The Beyond Gravity Festival is a biennial, interdisciplinary festival for digital arts, dance, and performance. The second edition in 2025 will be a collaboration between Theater im Depot, the Academy for Theater and Digitality in Dortmund, and the Kulturforum Witten.
The festival program in 2025 will include four world premieres, a guest performance, a residency program entitled Decolonizing the Digital, and a symposium on the same topic.
Decolonizing the digital means that we want to take a close look at where and how digital technologies cement or even reinforce power inequalities. The aim is to make these inequalities visible, to talk about them – and to devise artistic ways to change them or counteract them.
Teams from the so-called Global South are invited to collaborate with regional developers to create new works, which will also premiere during the festival.
These projects explore new connections between different types of knowledge and technologies – knowledge from different cultures and with different perspectives. A central question is: How can we design technologies in such a way that they incorporate many perspectives and worldviews?
We will deepen these artistic explorations over two days of the festival at our symposium Beyond Gravity Reflections, which combines the topics of digitality, decolonization, and artistic research. In keynotes, lecture performances, project presentations, and moderated discussions, various international perspectives will be brought into intensive dialogue.
In addition, the festival will showcase dance pieces and installations from the Ruhr region, Germany, and other countries around the world. In terms of content, this section focuses on two major thematic areas: the use of artificial intelligence in artistic production processes and the development of hybrid performance situations between digital and physical spaces, bodies, and fictions.
Participating artists include:
Angie Abdilla (AUS), Maria Luisa Angulo (SLV/F), Laura Cugusi (I), Kiran Kumār (IND), Viviane Maghela (CMR), MIRA - Julia Riera (D), Enya Obert (D), Norbert Pape (F/D), Die Ruhrgebieterinnen (D), Marlon Barrios Solano (VEN/USA), Simon Speiser (ECU/D), Studio Oleomingus (IND), Eric Takukam (CMR), Laura Waltz (F/D), machine yearning / Nada Zanhour (LBN), Federico Zurani (I)
All further information, including tickets, can be found here:
https://theaterimdepot.de/beyond-gravity
If you have any questions about the program, dates, or other contact requests, please contact presse@theaterimdepot.de.
Press photos and texts can also be found here:
https://theaterimdepot.de/de/service/presse
Beyond Gravity 2025 is organized in cooperation with Theater im Depot and Kulturforum Witten. Sponsored by Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft Nordrhein-Westfalen as part of the funding program Neue Künste Ruhr, with funds from LWL Kulturstiftung, NRW Landesbüro, Kulturbüro Dortmund, Kulturstiftung Dortmund and Kunststiftung NRW.
en