Fortunate Shortcuts by Marie Meyer at the Impulse Festival
For the Impulse Festival for Performance, Theatre & Dance from June 3 to June 21, 2026, the Impulse jury selected ten productions from 500 submissions. We warmly congratulate Marie Meyer, whose work Fortunate Shortcuts is among them. The production premiered on June 13, 2025 at Produktionshaus NAXOS.
In Fortunate Shortcuts, an AI takes over the direction of a musical object theatre, and the stage set becomes its ensemble: a self-trained algorithm controls the use of music, light, and motors and choreographs the stage scenery—anew every evening. Aesthetic disruptions, in which the AI’s decisions run counter to our usual ways of seeing, are inevitable. Baroque theatre machinery meets machine learning. Gloria in excelsis Deo ex Machina!
CONCEPT, ARTISTIC DIRECTION, STAGE DESIGN, AI TRAINING: Marie Meyer
DIRECTING, CHOREOGRAPHY: Artificial Intelligence
STAGE DESIGN COLLABORATION, DRAMATURGY, PROGRAMMING AND DIGITAL INTERFACE: Declan Hurley
ROBOTICS, LIGHTING DESIGN: Simon Lenzen
PRODUCTION ASSISTANCE: Svenja Polonji
A production by Marie Meyer in co-production with Produktionshaus NAXOS. The production was funded by the Hessian Ministry of Science and Research, Art and Culture, the Cultural Office of the City of Frankfurt am Main, and with the kind support of the Aventis Foundation. Development made possible through the HTA postgraduate funding program “Artistic Research” (2023)—a funding project of Frankfurt LAB for alumni of the Hessian Theatre Academy, supported by the Hessian Ministry of Science and Art and the Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as part of NEUSTART KULTUR.