About

ORBIT is Cologne’s festival for contemporary music theatre in the independent scene. As a dynamic platform for experimental, performative, and interdisciplinary art forms, ORBIT raises awareness of a genre that combines current trends in the independent scene such as collective creation, the dissolution of hierarchies, and cooperation over separation.

The founding of ORBIT was an initiative launched at the end of 2017 by composer-musician, Christina C. Messner, and theater director, Sandra Reitmayer. After countless discussions and immense encouragement from artists and sponsors in the independent scene, the heart of this dialogue led them to realize their vision through the debut season of SPARK 2022, succeeded by ORBIT 2024.

The biennial festival presents a four-day festival each April that offers a diverse audience a wide variety of formats and multi-sensory performances across different districts of Cologne. Symposia, workshops, speakers’ corners, and open-spaces also provide a forum for pressing issues, statements, exchanges, and new ideas.

ORBIT celebrates an art form that thrives on looking beyond fixed limits: it encourages us to explore our own preconceptions and limitations, evaluate our habitual senses of sight and hearing, open ourselves to the unfamiliar, and at the same time focus on urgent issues of our time such as ecological crises, social inequalities, and democratic challenges. Multisensory. Collective. Inclusivity. Diversity. Cooperation.

Since 2025, the festival has been organised and supported by ORBIT – Contemporary Music Theater Cologne, a registered non-profit association.

Artistic direction

Two artists from different disciplines, Christina C. Messner (composer, violinist and performer) and Sandra Reitmayer (theatre director), have come together in order to revive, build up and expand sustainable networks, cooperations, connections and platforms for contemporary music theatre in their adopted home of Cologne, as well as initiating the SPARK festival.

Christina C. Messner has been engaged in linking together different fields and investigating interdisciplinary approaches ever since she studied music in Würzburg. She has developed, produced and organised numerous projects, often involved as a performer herself, and has worked with renowned artists from various disciplines. Christina C. Messner’s compositions have been performed on concert, theatre and festival stages, both nationally and internationally, as well as on radio.

Sandra Reitmayer studied theater directing at the Folkwang University of Arts and curation of performing arts at the University of Salzburg. Since 2012, she has been realizing projects and developing plays in the independent scene in North Rhine-Westphalia. Sandra Reitmayer is a founding member of the theater and performance collective undBorisundSteffi and is part of the artistic management team of the Cologne music theater label, Paradeiser Productions, and an art kiosk in Bochum called the Schaubüdchen.

Project management

littlebit supports the planning, organisation and execution of ambitious  independent contemporary art projects. As a production office, littlebit forms the interface between the artistic draft and practical realisation of individual concerts and productions or takes on the complete organisational management of whole series of events and festivals.

www.littlebit.eu

Promoter and sponsor

The festival is organised and supported by the Cologne based association, ORBIT – aktuelles Musiktheater Köln e.V., which was newly founded at the beginning of 2025 to organise and present artistic events, cultural policy initiatives, publications, and discussion formats in the field of contemporary independent music theatre with a strong focus on inclusion and mediation. The experience gained through a history of trust and longstanding professional collaborations between the association’s members forms a stable foundation for this newly established, independent structure. As a platform, it serves as a contact point and network to strengthen the regional contemporary music theatre scene in a sustainable way and increase its visibility on a national level.

Team

  • Christina C. Messner

    Artistic Director

  • Sandra Reitmayer

    Artistic Director

  • Eva Maria Müller

    Project Management, littlebit

  • Lukas Becker

    Technical Director, littlebit

  • Jing Chen

    Project Management

  • Christopher Collings

    Public Relations, Social Media

  • Christina von Richthofen

    Press Relations, get2gether

Partners

ORBIT – Festival for Contemporary Music Theater is supported by the City of Cologne Cultural Office, the North Rhine-Westphalia Arts Foundation, the RheinEnergie Cultural Foundation, the North Rhine-Westphalia Cultural Sekretariat, the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, and podium Gegenwart, the German Music Council with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media.

HK-X Vol. 3 is supported by the Performing Arts Fund from funds provided by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

The HK-X cooperative network consists of: ORBIT – festival for contemporary music theater (Cologne), Stimme X – festival for contemporary music theater (Hamburg), BAM! – festival for contemporary music theater (Berlin), TRACKS – festival for independent music theater (Leipzig)

Special thanks to the Cologne University of Music and Dance, the Academy for Theater and Digitality, and the Alte Feuerwache Cologne, COMEDIA Cologne, the Ensemble Musikfabrik Studio, and the Auermühle for their kind support.

 

COOPERATIVE PARTNERS

Un-Label

moderne stadt GmbH

podium Gegenwart

 

MEDIA PARTNERS

Stadtrevue

mf:fm – Magazine for Independent Music Theater

 

TICKETING PARTNER

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