The Color Scheme | Performa Biennial 2025

Set in Berlin’s Tiergarten shortly after World War I, The Color Scheme is a new theatrical commission by artist and writer Aria Dean that imagines a dialogue between two Black American expatriates—the Poet (played by Nile Harris) and the Philosopher (played by Zaid Arshad)—as their date in the park becomes a broader meditation on the relationship between aesthetics and the nascent political movements of the 20th century.

Following a thread in Dean’s studio practice—which appropriates digital fabrication techniques to unravel traditional notions of subject, object, and image—the historical space of the Tiergarten is doubly replicated: first through a series of fabricated stage elements, and again through a virtual set created by Filip Kostic in Unreal Engine.

The Tiergarten’s Siegesallee, a boulevard of 32 sculptural groups commissioned by Kaiser Wilhelm II to assert an imperial narrative of German history and later relocated during WWII, is digitally reconstructed with 3D scans of the dispersed surviving statues. The looming presence of these statues provokes reflection and disagreement between the two interlocutors over the subjectivities produced by nationalism and how innovations in artistic form might produce a historical consciousness. The revolutions sweeping across the continent grant their discussion a sense of pressing political urgency.

In a nod both to early cinema’s use of rear projection and to early internet’s green-screen aesthetics, the virtual park is projected onto the stage backdrops, responding dynamically to the actors’ movement in real time. The material and virtual reconstructions are folded together by cinematographer Alex Huggins and technical director Tomi Faison into a live film that is displayed simultaneously on a larger screen upstage. A live score by composer Evan Zierk accompanies the performance, featuring newly built Intonarumori—experimental noise machines invented by the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo.

Just as the meet-cute is loosely based on a real historical encounter, it remains uncertain which features of the virtual models emerge from the imperfections of 3D-scanning technology and which emerge as markers of time itself. And since the Siegsalle has been dismantled, Dean’s rerendering of these monuments becomes a direct intervention into the life of the objects, putting into practice the stakes raised in the dialogue. The Color Scheme imagines theater as a space where the raw material of history can find redemption through dialectics of form.