In All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace Ezra Veldhuis and Bosse Provoost explore freedom and lack of freedom with relation to technology. At the centre of the staging is the poem of the same name from 1967 by Richard Brautigan, in which the American author sings the praise of a dreamed ecology in which mammals and computers live together harmoniously.

In this performance Veldhuis and Provoost gauge the feasability of that vision. Today, machines, medicines, algorithms are founded on forms of technology which discipline and control rather than give us freedom. Do we live in a totally perverted realisation of Brautigan’s dream ? Or is the freedom he promises still possible ?

The performance navigates between utopia and scepticism, a high and sobering up. Get acquainted with a ‘cyber ecology’ in which the relationships between people, materials and apparatus are ambiguous. Do they live together in symbiosis or conflict ? The question is not if we are entangled but how we move within that entanglement, suffer and…dance. Just like in Indoor Weather, also on the programme of NEXT 2023, the complete theatre machinery is a living organism.