Photo: Monique Kooijmans

Roman & ELIZA at Society 5.0 Festival

Amsterdam, 16 October 2025 — During the Society 5.0 Festival, Ulrike Quade Company presented a compact Theatre VR Experimentation from their upcoming production Roman & ELIZA (premiering March 2026). In the Auditorium, we demonstrated how live performance, XR technology, and digital puppetry converge in a hybrid scenography where physical performers and virtual doubles merge into one another. The experiment builds on our earlier public evenings on digital mourning and explores how technology reshapes memory, loss, and connection through ‘griefbots’ and avatars.

The festival took place at The Social Hub Amsterdam City and focused on the hybrid reality: two days filled with talks, workshops, installations, and performances in which artists, researchers, students, and policymakers came together to reflect on a human-centered digital society.

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The VR Theatre Experimentation was developed in collaboration with IDlab (AHK) and the European Horizon project PREMIERE, from which tools such as the AI Toolbox and the 3D Virtual Theatre (3DvT) have emerged. Using live data and XR workflows, we explore new forms of virtuality on stage and their implications for the creative process, documentation, and audience experience.

Earlier, we presented the very first scenes on 18 September 2025 at the Coliseu do Porto during PREMIERE Live; in Amsterdam, we showcased a small-scale festival version highlighting the potential of these technologies within a theatrical context. (Funded by the European Union.)

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Roman & ELIZA will premiere in March 2026 and subsequently tour throughout the Netherlands. Would you like to follow the creative process and/or receive early updates? Subscribe to our newsletter and follow our channels.

Productions

Autonomous drone kills human being. No human in the loop. Roboverse explores the underbelly of technology, the robot from within. What would the world be like from a robot’s perspective? A dancer, a drone and different robots share the stage — their sensors turning movement into sound and music. Human and machine mirror and challenge each other, from target to companion.

Theatre of the Future: Choreography of Flesh and Steel – A conversation with pioneer of human-machine performance Ulrike Quade

2 July 2026

Ulrike Quade interviewed by Hayel Ali Al-Mathabi for Arab Theater Magazine. At the heart of the radical transformations taking place in contemporary performance, the work of Netherlands-based director and scenographer Ulrike Quade stands out as a bridge between the richness of tradition and the precision of technology.

Photo: Erfan Abdi

‘By bringing together science, technology and art, we are creating a powerful space for innovation – one that challenges societal norms and opens new perspectives on the issues that define our world today.’

Photo: Monique Kooijmans

Roman & ELIZA at Society 5.0 Festival

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D4D Consortium Meeting

Roboverse – No human in the loop

Theatre of the Future: Choreography of Flesh and Steel – A conversation with pioneer of human-machine performance Ulrike Quade

Photo: Erfan Abdi

‘By bringing together science, technology and art, we are creating a powerful space for innovation – one that challenges societal norms and opens new perspectives on the issues that define our world today.’

– Ulrike Quade

Ulrike Quade Company

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