Premiere September 2025 at Festival Musica Strasbourg Next Performances: September 19-21 Festival Musica Strasbourg
ETERNAL DAWN is a lab for bio-modification for the improved and altered bodies of the future. Witness the children of the future in an unsupervised evolution. Here physical bodies are assembled and taken apart, disembodied and connected again. Discover how the posthuman self is broken down into its components and assembled anew.
The Eternal Dawn Handbook Mission Statement claims that no final / complete body exists. We are fluid, hackable and extendable. A being is not born complete. It is a starting container to be filled, extended and modded. The border of ourselves is not the skin. Through hardware and mental connection we form supra-beings. Except the soft border of the self. Extension into acquired parts is our default mode of Interfacing the world. We are not top-down entities. We are the interplay of sovereign parts. Autonomy to the components.
ETERNAL DAWN is a full-length music theatre project on the subject of transhumanism by Alexander Schubert, co-produced and performed by the Decoder Ensemble, in collaboration with a wide interdisciplinary artistic and scientific team. In a futuristic setting, performers act as a group of individual cyborgs with the help of technical body extensions, bio-modifications and sensors. These actions and interactions determine both the theatrical content of the piece and the musical form of the work.
The work aims to make the discourse on transhumanism tangible and depict its ambiguity. The technological starting point opens up questions about humanity, control, agency, self and body images.
composition, direction | Alexander Schubert Decoder Ensemble | Leopold Hurt, Andrej Koroliov, Sonja Lena Schmid, Jonathan Shapiro performance | Michael Mahar, Si-Ying Fung, Tasha Hess-Neustadt
scenography | Christian Wiehle choreography | Colette Sadler costumes | Felina Levits technical direction | Lars Kracht lighting design | Diego Muhr production | Gregory (Grischa) Popov, Elisabeth Brunmayr production assistants | Clara Brezinka, Ludmilla Mercier musical development | GRAME Lyon, Max Bruckert design of orthoses and prostheses | Neue Farben (Paul Geisler and Fabian Nitschowski)
