Tobias Staab works as a freelance director, dramaturge and curator for music and media art. As a dramaturge, he has worked at Münchner Kammerspiele, Schauspielhaus Zürich and Opera Antwerp, among others. Tobias Staab also curated large parts of the installation and music program of the Ruhrtriennale Festival between 2015 and 2017. Together with the US choreographer Richard Siegal, he founded the dance company Ballet of Difference in 2016, which has established itself as a permanent company of the city of Cologne.
In 2018 Tobias Staab wrote and directed the music theater project O, Augenblick as a tribute to the theater stage. In 2020, he developed and staged the piece After Work - A Requiem for the Working Man, which explores the relationship between work and identity at the intersection of dance, drama and visual arts. Since July 2020, Tobias Staab has been part of the performance group FARN.collective together with Sandra Hüller, Tom Schneider, Michael Graessner, Moritz Bossmann and Sandro Tajouri. In June 2021 the collective developed the piece The Shape of Trouble to Come (based on texts by Donna Haraway and Ursula K. Le Guin) which was touring different cities in Germany. Since 2020, Tobias Staab has been increasingly involved with film and video. Building on the electronic music of Modeselektor, and together with with dancer Corey Scott-Gilbert and video artist Krsn Brasko he conceived and co-directed the performance film Work, which was released on ARTE concerts in April 2021. In Cologne, he worked as co-director with Richard Siegal on the interdisciplinary streaming performance All for One and One for the Money, which premiered online in November 2020. His most recent video work Trans Corporal Formations premiered as a 5-channel video installation at Jena's Theater in Bewegung Festival in November 2021 and is currently touring to Cologne and Berlin. Together with dancers from Ballet of Difference he explores the transformative potential of the human body between the analog and the digital. In August 2022 the video installation Euphoria will be premiered at Ruhrtriennale Festival for which Staab has co-written the screenplay together with director Julian Rosefeldt. In September 2022 he will travel to Tokyo with the support of Goethe-Institut in order to do research on Japanese dance forms.
Several new works will be released in the near future: Autonomous Avatar - a dance performance with real-time motion capture elements for planetariums. And Memento Mori - a video installation for which Tobias Staab will be collaborating with choreographer Gustavo Gomes on the theme of death in contemporary society. Tobias Staab is currently preparing the opera Matsukaze by Toshio Hosokawa, which he will stage together with Dutch artist Lotte van den Berg at the Bayerische Staatsoper.
As a freelance curator, Tobias Staab launched various programs and festivals in the fields of music as well as performative and installative arts: with Ritournelle, he established a festival for advanced electronic music at the Münchner Kammerspiele in 2012, which also took place at the Schauspielhaus Bochum and as part of the Ruhrtriennale in the following years. The festival Noise Signal Silence, founded and curated by Tobias Staab, is located at the interface of experimental electronic music, media art and dance, and took place in Munich and Cologne in 2017 and 2018. In 2019, as part of the Bauhaus100 Festival at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, he curated an interdisciplinary program entitled Hyper.Culture, which formulated a concept for a future, queer and intercultural Bauhaus of the 21st century. In 2019 Tobias Staab co-founded the DIVE Festival for Immersive Arts in Bochum. Since 2018 he has curated and directed the new media art center Oval Office in Bochum, where he exhibits internationally renowned artists such as Matthew Barney, Julian Rosefeldt, Jon Rafman, Tianzhuo Chen, Kurt Hentschläger, Michael Saup, Ulf Langheinrich, Ivana Franke and Terry Riley. In 2022 together with choreographer Guy Weizman he has curated the program Dance and Digital Space for the Tanzkongress Festival in Mainz.
Staab has also participated in numerous juries for art awards, including the German Theater Prize FAUST and the European Center for Creative Economy (ECCE), among others.
Photo: Luis Zeno Kuhn