Dust
DUST is a wordless performance at the intersection of material theatre, object theatre, live music, choreography and visual art. Its central protagonist is an animated stage space: an apartment that slowly falls apart before the audience’s eyes. Walls open up, wallpaper peels away, furniture and everyday objects lose their familiar functions, and dust gradually settles over the entire space.
Two performers inhabit this disintegrating world. They carry, shift and transform the remnants of the apartment, disappearing behind walls and furniture and re-emerging from the dissolving space. Everyday objects become costumes, masks and performance partners. Paper, cardboard, tape, rubble and dust become extensions of their bodies. What begins as a series of careful and precise actions gradually develops into increasingly wild physical encounters.
At the heart of DUST are impermanence, grief and transformation. The disintegrating home becomes a vanitas and a ritual of shedding: a letting go of accumulated ballast. Dust is both what remains and what new life can emerge from. It carries traces of what disappears and resists any notion of permanence, wholeness or control.
The performance unfolds without spoken language. Its dramaturgy emerges from the precise interplay of bodies, objects, space and sound. What begins as an almost stoic observation of decay gradually escalates into a state of physical upheaval: objects are dismantled, materials torn apart, dust fills the air. The performers transform into masked, distorted figures as the stage space continues to dissolve around them.
Live music is an equal part of this transformation. Sounds emerge from the physical world of the performance and develop, through guitar, electronic beats and resonances, into an intense musical landscape. Sound is not an illustration of the action, but a physical force that can be experienced through the body.
nominated for the German national theater award “Faust”.object theatre/visual theatre // no words // 70 minutes
November 2025 // Theater Rampe, Stuttgart
March 2026 // HochX, Munich
May 2026 // Theater Rampe, Stuttgart
November 2026 // Unidram Festival, Potsdam
Team:
Artistic direction / concept / space: Samuel Hof, Nina Malotta
Performance / objects: Antje Töpfer, Marius Alsleben, Nina Malotta
Music: Michael Fiedler, Marius Alsleben
Outside Eye: Bastian Sistig, Yara Richter
Production / graphics: Markus Niessner
Assistant: Kristina Arlekinova
DUST is a production by O-Team in cooperation with Theater Rampe. Funded by the State Capital Stuttgart and the Landesverband freier Tanz- und Theaterschaffender Baden-Württemberg e.V. (State Association of Independent Dance and Theatre Producers of Baden-Württemberg) with funds from the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts of the State of Baden-Württemberg. With the kind support of the Kunstverein Wagenhalle e.V.
Trailer:
“Burrowing deeper will not bring us closer to the essence of things, or home at last; it will only generate a lot more dust. And it is dust all the way down. Fleeting, transient, moving, restless dust. We will not suddenly happen upon some stable molten core. Maybe the striking idea of our times is that the mass project of arrival (which modernity operationalizes), of seeking secure foundations, and finding true norths must now give way to the troubling fade of things.
Our vocation must now be that of learning how to live in the midst of the fade; learning how to honour the light of twilight; learning how to befriend our passing; learning how to grieve and fall apart; learning that failure is generative; learning that just because one is lost doesn’t mean one is on the wrong path; learning that the sacred is immanent; learning that to love is not to reach out to another but to recognize we are the other; and, learning that if we always had our way, there’d be no point to the journey. Maybe in learning to live here, right here, we unleash a spirited joy – the music of which escaped us when we strained to own it.”
Báyò Akómoláfé
(https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/)
full Video ( -> direct link to vimeo)
