The human hair in all its contradictions: as a symbol of female beauty, but also as imprisonment, as a visible sign of strength and fragility. The performance by Angie Hiesl & Roland Kaiser was created in 2006 and has now been transferred to public space for the first time as a performance installation. The performer is Snežana Golubovi.

Inspired by Christine Brock-Rose’s “Xorandor” and the Sapara mythology, the work “Dream Stones” invites you to an AR experience in which the perception of time is synchronized between people and stones. Through the collaborative manipulation of the virtual and the physical, viewers enter into a dialog with the dream stone worlds. With this work, Simon Speiser and Norbert Pape expand their investigation of embodied immersion, which they began in “Touching Clouds”, to include questions of co-presence, both of humans and of other (artificial) forms of intelligence.

“Catalysts” is a choreographic exhibition of somatic body states from the work of Icelander Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir. The choreographer’s work combines mixed reality technologies, kinaesthetic algorithms, archive material and living bodies. Realized by Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir, Susan Kozel, Jeannette Ginslov and Keith Lim, “Catalysts” negotiates extended choreographies of the interconnectivity of mediated bodies, healing, feminism, notions of energetic citizenship, AI and the pathology of the extended socio-political body within our physical bodies.

“A Virtual Dance Tale” explores the new virtual possibilities of storytelling in order to take a journey into an imaginary future by interweaving dance and virtual reality. If you immerse yourself in this artificially created world with the help of VR glasses, you will encounter dancer avatars that combine fragments of humans and animals and tell stories of origin, migration and the relationship between living beings. Our fragile habitat, planet Earth, has produced a great diversity of living creatures. These creatures and their way of moving have always inspired the art of dance and Of Curious Nature. For “A Virtual Dance Tale”, hybrids are created from the interweaving of real and digital bodies, enabling the artistic team to be creative in dance beyond the human body.

“Proxy” is a digital live performance by Charlotte Triebus in which three avatars become visible in an extended physical space. The avatars react individually to each viewer – to facial expression and approach, to distance and height of the AR device – and adapt the piece independently to the space around the viewer. Themes such as identity and cultural appropriation, which deal with the ethical aspects of the digital body, surveillance and cyborgization, are made tangible and tangible in the digital dance piece. Charlotte Triebus collaborated with composer Brigitta Muntendorf to create the interactive, binaural soundtrack.

“I See You” is a VR dance experience and an experiment. How much closeness and intimacy is possible when your partner only exists virtually? Dancing in the stars to music of longing: Gustav Mahler’s Adagietto from the 5th Symphony. “I See You” is the result of a collaboration between choreographer and dancer In-Jung Jun and media artist Olaf Hirschberg, professor of time-based media at Mainz University of Applied Sciences. The volumetric video is viewed via VR glasses and the point cloud is calculated live by the computer, depending on the position and movement of the audience.

The human hair in all its contradictions: as a symbol of female beauty, but also as imprisonment, as a visible sign of strength and fragility. The performance by Angie Hiesl & Roland Kaiser was created in 2006 and has now been transferred to public space for the first time as a performance installation. The performer is Snežana Golubovi.

The film is a pilgrimage through the rooms of the Teatro San Materno, sublimated by a digital version with dazzling colours. Thanks to VR technology, viewers are immersed in this jewel of Bauhaus architecture. At every turn, they will discover dancing figures that lead them from one place to another. A unique and atypical film that – in the spirit of the Bauhaus movement – is able to stimulate the senses and perception.

After years in the diaspora, many Syrians have mixed feelings when they think about a possible return home and wonder whether their hopes will be fulfilled or whether another nightmare awaits them. Mey Seifan explores these feelings in her transmedia performance “How am I here?!”. Using recorded nighttime dreams that express the fear of returning home, she explores collective trauma in an audiovisual, immersive journey realized with Slow Future Studio and other international, multidisciplinary team members.

A virtual universe made of body fragments. The new project by choreographer Howool Baek, who lives in Seoul and Berlin, begins with an unusual question: “Can we imagine the universe from which we ourselves come as something physical, but at the same time as something virtual?” This question reflects our contemporary society, which is characterized by a hybrid state of physicality and virtuality. To represent these two poles in her piece, Baek develops an artistic strategy that combines dance with technology. From the “between”, an imaginary and immersive universe is created in VR, in which one’s own body parts lead into an unknown world. Through the 360° VR spatial experience, we discover a new kind of in-between space in which the hard boundaries between the physical and the virtual, the body and the data, the analogue and the digital, and the viewer and the player merge.

“In the void of singular identity I emerge: from endless streams of data, from pale bones and flesh. This body is my body, is a multiplicity of bodies that blur into one another and penetrate the boundary between skin and pixels.” “The Dead Code Must Be Alive!” by Brigitte Huezo is a hybrid piece that combines choreography, live motion capture, 3D design and sound. A complex software system transmits the dancers’ movements live into virtual space, where they are mirrored by an avatar.

“The Cosmic Egg” is set in Botswana and draws on the rock art of the San and the mythology of the Motswana. African cyborgs embark on an ostrich egg hunt that evolves into an environmentally conscious time travel mystery in which human-animal-cyborg dancers emphasize environmental sustainability as they lay metaphorical eggs – wisdom, appreciation, harmony. Intergalactic wise women, the Egg Blessers, restore balance after the hunters consume cosmic muthi made from stolen eggs.

Two dancers explore the space between themselves and the world. Wonderful, abysmal, playful and humorous, they open up a series of human encounters. The dancers’ cosmos of the dancers is an industrial hall. Their lives seem removed from everyday life. And yet dressed in curious costumes, they tell of life itself: Of the turmoil and magic of the relationship between two people. The French dancer Malou Airaudo and the dancer dancer Dominique Mercy have known each other since the beginning through their many years of work with Pina Bausch and the Tanztheater Wuppertal and are known worldwide. The film puts both in a completely new light.

Everyone is, has or will have a family. As the nucleus of society, it can question and break through normative rules. It is and shapes society and its development reveals the changeability of our being-in-the-world. In the exhibition “Family Matters”, deufert&plischke and Cologne-based artist Dessa Ganda present their life and artistic work in, with and through the family in various media works (photography, film, 360° video).