.g. by anonymizing the information, is not personal data.


§ 3 What personal data do we collect/process and use?

Access data without personal reference is stored, such as the name of your Internet service provider, the page from which you visit us, the names of the requested files and their retrieval date. These data are evaluated exclusively for the improvement of our offer and do not allow any conclusions to be drawn about your person. 

If you wish to make use of services offered by us on our website, such as purchasing tickets via the ticket store or ordering a newsletter, etc., it is necessary for you to provide further data. This is the data that is required for the respective processing, such as your payment information when purchasing tickets or your e-mail address when ordering a newsletter. 

We process the data we collect about you for the provision of the services we offer, to answer your questions and to operate and improve our website and applications. 

We process your personal data exclusively to provide you with a comprehensive service via our website or, if you use our contact form or, to process your ticket purchase or, to process your application or, to provide you with requested information about our offers.

Fellowship

HIDA

discover cutting-edge digital research in theatre and performance 
meet our research fellows and collaborators in the 

Portal: Academy for Theatre and Digitality

Hanna Rode

How can we tell about human abysses without reproducing or trivializing violence? This question is the starting point for an experiment with a handmade puppet and its digital face double. 
United into one figure, the hybrid character serves as a proband in the search for expressions of horror that really reach us. 
When does empathy arise, when does alienation?

Researching Violence//Creating a Hybrid Character

2023

I am interested in immersion, the "reality" part of Virtual Reality. As CyberRäuber, Marcel and I have tried and created various avenues into immersion. A very short summary of our findings would be that a high degree of immersion is generally not necessary to tell a story or to convey what you want to. And that immersion generally suffers if you aim for too much realism: the more you rely on your target's collaboration, their imagination and established social and cultural norms, the more they will get "into it". Participation / interaction trumps detail, trumps realism.

But of course, the more you let people interact, the more you lose the the ability to steer a narrative. In this dilemma we usually opted for limited realism (high aestheticization), limited interaction, a limited scope of character, space and time, and worldbuilding as a narrative strategy.



 as an idea manifested itself over the course of years. It basically grew on the compost of CyberRäuber's work in theatre, in which we usually didn't have the time, scope and ressources - and more importantly - not the framing for such a project.



 aims to be maximally immersive with a given, limited technological effort, following an approach of a minimally detailled realism, maximal imagination and direct, personal contact.

Hundred thousands of years of evolution have led us to develop certain quirks that can help storytellers create compelling narratives, something that can also be ab-used, of course. Think about what we imagine in clouds, in the shadows of a forest lighted by flickering flames of a campfire. What kind of faces we see in objects, landscapes, moving leaves, what voices and sounds we hear in the wind. The less there is to see or hear, the more we augment; little impulses, visual or aural clues are launch pads for our imagination, something every horror movie, every mystery story told on a nightly walk makes use of.



One way of direct, personal contact is the human voice. It can supply content and - with language, dialect, wording, timbre and emotion - context. We ascribe very much to a voice that could only be safely verified by meeting and conversing with the person with this voice.
In this project, the means to deliver the voice will be a recording, a voice message. Why? Because it is a controlled way of communication. For the ordinary person an ordinary conversation is something that can be quickly understood and deciphered, the situation, the conversation partner can be assessed. We would normally aim to reduce mystery, to understand what is happening and only continue to engage with the person and the topic if intrigued and feeling save. A voice message instead can be mysterious, incomplete, poetic, out of the norm. It can also contain additional information, environmental sounds. A voice message can be dilligently tailor-made for a situation and our goals. It doesn't need and anyway couldn't deal with an instant reply. The communication here isn't a realtime dialogue, but an elusive conversation over a longer timespan, similar to an infrequent exchange of letters, including lost and/or overlapping messages.




Nevertheless the recipient has to have the feeling of being heard, of being reacted to. And as in any communication, truth and trust plays an important role...

During the fellowship different areas have to be explored:

Voice - characteristics, difference to simple text

AI - what can be done with artificial neural networks? Story, text to speech, speech to text...

Soundscape - binaural sound, artificial and recorded; AMSR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response)

The role of time (length, pace, intervalls,...)

This documentation is an ongoing process and will grow as the fellowship progresses. Last entry: 30. November 2023


Björn Lengers

You just received another one of those mysterious audio messages that strangely overlay your surroundings and ask you to perform a seemingly insignificant action: to walk a little slower, to press the pedestrian lights even though you don't actually want to cross the street, something else. A voice wants you to believe that you are decisively changing the future.
- - - Resonance is an interactive, immersive and theatrical narrative, which can be experienced by many people independent of time and place on their smartphones.

