FELIX'S ROOM

World Premiere: Berliner Ensemble, Berlin (DE), 2023

Felix’s Room is a digital hybrid theatre production which reconstructs the life of Felix and Erna Ganz after their imprisonment in a so-called ‘Judenhaus’ in 1942. The Room is simultaneously prison and memory palace: by means of projected holographic effects, Felix and Erna fill the room with ghosts of exuberant parties and journeys to far-off lands, but the proximity of Nazi threat always lingers.

You could say: high-end playfulness. But it can do much more than a normal stage set or a video, which in the best moments becomes a phenomenology of perception: The music coagulates into a flickering, the oboe blows a disparate melody, the colours disappear from the scans, the performance becomes a ghostly symbol of memory, shadow, chimera, whatever pops into your head when you try to remember. In these moments, ‘Felix’s Room’ is an absolute masterpiece, technically astounding
— Süddeutsche Zeitung

ScanLAB co-created and co-directed Felix’s Room, collaborating with the Komische Oper Berlin, the Berliner Ensemble, and writer Adam Ganz to devise new digital narrative forms at the intersection of theatre, music, and technical innovation. The work uses projected holographic effects and virtual sets created using high-resolution 3D scans to transport the audience into the life of Felix and Erna Ganz.

ScanLAB Projects

A chest of drawers and a sketched floor plan are all that survives of the single room in a so-called “Jewish House” in the Kaiserstraße in Mainz. Felix Ganz and his wife Erna were confined there for a year after they were evicted from his mansion overlooking the Rhine. His life as an international businessman is over, his home has been stolen, his children have escaped. Now his engagement with the world is limited to letters, the sounds of neighbours and his view of the Gestapo Headquarters across the street.

The production is a kind of requiem, a musical journey into virtual reality.
— Tagesspiegel
ScanLAB Projects
ScanLAB Projects
As touching as it is oppressive!
— BZ
ScanLAB Projects

“Felix’s Room” is a co-production of Komische Oper Berlin and Berliner Ensemble in cooperation with ScanLAB Projects.

The co-production “Felix’s Room” is part of the cooperation project “Spielräume!”, funded by the Kultur Digital program of the German Federal Cultural Foundation.

Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

The production is supported by the international theatre company Complicité and StoryFutures, the National Centre for Immersive Storytelling in Great Britain.

Credits:

Archive courtesy of:

Orchestra

Can be heard in sound recordings - Nina Bruns, Jonathan Kempf, Peter Moltzen, Tilo Nest (Berliner Ensemble)

As well as - Fina Bockemühl and Johannes Voermans (Childrens’ choir of the Komische Oper Berlin)

Thanks to:

ScanLAB Projects