Curators

Kai Tuchmann works mainly as a Director, Dramaturge and Academic. He studied Directing at the Drama Academy Ernst Busch, Berlin. Although strongly influenced by documentary theatre practices, he constantly tries to challenge the concept of documentation.

Currently, Kai works as a Dramaturge for Lian Guodong`s new choreography 关于未知的诗歌/ A Poem to the Unknown, which will highlight the crucial power of imagining future in troubled times. This piece will premiere in October 2020 in Beijing and will be shown in Germany and Italy as well. As a fellow of the recently founded Academy_for_Theatre_and_Digitality in Dortmund (Germany), Kai will collaborate in the second half of 2020 with the dancer Kiran Kumar and the programmer Matthias Härtig for the piece Dear Dead Doctor, which will premiere in 2021. Dear Dead Doctor will unfold on stage as a choreographic dialogue between the digital hologram P3B and Kiran Kumar. Materializing layers of presence and absence on stage, this work proposes aesthetic experiences of reincarnation through the use of recursive algorithms.

Between 2013 and 2018 Kai collaborated with some of China’s internationally most esteemed independent theatre groups, such as Living Dance Studio, Caochangdi Workstation and Grass Stage. The resulting collaborations have been invited to numerous festivals and venues, among others, to I Dance Hong Kong (2016), Zürcher Theaterspektakel (2017), Kunstfest Weimar (2017), Festival d’Automne à Paris (2017), and Asia Society New York (2018). Thematically, these works examine, among other things, the afterlife of the Cultural Revolution in present-day China, the effects of urban development on the population of the migrant workers, and the application of digital technologies.

Kai lectured, taught and conducted workshops, among others, at Beijing University, University of California Santa Cruz, Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi, and he is a Fulbright Scholar at The Graduate Center, City University New York, where in summer 2020 he will complete the work on his book “Situating Visibility -Dramaturgies of The Real in Dialogue”.

Kai published articles and chapter contributions on dramaturgy and documentary theatre in several books (for Routledge and the Brecht Yearbook) and he has written for Theatre Times and the German weekly Der Freitag.