Resonance

Dance and the relations with the performative possibilities of technologies in VR/XR. Exploring the concept of stage when dance happens within hybrid stages (VR and on-site). How to share this kind of content with others?
VR creates an experience where introspection can be achieved. This opens up possibilities for somatic and other movement practices. Working with the body & technology presents the possibility to explore rigid -computer- systems with an ontological approach (praxis/doing), exploring the medium's possibilities. The problem is that often, dancers who work with technology forget their own embodied language (why/how). They get confused and carried away by the pragmatic reality of technology, focusing on the content (what). Forgetting their own embodied power. The result is a superfluous object.

I propose a praxis that privileges the process over the result. 

Working with avatars, sigils, as a ritual practice with a non-anthropocentric approach. 


The key aspect here is in choreographic strategies to shift the focus from what to do with technology to how/why technology

The continuation of a research about Dance in VR that started in 2022 at 

Motion Bank - University of Applied sciences Mainz

 (Project originally founded by choreographer William Forsythe). 

Using a markerless motion capture system I created, I explored and documented simple visual representations of the body (avatars) in VR. 

. I achieved this using a non-anthropocentric approach. In the documentation it was important to use an inclusive, clear language that addressed both dancers and technologists. In the 1st cycle at Motion Bank, the focus was on the dancer.

In the 2nd cycle at the Akademie I want to add a layer where I introduce the stage. Exploring the relation between audience and  dancer.

How can we (as a field) make a dance in a virtual environment so that the audience “feels” the presence of the digital body?

What is needed for the audience to find new aesthetics when dance is mediated with digital environments like VR headsets?

: To explore different perceptions of realities when dance happens within Hybrid stages - (VR and on-site)

Missing conceptual context to apply technical tools.

The natural empathic and embodied relation between dancer audience is partially lost when using VR headsets. This research aims to help the audience to find new aesthetics (

mediated experience of time created between the artwork, the artist, the interface and the audience

), to find engagement, new meanings and purpose when dance is mediated with digital environments like VR headsets In hope to 

create a visceral sense of unfolding or revelation, but also a feeling of immediacy and loss.

Exercises on subjective perception of time and space. The aim with this series of videos is in questioning, What is happening in real time.

. An action of a person drinking water (action 1) is recorded with 2 different camera perspectives. A setup in OBS is set to switch between 3 different perspectives of the camera; the 2 recordings and a 3rd live feed. A person comes into the space. There is a projection that switches between the 3 perspectives while a person is in the space doing the action of drinking water. This action is recorded. 

Sigil

Pathfinder

Lecture Performance : Open House 

Dancer, choreographer, multimedia designer, researcher 

Choreographer, Multimedia and Interaction Designer

Jorge Guevara

The natural empathic and embodied relation between dancer - audience is partially lost when using VR headsets. This research aims to help the audience to find new aesthetics (mediated experience of time created between the artwork, the artist, the interface and the audience), to find engagement, new meanings and purpose when dance is mediated with digital environments  In hope to create a visceral sense of unfolding or revelation, but also a feeling of immediacy and loss. 


Untitled: Jorge Guevara

Dance

Choreography

Immersive

Piet Esch

The interaction of a scaled theater stage and digital video content creates a usable playground. Freed from a physical immanent state, the scaled theater stage becomes the ground for the immersive of the digital.

KEEP IT REAL

Do Mayer

Hen Lovely Bird

The performance and video installation Disco Planet: Letheia takes a philosophical 3D landscape as backdrop to inquire into relations between plants, humans and animals, and their embeddedness in environment/society. An artistic twin of our symbolic mindscape meets the somatic practice of tuning into our senses to expand our capacity for change and adaptation. The common urge: To find new methods to situate ourselves in our time and reshape our habitual presentation of ourselves and the commonplace.


Disco Planet: Letheia

Laura Waltz

Laura's fellowship project is based in movement research, and the use of MoCap technology to explore the possible 'alivenesses' of avatars through animation principles from puppetry.


RESEARCH PLATFORM

Academy for Theatre and Digitality

A-live (Working Title)

Laura Waltz

2023
activeFellowship

Summary
Laura's fellowship project is based in movement research, and the use of MoCap technology to explore the possible 'alivenesses' of avatars through animation principles from puppetry.

Similar Projects

A-live (Working Title)

Laura Waltz

2023activeFellowship

SummaryLaura's fellowship project is based in movement research, and the use of MoCap technology to explore the possible 'alivenesses' of avatars through animation principles from puppetry.

Similar Projects

2023
activeFellowship

Summary
Laura's fellowship project is based in movement research, and the use of MoCap technology to explore the possible 'alivenesses' of avatars through animation principles from puppetry.