John Jesurun’s practice is a radical convergence of media technology and theatre, and the transgressions, sensory rewiring, and fluidities therein—long before these techniques became normalized on stage. The theatre is transformed into a live editing room, where filmic language unravels and touches all facets of the performance, including the audience, who is referred to as ‘the camera’.

Born in 1951 in Battle Creek, Michigan, Jesurun studied art before moving into television, where he worked as a content analyst for CBS and later as an assistant producer for The Dick Cavett Show. His experience in the industry would heavily shape his approach to theatre, laying new ground as a director/writer/designer with various communities in New York and abroad. His elaborate narratives unfold in a multi-dimensional language at an urgent pace. Identities, objects, and places are unfixed and morphing, continuously being called into question. Demands and accusations circle between characters in a shared hysteria of multiple meanings and interfaces. His breakthrough live soap opera, Chang in a Void Moon, in its early days was written and performed weekly at the legendary Pyramid Club. It began in 1982, with episodes still emerging into its fourth decade in digital form.

Jesurun has written and directed over 30 plays including Shatterhand Massacree (1985), Deep Sleep (1986), and Snow (2000), in which the stage design surrounds the audience with four live-edited projections connected to 23 cameras. The character of an intern is played by a computer-integrated voice and POV camera ‘virtual actor’. It circulates the space interacting with the live actors. A few years later Firefall (2006) reflects on how our thought and speech patterns have become forms of ‘dissociated circuitry’ in a post-internet world. More recent works include Shadowland (2012-15) and Letter of Intent (2025), the driving language of which, tracks its own relegation to data rather than communication.

Jesurun’s influence at Justus-Liebig University in Gießen, one of several institutions where he taught, left a lasting mark on students who would later be associated with what came to be known as the ‘Gießen School’. He strongly impacted the work of René Pollesch and laid the groundwork for certain strands of post-dramatic theatre, as well as on many contemporary art practices and discourses today.

We would like to thank John Jesurun, Jonathan Franz, Özlenim Meier, Thomas Schubert, Xiaoyao Xu, Apartment 1 and CTMS for the poster design.

We would also like to thank NRW Landesbüro Darstellende Künste, der Stadt Köln and Kunststiftung NRW for their generous support.

John Jesurun’s practice is a radical convergence of media technology and theatre, and the transgressions, sensory rewiring, and fluidities therein—long before these techniques became normalized on stage. The theatre is transformed into a live editing room, where filmic language unravels and touches all facets of the performance, including the audience, who is referred to as ‘the camera’.

Born in 1951 in Battle Creek, Michigan, Jesurun studied art before moving into television, where he worked as a content analyst for CBS and later as an assistant producer for The Dick Cavett Show. His experience in the industry would heavily shape his approach to theatre, laying new ground as a director/writer/designer with various communities in New York and abroad. His elaborate narratives unfold in a multi-dimensional language at an urgent pace. Identities, objects, and places are unfixed and morphing, continuously being called into question. Demands and accusations circle between characters in a shared hysteria of multiple meanings and interfaces. His breakthrough live soap opera, Chang in a Void Moon, in its early days was written and performed weekly at the legendary Pyramid Club. It began in 1982, with episodes still emerging into its fourth decade in digital form.

Jesurun has written and directed over 30 plays including Shatterhand Massacree (1985), Deep Sleep (1986), and Snow (2000), in which the stage design surrounds the audience with four live-edited projections connected to 23 cameras. The character of an intern is played by a computer-integrated voice and POV camera ‘virtual actor’. It circulates the space interacting with the live actors. A few years later Firefall (2006) reflects on how our thought and speech patterns have become forms of ‘dissociated circuitry’ in a post-internet world. More recent works include Shadowland (2012-15) and Letter of Intent (2025), the driving language of which, tracks its own relegation to data rather than communication.

Jesurun’s influence at Justus-Liebig University in Gießen, one of several institutions where he taught, left a lasting mark on students who would later be associated with what came to be known as the ‘Gießen School’. He strongly impacted the work of René Pollesch and laid the groundwork for certain strands of post-dramatic theatre, as well as on many contemporary art practices and discourses today.

We would like to thank John Jesurun, Jonathan Franz, Özlenim Meier, Thomas Schubert, Xiaoyao Xu, Apartment 1 and CTMS for the poster design.

We would also like to thank NRW Landesbüro Darstellende Künste, der Stadt Köln and Kunststiftung NRW for their generous support.