Future Lab 1.0

Theater piece | 2017

Theater an der Parkaue, which is Germany's largest theatre focused on young audiences, is located near our studio in Lichtenberg, East Berlin. During the fall holidays Niklas and I got the chance to collaborate with them in a week-long production exploring the theme of future. Altogether about 20 children aged 10-13 years participated in the project. The outcome of the week was an interactive theatre piece, where parents and friends were invited as the audience.

Headpiece DIY materials Working on props

Building props

We started each day together at the theatre, warming up and spreading into different groups and tasks. Our workshop space served as a DIY laboratory, where the kids came to build props and costumes, while the other groups focused on developing scenes, characters and the set design. The aim was to create an interactive performance.


In our DIY laboratory we first revamped the black overalls, which we had all received on the first day. Then we moved on to bigger props. We discussed how humans will be in the future and this led to the idea of building a maintenance vehicle, that would support bodily functions. We had a joystick-controlled electric wheelchair in the basement, which was perfect for this purpose. Additionally, two grandma-style shopping cars were turned into trailers. The first trailer contained mesmerising plasma globes and provided an energy reserve of the people of the future. The second one resembled a plastic flower aquarium and was there to offer clean air, presuming that this would be scarce in the future.

Decorating plasma ball wagon Costumes Making a transport cart

Several smaller props were also produced during the intensive week: cool helmets and hats, more decoration for the overalls, hula-hoop scanners, a time capsule and wizardly wands for the kids, who guided the guests through the performance. Our studio was covered in DIY materials, with leftover tape pieces and other trash continuously sticking to our socks.

Performance snapshot Plasma ball station Bringing out the time capsule

Performance

It was worth all the mess and effort, as the final performance turned out spectacular. All the pieces came together in an interesting way. As you can see on the video, the audience could walk around the stage and explore different stations. The idea was that the children had visited the future and came to tell about it. The final parade outside the theater led by the glowing maintenance car was quite a highlight. With this ceremonial drive we transported the time capsule into its final destination in the park. It contains wishes for the future and will be excavated and investigated again ten years after its burial, which is in 2027.

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Thank you!

Special thanks to Sarah K., Sarah W. and Dominik, Jona, Emelie und Lena for making all the parts of this project to click together so fantastically. We want to also dearly thank the participating kids, who worked with us and made such a cool set of props. Our car pilot Anton deserves a special mention for manoeuvring the challenging vehicle beautifully.