Meeting Strangers
Smartphones have become a part of ourselves because we are part of them: They store photos, videos, music and memories. They are our recall in our hands. War and taking refuge infuse them with even more importance: Mobile phones bear witness to events and remind us of lives that do no longer exist in their previous forms. In a labyrinth, the audience encounters youthful performers. They left their homes very recently and developed story-telling from the audio-visual material stored on their mobile phones. Ingo Toben and his team continue a series of theatre formats that they develop in collective authoring with young migrants, enabling unusual encounters between performers and the audience.
Regie/Künstlerische Gesamtleitung: Ingo Toben, Musikalische Leitung: Christoph Grothaus, Text und Dramaturgie: Anke Platon, Bühne: Joachim Brodin, Produktionsleitung und visuelle Medien Kamila Kurczewski. Koproduktion des FFT, gefördert durch das Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes NRW und das Kulturamt der Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf
Ingo Toben, director, lives in Düsseldorf. He studied German philology and media sciences (M.A.) at Heinrich Heine University. In 2003, he received the Support Grant Award for Performing Arts of the State Capital of Düsseldorf. He has been developing experimental live formats with children and youths at FFT Düsseldorf since 2007. Together with a cast and team of interdisciplinary artists, he creates stagings veering between performance art, concerts, story-telling, film and installation. Ingo Toben perceives the performers on his projects as authors. Improvisation and research are, accordingly, among the main forms employed in an extended understanding of performers, inviting children and youths to tread new paths within artistic practice.