Transhuman Performance Installation
100'
2025
Premiered 19.9.2025 Maillon Strasbourg (Musica Festival)



Program Notes
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.


Team
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 and Character Development: Felina Levits
Costume, Robotics & Set Assistance: Esther Heltschl
Technical Direction: Lars Kracht
Lighting Design: Diego Muhr
Production Management: Gregory Popov, Elisabeth Brunmayr
Robot Arm Direction: Clara Brezinka
Direction Assistance: Ludmilla Mercier
Musical Development: Grame Lyon, Max Bruckert
Design Of Robotic Prostheses: Neue Farben (Paul Geisler, Fabian Nitschowski, David Unland)
Conception Robotics and Programming : Kyrillos Adeeb, Inderawes Khalil
Conception Automatisation and Programming : Dr. Mohammad Sadeghi


Production / Cooperation
Funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation). Funded by the Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media). Kompositionsauftrag von Kampnagel, finanziert durch Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung. Funded by: ZEIT STIFTUNG BUCERIUS, Kampnagel Hamburg, Festival Musica, ligeti zentrum Hamburg, IRCAM Paris, GRAME Lyon, Claussen-Simon-Stiftung, Proberaumfonds des Dachverbands freie darstellende Künste Hamburg (DfdK)