Vögel

TASK

An LED wall on the revolving stage is to be used in a variety of ways at the Berliner Ensemble.

Robert Schuster staged "Birds" by Wajdi Mouawad at the Berliner Ensemble in spring 2022. The love story between Eitan and Wahida becomes an emotional family drama that raises fundamental political, religious and ethical questions. This multitude of often parallel themes to be portrayed was to be conveyed in a supportive manner with a revolving stage and two rolling walls, one of which was made of LEDs.

The task for the video performance artist Bahadir Hamdemir, who was engaged at the Berliner Ensemble, was to bring the LED wall to life with video art and technology.

SOLUTION

In "Vögel", the moving LED wall became the digital hub of the production.

Whether it was a live recording of a subplot, club visuals, a TV news broadcast or other dramaturgical elements, with the help of the StageDesigner the LED wall could be impressively multi-layered.

During the production phase, Bahadir Hamdemir worked with director Robert Schuster to design the video performance for the three-hour play. According to the textbook, Hamdemir transferred the performance into the tabular system of the StageDesigner playlist tool by defining so-called "clip triggers" as video cues. Using a standard computer, StageDesigner output the content to the LED wall, which became the main component of the stage set.

The space behind the back wall became the setting for the subplots, whose footage was played out live on the other side of the LED wall toward the audience. The live videos were recorded with a smartphone camera connected to the StageDesigner via NDI. While the smartphone camera acted as an intimate glimpse into a subplot, the pre-produced video recordings of the characters were a glimpse into the inner images of the protagonists*.

A recurring element was the dissolving of the frame at the end of each video recording via an effect in the software "TouchDesigner". Hamdemir used the flexible StageDesigner as a central control tool and forwarded the visual output to TouchDesigner via the Spout application for video streaming. There, the recordings were immediately processed with an effect and played out again via StageDesigner according to the set cues.

Applications

StageDesigner
Playlist
NDI
Spout

Credits

Regie: Robert Schuster (Director)
Bühne/Kostüm: Sascha Gross (Stage/Costume)
Musik: Jörg Gollasch (Music)
Video: Bahadir Hamdemir (Video)
Licht: Benjamin Schwigon (Light)
Dramaturgie: Karolin Trachte, Marion Hirte (Dramaturgy)

Wilhelm Müller (Photography)