About the Production
What will our future look like, starting with this present now? In a time of constant uncertainties, in her new work Dragana Bulut explores how people use different strategies in order to predict and also shape their future. Together on stage with a semi-humanoid robot, she looks into the tension between determinism, free will and choice-making. Thereby she also refers to the influential but almost forgotten play R.U.R. by Karel Čapek, who introduced the term robot. Using tools of classic science fiction, the performance time travels through the temporality of its own production within the contemporary art market. Is the future already determined by the present? If so, what happens when we sacrifice the present for the construction of the future?
The Author
DRAGANA BULUT works with choreography and performance. In her choreographic practice she treats the theater as a place for social gathering, questioning the different configurations of aesthetics, economics, emotions and their entanglement. These social choreographies make transparent various, often overlooked processes of how society choreographs our behavior. She has a MA in Solo/Dance/Authorship studies, from the University of Arts Berlin. Since 2005 she has developed her own choreographic work, which has been presented in different contexts (including: HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Tanzquartier Wien, Pact Zollverein Essen, Museum Folkwang Essen etc.). She made her first dance steps at the Ballet School Lujo Davičo, and she developed her first choreographic works with the support of the Station service for contemporary dance Belgrade. Currently, she is a PhD research fellow at Oslo National Academy of the Arts.
From the Reviews
“Bulut gathers here a variety of discourses ‑ on “Labour” and the exploitation of workers without basic rights (the robot as a symbol of all subalterns, without whose labour the capitalist system cannot be kept running), on the offshoots of the Anthropocene, This is a very entertaining, critical, but also thought-provoking show, which never drifts off into trivia or fatalism in between, and focuses on questions of determinism, participation, surveillance and last but not least democracy (another invention from the last century).”
Alexandra Hennig, tanzschreiber.de
“Can a machine cross borders? With ease the performance touches on numerous discourses in the philosophy of technology.”
Hannes Soltau, tagesspiegel.de
