About the work
“A Perfect Sky” is a piece combining theatre and dance, developed by the writer and director Falk Richter together with the Dutch choreographer Anouk van Dijk; Richter wrote the text and directed, van Dijk was responsible for the choreography. It premiered on 26 April 2025 at the Deutsches SchauSpielHaus in Hamburg with a mixed ensemble of ten actors and dancers. It is the pair’s eighth joint work, a collaboration that began in 1999 with “Nothing Hurts”.
Plot
An artificial intelligence, embodied by an actress, observes human beings and promises to free them from fear, vulnerability and loneliness. Set against this are scenes from relationships and domestic life in which desire, emotional unavailability and old wounds are played out, while code is projected across the stage. References to earlier images of artificial humans, such as E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Olympia, Kleist’s marionettes and Čapek’s robots, are linked with questions of closeness and isolation in the digital age. Spoken scenes and dance sequences alternate and interlock.
Cultural significance
Critics singled out the unusually organic fusion of acting and dance. The text met with more reservations: it is not regarded as Richter’s densest work, and several reviewers felt that passages on the social consequences of AI stayed on the surface.