Contrasting Programme

The FIDENA festival (Puppet Theatre of the Nations) will focus on the theme of “digitality” in 2020. Based on the motto “Contrasting Programme”, the festival organisers have invited productions which innovatively explore the dichotomies of analogue and digital, light and shadow, black and white, and animate and inanimate. The festival is initiating collaborations with artists who work with digital media in order to present audiences with enlightening examples of links between the analogue and digital. The Shanghai Puppet Theater will present one of the highlights of the programme with the German premiere of the legend of “Mulan”. The production combines traditional Chinese shadow play with the innovative application of digital media. The group “half past selber schuld” will perform a new production in which they develop fictional technologies and discuss them with experts. Light is the central focus of the production “P=Ui” performed by young artists from France. The piece by the Japanese artist Miyako Kurotani highlights some of the central dichotomies of eastern Asia: old and young, animate and inanimate, and yin and yang. Her solo performance at the festival will also be its German premiere. The artistic programme will be accompanied by a multiple-day symposium on “Digitality and Performance”, developed in cooperation with instructors and students in theatre studies, the “Scenic Research” master’s programme, and puppet theatres in Erlangen, Bochum and Stuttgart.

Artistic director: Annette Dabs-Baucks
Artists/participants: Miyako KUROTANI, Shanghai Puppet Theater Troupe, Dries Verhoeven, Cie Etcétera, Esnam - Institut International de la Marionnette, Half Past Selber Schuld, Scheinzeitmenschen, Why Not Kollektiv/ Kalakutta Soul