«Battles without war»

«infotainment about war and games in cyberspace»: On the premiere of «Blackout» at Discounter Theatre, Berlin.

  

The premiere of the play «Blackout» by the collective internil at Berlin’s Discounter Theatre was announced as «infotainment about war and games in cyberspace.» It is a play about conflicts that hybridise in digital space, but whose actors are rarely visible and yet keep a kind of global proto-war going that occasionally leads to real blackouts. 

The format announcement makes one think of television, influencers or YouTube, and like most of internil’s pieces, «Blackout» is based on documents and true events that were researched over long periods of time on the internet. And that is exactly where the livestream can be seen, which is being created in parallel as an online version of the play with its own dramaturgy. For this, the collective GUT Holz Strahl has built a stage set as a mixture of television studio and a fair stand. The performers Christopher Hotti Böhm, Marina Dessau and Arne Vogelgesang move between their information stand and projection screens, accompanied by a live operator to control a drone and a small camera robot on four wheels for the audience in front of the screens.