No Work And All Play

Media

Photos by Konrad Fersterer. Additional images available on the Prinzip Gonzo website.

Project Overview

"No Work And All Play" is a game about the future of work, created by PRINZIP GONZO in collaboration with Staatstheater Nürnberg. The project explores what happens when traditional employment becomes obsolete and people must find new ways to create meaning in their lives.

Concept

You enter a building that was once the heart of a large "employer" - a powerful entity where life revolved around selling labor and lifetime for money. Decades have passed. Now a successor institution has moved in: the Ministry for the Investigation of a Meaningful Existence (MUSE). Even after the era of wage labor, people want to be self-fulfillingly active. But the newly gained freedom presents people with challenges. Here MUSE helps: playfully trying out various offers to find out how "work" can be individually defined and what would be a personally meaningful equivalent in the new world.

Project Details

The project combines theater, computer games, role-playing, and social games. The audience becomes active players in direct interaction with the actors and specially developed software. To find a meaningful equivalent to wage earning and radically rethink the relationship between life and work, we leave the theater and turn the former office spaces of the long-time Nuremberg-based GRUNDIG AG into a new play space.

The project addresses the challenge that work is running out. Automation, digitalization, and so-called "artificial intelligence" accelerate and intensify this process, which doesn't necessarily have to end in catastrophe - if we can imagine that the world revolves around something other than the labor market.

Creative Team

MUSEN: Frank Damerius, Nabil Iftekhar, Melanie Klos, Amadeus Köhli, Teodora Koeva, Felix Mühlen, Maximilian Pulst, Moritz Schulze, Katharina Uhland

BOTS: Viktoria Badewitz, Lena Gramsch, Karl Grus, Sascha Kölzow, Michael Königstein, Anne Lämmer, Sonja Morgenstern, Melanie Negele, Svetlana Reimer, Florian Wetzel

Idee, Konzept + Realisation: PRINZIP GONZO (Hartmann | Tonndorf)
Bühne + Kostüm: Thea Hoffmann-Axthelm
Game Design: Markus Schubert
Game Engine: toto.io (Markus Schubert & Christoph Wanja)
Dramaturgie: Sascha Kölzow
Regieassistent: Michael Königstein
Ausstattungsassistenz: Corinne Schlichting (diehappyfew.de)
FSJ: Lena Gramsch
Hospitanz: Anne Lämmer

Premiere: 05. März 2020 in den Räumen der ehemaligen GRUNDIG AG, Nürnberg

Website: Prinzip Gonzo - No Work And All Play