‘A Peculiar State’ is a multimedia concert performance for a dancer*, harpsichord, light and video. In a post-digital forest clearing, the audience encounters a knight sitting at a virtual campfire and pondering this ‘peculiar state’ we find ourselves in. In doing so, the play forges a link between the social melancholy at the beginning of the modern era and the current forlornness in the post-internet age. With the ‘Copernican Turn’ at the beginning of the 17th century, people in Europe had to struggle with the fact that they were no longer the centre of the universe, but just some spinning rock in space. Previously, the world had been divided into heaven, earth and hell in a clear divine order. While God reigned in heaven and the devil in hell, much of medieval science consisted of trying to work out whether something was the work of the devil or the work of God. With the shattering of the certainty of a clear divine plan through the realisation of lostness in space and the emergence of modern science, the pre-modern order was shaken enormously. Various technologies played a role here, as did faith, spirituality and the question of the meaning and significance of body and mind.

About 500 years later, in the face of social and technological changes such as artificial intelligence, social media and robotics, the traditional order again seems to be slipping further and further away from us. At precisely this point in time, the audience encounters a knight, one of the most overloaded symbols of cis-male fantasies. Trapped in shining armour, he sits by a virtual campfire, as if he has fallen out of time. The world around him seems alien to him, but he seems equally alien to himself and his own body. In a recurring loop, he struggles with the world. What story are we telling ourselves and who is the narrator? ‘Oh, what a peculiar state.’


‘A Peculiar State’ was premiered on 8 November 2024 in the Forum Theatre of the HFMT. The starting point of the piece is Christopher Ramm's composition for harpsichord, which bears the same title and was written in summer 2024. The composition is inspired by the harpsichord music of the English Renaissance, which is characterised by a strong sense of melancholy. This is evident, for example, in Thomas Tomkins' “A Sad Pavan for These Distracted Times” from 1649, which is complemented by analogue synthesizers and heavily processed voice recordings. In the course of the piece, the harpsichord is electronically altered and digitised by live effects to such an extent that the sound changes from early modern pavan to contemporary glitch aesthetics and deconstructed electronics.

The movement material is inspired by NPC acting and is complemented by lip-syncing. The stage is created by the hyper-real video setting, which was designed in the Unreal Engine. The audience takes a seat on the stage by the knight's virtual campfire. From here, a hybrid, half-virtual, half-analogue world unfolds, transforming from a digital fairytale forest into a post-digital wasteland reminiscent of a simulation of the world after the climate catastrophe. Together with the audience, ‘A Peculiar State’ embarks on a search for the question of why everything feels so strange in our fragmented, post-digital reality.


A Peculiar State in the Radio:

A PECULIAR STATE at DEUTSCHLANDFUNK

Composition/Concept/Direction/Video/Lights/Effects: Christopher Ramm
Harpsichord: Elena Khurgina
Performance: Kyte Brüggmann
Make Up/ Costume: Marco Merenda
Unreal Support: Carmen Kleykens Vidal
Light Technician: Giovanni Dinello
Tech Support: Ian Whillock, Candid Rütters
Mentoring: Alexander Schubert

Big Thanks to:

HfMT Hamburg Multimedia Composition
HfMT Hamburg Harpsichord Department
HfMT Hamburg Forum Team
Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg Costume Department
Lorenz Vetter
Wanja Neite