Directed by: Erik Holmström
Scenography: Maja Kall
Music and composition: Dror Feiler

Construction: Alexander Wiig

Lighting design: Raimo Nyman

Technician: Olivia Grevfe

Producer: Anna Jonsson Björck

In collaboration with: Orionteatern, Folkuniversitetet and ABF Malmö.

With support from: Region Skåne and Kulturbryggan

Stockholm premiere: April 21, 2017 at Orionteatern.

Performance period Orionteatern: 21 April - 21 May 2017.

Malmö premiere: August 28, 2017 at Malmö Puppet Theatre.

Performance period Malmö Puppet Theatre: August 28 - September 21, 2017.

Performance duration: 70 min (excluding intermission)

Malmö Puppet Theatre in partnership with Orion Theatre in Stockholm
presents a theatre performance without actors and classical plot. Here the main roles are played by material, form, sound and movement. In a theatre scenography reduced to pure construction, a drama unfolds between wires, wheels and motors.

Director Erik Holmström was inspired by the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich and his ambition to create art where form, color and material were the meaning and content of the art in themselves. In Automata, movement is added and poetic distance is created.

Already in the last decade of the 20th century, theatre theorist and director Gordon Craig described his longing for a theatre without actors. For just over an hour, the audience of Automata will escape the slavery of human actors under the law of gravity, their imprecise

movement patterns, their demands for attention, the limitations of communication and the embarrassing effort to please. Instead, the audience is left alone with aesthetic expressions reduced to the extreme.

The creators of Automata want to fascinate the audience with mechanics, automation, composition and movement. In the mighty stage space of the Orion Theatre, where the performance had its first premiere in the spring, they built a machine without purpose, a framework and stage automaton in large dimensions.

In Malmö, the performance is set up in Malmö Dockteater's smaller stage room.