The Beyond Gravity Festival is a biennial, interdisciplinary festival for digital arts, dance and performance, which will enter its second edition in 2025. It is organised in cooperation between the Theater im Depot, the Academy for Theatre and Digitality and the Kulturforum Witten.

Beyond Gravity
01. - 05. October 2025

Following its successful launch in 2023, the festival will expand its content profile, regional reach and international focus in 2025. It will take place from 1 to 5 October 2025 and mark the opening of the season at the Theater im Depot.

The festival centres on the thematic programme Decolonising the Digital, which deals with the intertwining of digital technology, global power relations and artistic practice.

As part of an international residency programme, two invited curators and an artist/curator collective from the so called Global South – with regional expertise in West Africa, Central America and South West Asia – will work with artists from their region to develop project ideas, which will then be realised in cooperation with artists from the Ruhr region and presented at the festival.

The curatorial approach deliberately reverses established invitation policies: artists from the Global South are not invited, but rather actively shape the conditions for artistic cooperation with the Global North.

Complementing the residency programme is the two-day symposium Beyond Gravity Reflexions, which discursively examines the topics of digitality, decolonisation and artistic research. Keynotes, lecture performances, project presentations and moderated discussions will bring together different international perspectives in dialogue. The aim is to open up a pluriversal space for thinking and possibilities for future-oriented digital cultures.

In addition to the residency and discourse programme, the festival presents a curated programme of guest performances and world premieres with productions from the Ruhr region, Germany and other European countries. In terms of content, this section focuses on two major thematic areas: the use of artificial intelligence in artistic production processes and the development of hybrid performance situations between digital and physical spaces, bodies and narratives.

The Beyond Gravity Festival 2025 brings together artistic research, digital innovation and global socio-political issues. It links regional cultural work with international networking and offers platforms for transcultural cooperation, critical reflection and artistic-technological visions of the future.

A detailed programme overview and links to ticket sales will be available here from mid-August.

Beyond Gravity 2025 is organised in cooperation with the Academy for Theatre and Digitality and the Kulturforum Witten. Funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia as part of the Neue Künste Ruhr funding programme, with funds from the LWL Cultural Foundation, the NRW State Office, the Dortmund Cultural Office, the Dortmund Cultural Foundation and the Kunststiftung NRW.