E.ID: A FUGUE Will Be Performed By Darkroom Contemporary Dance Theatre

Beginning with a season at The State Theatre in Pretoria, Cape Town-based Darkroom Contemporary Dance Theatre will present e.ID: A Fugue, a production supported by the National Lotteries Commission of South Africa that will also tour to Berlin (Germany) and Arnhem (The Netherlands).  e.ID: A Fugue explores what it means to be human in a digitally mediated age, through choreography, bespoke interactive technologies and an original score.

Conceived and directed by Louise Coetzer, e.ID: A Fugue unfolds as an immersive contemporary performance where recurring images, movement, sound and objects continually return in altered forms. Inspired by the musical structure of a fugue, the work invites audiences to experience identity as something fragile, mutable and continually transformed, with meaning emerging through repetition, variation and association rather than linear narrative.

"We are living between worlds: between the physical and the digital, the inherited and the constructed, the embodied and the represented," says Coetzer. "Rather than examining technology itself, e.ID reflects on the shifting nature of human identity within this contemporary condition.” Throughout the performance responsive technologies, light and sound quietly reshape the landscape, while recurring motifs—including the image of a goldfish contained within a fragile vessel—evoke questions of memory, vulnerability, mortality and the unseen systems that shape contemporary life. Neither narrative nor abstraction, e.ID: A Fugue creates a space where audiences are invited to experience questions rather than seek fixed answers.

The work features seasoned performers and emerging talent including Gemma Trehearn, Rian Jansen, Tamsyn Pretorius, Gala Winkler and Aphiwe Sodlamba. The score brings together South African composers Njabulo Phungula and Inge Beckmann, and German composers Heidrun Schramm and Nicolas Wiese, with musical direction by Brydon Bolton. The bespoke interactive technologies were developed in collaboration with Methodlab, with technical direction by Oscar O'Ryan, lighting design by Wilhelm Disbergen and répétiteurs Natalie Fisher and Yarisha Singh.

Founded in Cape Town in 2010 by choreographer Louise Coetzer and filmmaker Oscar O'Ryan, Darkroom Contemporary is an award-winning interdisciplinary dance company based at its Bree Street studio. The company, based in the Mother City, creates contemporary performance through the integration of dance, digital technologies and visual media, with work presented at venues and festivals including Ars Electronica, Zeitz MOCAA, the National Arts Festival, Norval Foundation, Dance Umbrella, the Fa'kugesi Festival of African Digital Innovation and the Centre for the Less Good Idea. Its dance films have screened internationally, including at Cinedans (Netherlands), POOL Movement Art Film Festival Berlin, Third Coast Dance Film Festival (USA) and the British Film Institute (UK).

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