Performing Arts and Digitality

We live in an age where digital technologies such as AI and robotics are part of our everyday lives, transforming many aspects of how we live. In the arts as well, artists are actively embracing digital technologies and shaping new directions of creation. The 2025 Seoul Performing Arts Festival (SPAF) presents Entanglement and Friction as its theme, hosting three productions, a forum, and a workshop that question the evolving relationships among art, technology, and science in the digital age. This initiative is co-organized by Schauspiel Dortmund’s Academy for Theatre & Digitality, the Seoul Performing Arts Festival, and the producer group DOT, in collaboration with Arts Korea Lab and the Goethe-Institut Korea.

Performing Arts and Digitality will consist of a three-day workshop and forum, sharing Schauspiel Dortmund’s decade-long experiences of collision, friction, and experimental collaboration between digital technology and the arts. Alongside this, discussions will address new creative structures and methodologies, the role of mediators in digital creation processes, and the necessity of digital dramaturgy. Through this program, we hope to create a space for reflection on theater and performing arts in the digital era—one that moves beyond merely focusing on the technical possibilities of “use and fusion of technology,” toward deeper questions about digital culture and the creative philosophies of digital technology.