an immersive
drive-in cinema music theater
Autocalypse
by Bauer ✦ Herzog ✦ Møller ✦ Weyrauch
The 20th century came upon us with its avalanche of metal and thus transported us into the age of the autocalypse: like zombies we are rolling through cities and landscapes, soon also driven by the car itself. The experience of the world, medialized through front and rear windows.
Autocalypse is the playful examination of the contradictory relationship between man and car/machine at the interface of music theater, immersive performance and installation in a drive-in theater. As part of a process grant from the Fonds Darstellende Künste, the Copenhagen composer and singer Mathias Monrad Møller and the theater makers Romy Weyrauch (Dresden), Chris Herzog and Alexander Bauer (peira, Vienna and Leipzig) come together.
Together they take a critical look at the car as a future and discontinued model, as a key product of capitalist production. The car remains present as a revenant and continues to have positive connotations. This is also made clear by the rescue fantasies of techno-optimist Elon Musk, whose visions reveal a world in which humans and cars once again live together in reconciliation. Does the new appear here primarily in the guise of the old? Is the car like a zombie that - long dead - continues to walk the earth? With reference to products of the culture industry - especially horror films - they examine the extent to which our everyday actions are not actually scary.
✦ Soundtrack
Autocalpyse ✦
✦ Testreihe mit Kontaktmikrofonen✦
The audience arrives in their own cars and parks in the stage set by the set design collective GRIF (Ditte Tygesen and Mikkel Rostrup, Copenhagen). It sets the car radios to predetermined frequencies and looks at an acting stage and a screen. The evening begins as one would expect at a drive-in movie theater: with popcorn, movie trailers, good vibes. But gradually things shift; dubbing voices are out of synch, performers from the film become visible between the cars, one's own car begins to speak... The discomfort with technology, that is becoming more and more independent, turns into a staged loss of control.
✦ Testreihe mit Kontaktmikrofonen✦
✦ Horror music ✦
✦ Crash installation ✦
✦ Monster voice ✦
✦ original images of cars in flames ✦
To create the AI-generated images for "Autocalypse" we used a visual AI algorithm
(www.crayon.com) fed with large collection of car and zombie pictures. This algorithm was designed to generate new images that combined the features of cars and zombies from grotesque prompts such as “Hyper realistic horror zombie car eating another car in a drive-in cinema”.
✦ AI generated Images ✦
By challenging the AI model with more and more grotesque requests, it learned how to create its own unique visuals. The process involved the model generating different variations of car-zombie images by using a mix of random inputs and words and then refining the outputs. The result ended as a gloomy and disturbing moodboard of a ghostly drive-in cinema
✦ AI generated Images ✦
✦ Arrangements of cars ✦
✦ visualization of the sqaure of Hellerau ✦
The concept behind the costumes in "Autocalypse" delves into the transformation of cars into living entities, exploring the intriguing amalgamation of man and machine.
✦ costume drafts ✦
By extracting materials from the cars, such as lacquer, leather, gasoline, and smoke, these elements have been translated into costumes and props. The focus lies in investigating surfaces and decay processes, capturing the essence of the cars' zombie-like state while emphasizing their perpetual existence. In this production, the performers have surpassed or even replaced the cars' original function, blurring the boundaries between human and machine. The costume design itself is a study of textures, drawing inspiration from the textures found in automobiles. The result is a representation where man and machine have seamlessly melded together.
✦ costume drafts ✦
✦ costume drafts ✦
What disappears in the rear window of the car against the horizon is the first reality, space and object of experience, in favor of the rapid change of place, the sense of things and substances that become signs and instructions. As Kafka foresaw, the allure of high speeds degrades identity in favor of conformity: in the end, cinema, kinetics, put a uniform on the eye.
