:-Oz

Spiraling through simulations, halfway between the real world and the big nothing; dead and alive at the same time. Here is where we are engaged, now, inside the pregnant monster of possible futures. Here is where global techno-science digests everything into a docile mass. Here, where 3D printers, equipped with the supernatural powers of plastic, condense still-human imagination into material reality.

How do we deal with issues of digital reality in an analog medium such as theater? What happens at the interface between the physical and the virtual world? What is hidden under these shiny surfaces? What is the political and ecological reality behind these high-tech simulations? Based on the work of the fictional artist Dorothy, O-Team embarks on a research for an artistic language to reflect our present superimposed by digital images and calculated textures. Inspired by motifs from L. Frank Baum’s “The Wizard of Oz”, the project asks how our perception of bodies and biographies changes. What do virtual bodies dream of? Which forces work on them? Can we speak of places when there is no ground? Together with the visual artist Fabian Hesse, the figure-player Antje Töpfer and the musician Ha$i, O-Team develops a genre-crossing theater event between documentary, discussion and musical, between exhibition and performance, between reality and simulation.

The story of :-Oz aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out. Yet the old time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as “historical” in the children’s library; for the time has come for a series of newer “wonder tales” in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale. L. Frank Baum, Introduction to „The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”, 1900

a project from O-Team feat. Antje Töpfer, Fabian Hesse and Ha$i

director: Samuel Hof, stage and costumes: Nina Malotta, visual arts: Fabian Hesse, Musik: Ha$i, puppeteering: Antje Töpfer, acting: Folkert Dücker, dramaturgy: Antonia Beermann, sound & video: Pedro Pinto, production & grafics: Markus Nießner

Dec 2017, Theater Rampe, Stuttgart
Feb 2018, Schwere Reiter, Munich
March 2018, FITZ, Stuttgart
April 2019, Stuttgarter Theatre Award „6 Tage frei“
May 2019, 21st international. Figuren.theater.festival Erlangen

a production by O-Team in cooperation with Theater Rampe, FITZ! Stuttgart and Pathos Munich.

Tanz- und Theaterpreis der Stadt Stuttgart und des Landes Baden-Württemberg

Funded by Fonds Darstellende Künste, Landesverband freier Theater Baden-Württemberg e.V. aus Mitteln des Ministeriums für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst des Landes Baden-Württemberg, the City of Stuttgart and Bezirk Oberbayern. With the friendly support of Karle Recycling.