Fast Forward

This year FAST FORWARD will appear in university course content for the first time. In cooperation with the Dresden University of the Fine Arts, there will be seminar in the Applied Theatre Studies and Production Dramaturgy department, in which the students will visit the festival in real life and online and investigate how the pandemic changes a festival and which new situations the artists, organisers and audience find themselves in under certain circumstances. They will also explore questions about the contextualisation of the productions presented: Where is art located? What positions does it occupy?

There will also be a special collaboration between the supplementary course theatre in the department of German Studies at the TU Dresden and the department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Aberystwyth, Wales. Under the guidance of Matthias Spaniel (Dresden) and Louise Ritchie (Aberystwyth), in “long-distance relationships” the students will research how people share experiences when they are in different places. This experiment on the “transport” of experiences and presences in asynchronous spaces and times is also cultural and social survival training.

At the Institute for Media Culture and Theatre at the University of Cologne, they will also be taking a look at FAST FORWARD from afar – as a practical exercise in media on the practice of curatorial work in times of a lack of co-presence and physical distance, under the instruction of Dorothea Volz. A discussion between the Cologne students with the students from the University of Fine Arts is planned for after the festival.