After Work

After Work traces snapshots from the history of work in calm, dreamlike images. With dance, with drama, with music, with text. A hybrid meeting of different modes of representation, where the boundaries of the art disciplines become blurred. The participants are a dancer, four actors and a bondage artist who specializes in the Japanese bondage tradition of Shibari. This journey through stations ranging from quiet, humorous to grotesque tableaux offers viewers a playful, open field of associations.

A look back into the time of the Renaissance as proto-capitalism. The moment of the discovery of the hand as the decisive tool for the incarnation of the monkey. The appearance of the miner from the Ruhr area as a representative of the working class in the time of industrialisation. He is replaced by office workers in grey suits, who are treated by a business coach who acts like a shamanic healer. From euphoria to self-optimization to self-abandonment to burnout.

And finally, After Work leads into the future of a world dominated by robots, artificial intelligence, algorithms, in which human labor seems to have become superfluous. Is doing nothing a state of total bliss? Or will the supposed liberation technologies become a shackle for the people of tomorrow?