Paul Virilio ✦ Text: Fahrzeug ✦ in: Aisthesis
✦ Proben ✦
✦ Aufbau der Probensituation ✦
Just as the BRIDGE is a ROAD that crosses the river, the road is a bridge that crosses the forest, all roads are bridges, points that have become dashes, straight lines that continue endlessly. [...] A little like that architect for whom the straight line and the right angle were absolute signs of civilization, but geomorphology was the primordial chaos, it seems that the popularization, that is, the alleged democratization of high speeds has placed the rigid straight line far above everything tortuous, above the ominous figure of the coiling snake and the curve that slows down the speed of travel and makes it more dangerous by centrifugal force; but this resurrects a mythical, a mythological climate, teeming again with dragons, sea serpents and labyrinthine passages - figures of a world crossed, passed through.
Paul Virilio ✦ Text: Fahrzeug ✦ in: Aisthesis
✦ Probefahrt im E-Auto ✦
✦ Proben ✦
For Virilio, speed logically leads to the Internet and ultimately to the cyborg, which uses implants to break the link between space and time. For this reason, the car must become more than a means of transportation. It will become a kind of control center. Driving is being automated so that there is time for something else: communication. The telephone, Internet and the subject's biometric data will converge in the car. The car becomes a computer on wheels. It is a transitional object until the last obstacles of matter are removed. In this sense, virtual reality and automated driving are working at the same interface. Devices are being brought ever closer to the body and it is only a matter of time before they are implanted in the body.
✦ Recherche in der Gläsernen Manufaktur Dresden ✦
✦ Dialog Crash LipSync ✦
✦ Romys Nachtfahrt ✦
✦ Fahrende Pfauen ✦
Artistic Team
Romy Weyrauch studied "Drama" in Exeter/GB and "Cultural Studies and Aesthetic Practice" in Hildesheim until 2011, specializing in theater & performance. Productions, whether stage plays, video-, audowalks, installations have been performed at HELLERAU Dresden, Staatsschauspiel Dresden, tjg Dresden, theaterdiscounter Berlin, FFT Düsseldorf, Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin, Mainfranken Theater Würzburg, Segal Theatre and The Tank New York.
Mathias Monrad Møller is a composer and singer. He was a member of the Thomanerchor Leipzig and studied composition at the HfMDK Frankfurt/Main, singing at the Hochschule "Hanns Eisler" in Berlin and at the Royal Danish Academy of Music. His works have been performed by the Norwegian Radio Symphony Orchestra or the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra, among others, and have been broadcast on BR, HR, SWR, WDR, Deutschlandfunk Kultur as well as Norwegian and Danish Radio.
Alexander Bauer works in the fields of performance art, theater and interdisciplinary art. Studied applied theater in Giessen, at L'École nationale supérieure d'arts de Paris-Cergy and at Ashkal Alwan Beirut. Among others, he co-directed "Die Policey - Versuch über die Sicherheit" (Ringlokschuppen Mülheim) with the collective KGI, and directed the play "Das verkommene Land" (Schaubühne Lindenfels, Leipzig).
Chris Herzog was a member of the Thomanerchor, studied applied theater in Giessen and at the Ashkal Alwan Beirut. Since 2015 he lives and works in Leipzig as a freelance director and realizes performance, radio play, socio-cultural and interdisciplinary projects in Germany and abroad. Recent projects include 'Death Spells' (zeitraumexit Mannheim, D-Caf Cairo), 'Das verkommene Land', and the online festival 'Tender Absence' (2020/21).
GRIF is a Copenhagen based scenographer duo. The mission of GRIF is to expand artistic approaches, methods and forms of collaboration in the field of scenography. GRIF is formed by scenographer and costume designer Ditte Marie Walter Tygesen & scenographer and architect Mikkel Sebastian Rostrup. Both graduated from the Danish School of Performing Arts in 2020. Both Ditte and Mikkel individually received the Wilhelm Hansen Foundation‘s honorary scholarship 2021.
Thanks to the support of the Fonds Darstellende Küsnte and the Festspielhaus Hellerau, we were able to conduct an initial research and rehearsal phase from Sept. 26-Oct. 9, 2022, the results of which are also documented here.
Another two-week rehearsal phase is planned for May/June 2023, in which the drafts and approaches found will be further elaborated.
We aim to have the premiere in early summer 2024.