Digital on Stage Immersive Workshops: Mapping the Creative Transformations of 300 Artists
In 2025, the European performing arts scene threw its doors wide open to the digital unknown. As part of DIGITAL on STAGE, thirty immersive workshops traveled across six countries, meeting more than three hundred artists in search of new ways to tell stories, to move, to interact, to dream. Each workshop became a small world: an environment where technology was not presented as a tool, but as a conversation partner. A world where imagination could take digital form, becoming light, sound, movement, algorithm.
From Stockholm to Thessaloniki, from Brussels to Madrid, participants found themselves inside VR landscapes that responded to their bodies, in AI systems that answered their questions as if they were fellow performers on stage, in mobile phones transformed into collective interfaces, in biodata turned into music and visual material. Each country added its own color, its own artistic culture, its own curiosity. Yet everywhere, the common thread was the same: the desire to redefine the artist’s relationship with the digital environment.
“I would like to extend my sincere congratulations to the organizers for curating such an outstanding program focused on the use of technological tools in performative practices. It was particularly valuable that artists with hands-on experience in these technologies were given the opportunity to share their insights.”
Participants did not simply learn how to use new tools; they learned to trust them. To let them lead them in unpredictable directions. To see how a VR environment can transform choreography, how artificial intelligence can open new pathways in dramaturgy, how the small screen of a mobile phone can become the gateway to a collective experience. In many workshops, the moment of revelation came when artists realized that technology does not limit imagination — it sets it free.
“The collaboration with the organizers was seamless and really enjoyable. I feel as welcome as I could feel!”
These encounters were not only technical. They were deeply human. Artists who had never worn a VR headset before found themselves moving as if they were in another world. Actors who had learned to work with their bodies and voices began to converse with algorithms that reflected their thoughts. Dancers discovered that movement can leave a digital trace, become data, become image. And within all of this, new ideas were born, new collaborations, new artistic identities, which will now shape the future activities of the DIGITAL on STAGE project, as well as its long-term impact on cross-border artistic cooperation and transaction.
“Thank you for facilitating a safe and creative space.”
In every country, participants left with more than just knowledge. They left with a new sense of what it means to create today. With an awareness that the stage is no longer only the floor of a theater but can also be a digital world built in real time. That their fellow performer can be an algorithm. That their voice can become data transformed into image. That art can be at once physical and immaterial, handmade and artificial, personal and collective.
“I was deeply impressed by the richness of the program and the diverse range of technological media introduced for use in performative practices.”
DIGITAL on STAGE does not aim merely to train artists. It seeks to give them space to dream again. To show them that technology is not a threat to artistic identity, but a new language waiting to be spoken. And the artists, throughout the immersive workshops, spoke it — with enthusiasm, with curiosity, with boldness.
The impact of these workshops cannot be measured only in numbers. It is measured in the moments when someone discovered a new side of themselves. In the gaze of a participant who, for the first time, saw their work come alive through a VR environment. In the smile of an actor who felt that artificial intelligence does not replace them — it inspires them. In the silence that fell when a group watched the result of its collective creation.
©Peter Lubej, 2025
These are the moments that make DIGITAL on STAGE more than a European project. They make it a community. A journey which will continue until 2027, with more digital performances and further educational and training opportunities coming up. And a promise that the future of the performing arts will be as human as it is digital — and endlessly creative.