HAMLETMACHINE - ChuanFest @Manhattan

HAMLETMACHINE is a solo research-performance that reimagines East German writer Heiner Müller’s 1977 play Die Hamletmaschine through choreography, projection, sound, generative text, and live performance. Moving between dance, experimental theatre, and digital media, the work stages a body caught inside historical ruins and contemporary machines: scrolling feeds, ghostly archives, failed revolutions, inherited scripts, and unstable identities.

Rather than treating Müller’s text as a script to be faithfully staged, HAMLETMACHINE approaches it as an apparatus: a machine of fragments, quotations, ghosts, and unfinished political desires. The performance asks how queer postsocialist memory might appear through glitches, repetitions, bodily exhaustion, and digital overflow. Here, history is not a finished past, but something that continues to flicker through the performer’s body.

For the CHUAN Festival iteration, HAMLETMACHINE moves from an intimate studio presentation into a more fully realized theatrical environment, with expanded attention to lighting, sound, and projection. Presented shortly before ZIWEI 子维’s relocation from New York City to the Greater Bay Area, the work also carries the charge of departure: a farewell, a malfunction, and a beginning again.

Both venues are wheelchair accessible. For accessible seating, or any other questions related to tickets, please contact us at [email protected].