Futur3

Three theatre makers are simultaneously expecting offspring and are looking for a name for their joint theatre projects - "Futur3" is born, founded in autumn 2003 by André Erlen, Stefan H. Kraft and Klaus Maria Zehe as a platform for their theatre work in Cologne. Even with their first productions, they look for performance venues outside of fixed theatres, turn the city itself into a stage and often stage with elaborate logistics towards a specific - public or private - space.
They have always worked collectively. An attitude that, by the way, definitely includes the audience: what is required is an active audience that takes on the roles that are dramaturgically assigned to them - be they delegates at a Middle East peace conference or guests at a funeral service. The participatory moment includes that theatre is also celebrated as a ritual. Eating and drinking together are part of Futur3 productions. In this way, the audience and the theatre-makers enter into a direct dialogue about the themes of Futur3, which are always political: war, unemployment, homelessness and gentrification, utopias (how do we want to live?). But also taboos, dealing with death, family, love, one's own biography. Experiences, facts, opinions and fiction intermingle when the condensates of the often very detailed research phases meet the actors' improvisations in the rehearsal process. Often the rehearsal results are condensed into literary form through the work of authors.

"Of genes and other coincidences" narrated by André Erlen, Stefan H. Kraft and Klaus Maria Zehe

Futur3 not only seeks transdisciplinary collaboration with authors, musicians, dancers, scientists, street workers and undertakers, but also internationality: working contacts, festival invitations and co-productions with theatre artists in Ukraine, Poland, the USA, Italy, Israel, Singapore, Switzerland and Belgium have enriched the work of recent years.
Formally, Futur3 constantly rethinks theatre, questions it and reinvents it as a theatrical happening or walk-in installation. The dialectic of playing and watching in the moment of performance is complemented by discursive formats that turn theatre into a place of social debate that is not only aesthetic.