The special experience that theater provides, certainly includes the multi-layered fanning out of perspectives and a playful challenge to our perception and evaluation. In this respect, it is perhaps particularly suitable to engage with digital technologies, which have long since begun to change our individual as well as collective experience and processing of reality in ways that are still largely unforeseeable: to explore what aesthetic means the possibilities of artificial intelligence or augmented realities can make available to the performing arts. But also to make an important contribution to gaining a conscious attitude towards these possibilities and to sensitize to the changes, challenges and opportunities that go hand in hand with them.

With this in mind, the Theater an der Ruhr has been working with the Akademie für Theater und Digitalität and the MIREVI working group (Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences) since 2022 to test a theater of extended realities and research. In addition to the aesthetic consequences of the use of digital technologies, the forms and formats that such use could enable were examined artistically and scientifically, as well as the influence of extended realities on the presence and live experience of the theater situation created jointly by performers and spectators. This has resulted in a large number of plays, installations and experiences, which we will be presenting to you from August 28 to 31. Some works have already been shown at the Theater an der Ruhr, others can now be experienced for the first time. Together, they convey an extraordinary impression of the rich artistic encounters between analog and virtual realities, but also of the innovative work of a special research project.