Some places are full of stories. The prop room is one of them.

Behind the scenes of the City Theater lies a place that should really be silent. But it isn’t. Here are stored costumes that kings have seen. Furniture that lovers and the desperate have used. Props that have survived triumphs and catastrophes. They have all remembered something—and they have begun to speak. In small groups, we enter this hidden cosmos: storage rooms, corridors, workshop areas. Rooms that otherwise remain locked. What begins as a guided tour quickly turns into a game.

The Story

Emma Casali, the new assistant director at the Stadttheater Gießen, is desperately searching for the right props for a new production. But in this stubborn prop room, nothing obeys her. The objects have airs and graces, opinions—and a will of their own—and they want to be heard.
So she turns the audience into accomplices and sends them on a quest: for objects, for stories, for what holds theater together at its core.

How Objects Learn to Speak

In the months leading up to the premiere, we conducted interviews with staff members from every department—carpentry, metalwork, painting, costumes, props, makeup, and stage technology. We asked: Which object do you love? Which one do you hate? What story do you associate with a particular item here?
Behind every object in the prop room lies its own language model—an LLM, trained on the interviews with the departments and production archives. This gives each prop its own voice, its own story, its own will. Nothing is pre-recorded, nothing is spoken in advance. What you hear is created in the moment someone speaks to the object.
This is the central premise of the production: it is only through digital capture that the voices of the props become audible. As long as an object is just one among thousands in the prop room, it gets lost in the noise. It is only through digitization that it takes shape.

What to Expect

Performative, interactive, audiovisual. You’ll move through spaces, hear voices, and follow clues. Sometimes you’ll be asked questions. Sometimes you’ll help make decisions. Sometimes you’ll just listen.
Actors from the Stadttheater and dancers from Justus Liebig University Giessen guide you through the evening. Don’t worry: No one will be put on the spot, and no one has to perform. If you want to join in the conversation, you can. If you’d rather listen, that’s just as welcome. All you need is curiosity.

Sustainability as an Artistic Question

The Fundus embodies radical sustainability in practice: things are not thrown away, but reused, reinterpreted, and retold. The project is being developed as part of the “Fonds Zero” initiative of the German Federal Cultural Foundation and builds on “Fifty Degrees of Now.” Parallel to the production, a database is being created that makes the Fundus systematically searchable for the first time—because what cannot be found is bought new.