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MIDNIGHT MOVIE
- by Eve Leigh
Anhaltisches Theater Dessau I Premiere September 2022 / German premiere
"Midnight Movie takes us into the world of real madness without moralizing. Tough, but good."
Andreas Montag, Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, September 26, 2022
"The rift between psychological dissolution on the internet and the longing for perfect physicality becomes a tensile test that Bangerter explosively condenses. […]"
Roland H. Dippel, Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, September 16, 2022
"As the popcorn releases its distinctive aroma, the audience in the nearly lightless room regroups. Suddenly, the boundaries between acting and reality are broken down."
Andreas Behling, Volksstimme, September 16, 2022
How can we overcome the limitations of our own bodies? What distinguishes digital experiences from real experiences? Is there even a difference?
In the endlessness of a long night, a whole world opens up next to the bed. A woman suffers from insomnia and takes refuge in the infinite vastness of virtual reality. In the open windows of the browser, a student wanders through a ghost hotel, a teenager falls into the clutches of a stranger, and a man searches for pictures of his brother in a Ukrainian prison. While her boyfriend sleeps beside her, the parallel worlds blur into a universe of digital ghosts that can be approached and succumbed to without a physical body. But will she find her way back when morning dawns?
The text by young author Eve Leigh, which premiered to great acclaim at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2019, is a masterfully composed and highly entertaining digital ghost dance that tells us a lot about our times. It is not only in the months of the pandemic that the internet has become a digital counterworld more than ever before. In Midnight Movie, it becomes a single, infinitely ramified continent for the protagonist and the audience to discover. And it marks the debut of a young author who is introducing herself to the German theater scene for the first time in Dessau.
Surtitles will be provided.
Stage rights Rowohlt Theater Verlag, Hamburg
Directed by Rebekka Bangerter
Stage and costume design Samuel Herger
Music and Sound Michael Lohmann
Video Robert Boehnel
Dramaturgy Sahar Rezaei
With Josephine Nahrstedt
HORROR VACUI
- a live typed performance in collaboration with an AI
DAS Theatre, Amsterdam I Theater Monty, Antwerp
2023
The curtain opens. A cursor is blinking on an empty screen. Only the clicking of the keyboard is breaking the silence as we embark on a sensual walk through the forest.
Rebekka is writing a performance, exploring the power of language and the politicallity of authorship and creativity. But while she is still typing and thinking, text generating AI’s have found their way into our everyday use, creating much more text than her - in much less time. Producing text has become posthuman.
What does it mean to create in a time of constant technological updates? Can we still allow ourselves to get lost? To read between the lines and slow down?
Inspired by techno-feminist perspectives and writing strategies, horror vacui invites you on a humorous, poetic and critical journey on the entanglement of human, text, machine - from female typewriters to disembodied AI’s. What reality do we write with the tools we create? Who is writing? - And who keeps doing the work in the background?
An evening between edited and deleted thoughts, dominating datasets, collective imagination and our own bodily presence.
Premiere October 2023, Theater Monty Antwerp
Research Phase: DAS Theatre, 2022 / 2023
Concept / Text / Performance: Rebekka Bangerter
Dramaturgy: Henriette Festerling
Scenography and light design: Hendrik Walther
Mentoring: Joachim Robbrecht
Eye Exterior: Emke Idema
Costume Advice: Daphne De Winkel
Consulting Isadora: Chun Shing Au / Jimmy Grima
Technical Support: Durante Van Kuijk
With special thanks to Edit Kaldor
© rebekka bangerter