Digithalia Festival

Dancing robots and talking posters

The new artistic director of the Graz Schauspielhaus has dedicated herself to expanding the canon. The Digithalia Festival, which opened on Wednesday, explores the paths of theater art in virtual space. On show until Sunday.

Belgian choreographer Ugo Dehaes makes the robots dance at the opening of the festival. He has set up his mini-stage for "Simple Machines" in the Schauspielhaus showroom and begins to explain how he has replaced the real dancers in his company (too expensive, constantly ill) with machines. But in reality, the robots are no less bitchy - and not really graceful. But times are changing, so he tries anyway. He breeds the machines from an early age, teaches them how to move and at the end of the performance, you sit spellbound and watch a ballet of machines. 

On screens and yet very close
The production is the perfect example of what the digital theater that this new festival, curated by the F. Wiesel duo (Hanke Wilsmann and Jost von Harleßem), can look like: It's all more technical and often happens via machines or on screens, but at the same time, as a spectator, you are closer to the action and can usually intervene interactively.

In "The Adventures of Harriharri", for example, you can watch the Canadian-Finnish artist Harold Hejazi as he maneuvers his way through Finnish bureaucracy in a computer game and tries to escape his foreignness. Again and again he gets input from the audience for this, at times somewhat tiresomely casual, fight against exclusion.

Posters come to life
You can also get active in the Schauspielhaus salon. For example, there are posters hanging there that can be scanned with a cell phone, allowing you to immerse yourself in scenes from the world of Leonora Carrington's surrealist one-act play "A Flannel Nightgown" via augmented reality. There are also three short films by the local group Total Refusal, which takes an unusual route through the world of computer games and exposes social injustices, among other things.