Level 1 - Absolute Beginner

David Bowie was a famous British singer. He died in 2016. Now there is a new film about him.

The film is called David Bowie Stage. It uses old film from a concert in 1978. Nobody has seen this film before.

People will watch it in a big arena, not in a small cinema. The first show is in Berlin on 14 February 2027.

After Berlin, the show will travel to other arenas. The director is Brett Morgen. He made another Bowie film in 2022.

singer

A person who sings songs.

famous

Known by very many people.

film

A moving picture you watch; a movie.

concert

A live show where music is played.

arena

A very big round building for shows and sports.

cinema

A building where people go to watch films.

director

The person who makes a film.

travel

To go from one place to another.

Level 2 - Elementary

The Berlin Film Festival announced on Tuesday that its 77th edition will open a new kind of event. Brett Morgen, the American director who made the Bowie documentary Moonage Daydream in 2022, has built an immersive concert experience called David Bowie Stage. It will have its world premiere on 14 February 2027.

The premiere will not happen in a cinema. It will take place in the Uber Arena, one of Berlin's largest venues, so that the sound and the images can surround the audience the way a real concert would.

The material comes from Bowie's Isolar II world tour of 1978. The footage was shot on 35mm film and has never been shown in public. Morgen worked with the David Bowie Estate and with Wonderworld, the company run by the concert promoter Rob Hallett.

Berlin is a meaningful place to start. Bowie lived and recorded in the city in the late 1970s, during the years that produced the albums fans often call his Berlin period. After the premiere, the show is expected to tour arenas during 2027.

announce

To tell the public about something officially.

edition

One particular occasion of a regular event.

documentary

A film about real people and real events.

immersive

Surrounding you so that you feel inside it.

premiere

The first public showing of a film or show.

venue

A place where an event is held.

footage

Recorded film or video material.

promoter

A person who organises and pays for concerts.

Level 3 - Intermediate

Film festivals usually measure prestige in screens, not seats. The Berlinale's announcement this week therefore reads as a small institutional experiment: the 77th edition will world premiere David Bowie Stage, an immersive concert experience assembled by Brett Morgen, in the Uber Arena rather than in any of the festival's cinemas, on 14 February 2027.

Morgen is not a newcomer to the material. His 2022 documentary Moonage Daydream was itself built less as a biography than as a sensory collage, and it established both his access to the Bowie archive and his preference for overwhelming an audience rather than explaining things to it. Stage draws on 35mm footage from the Isolar II world tour of 1978, which has never been released, and was produced in partnership with the David Bowie Estate and with Wonderworld, the venture founded by the veteran concert promoter Rob Hallett.

The choice of 1978 is not incidental. Isolar II followed the albums Low and Heroes and preceded Lodger, the records Bowie made in and around Berlin with Brian Eno and Tony Visconti, and the tour is remembered for a cold, mechanical staging that looked nothing like the glam theatre of a few years earlier. Presenting that tour in a Berlin arena, with the city's own role in the music implied rather than narrated, is a neater piece of curation than most festival galas manage.

Commercially, the project points towards a format that the live music business has been circling for several years. Rather than a theatrical release followed by streaming, Stage is scheduled to tour arenas through 2027, selling tickets to an event in a room instead of admissions to a film. Whether audiences will pay arena prices for a concert whose performer died in 2016 is the open question, and the Berlinale premiere is, in effect, the first test of it.

prestige

High status and respect.

institutional

Belonging to or done by an established organisation.

collage

A work made by combining many different pieces.

archive

A collection of historical recordings or documents.

venture

A new business project.

incidental

Happening by chance; not important or planned.

curation

The careful choosing and arranging of works for an audience.

theatrical release

Showing a film in cinemas.

Level 4 - Advanced

The posthumous concert has become one of the music industry's more reliable growth categories, and also one of its least examined. Holograms, orchestral tributes, abba-style avatar residencies and remastered tour films all solve the same commercial problem, which is that catalogue demand outlives the artist by decades while the only product that reliably monetises it, the live show, dies with them. The Berlinale's announcement this week that its 77th edition will world premiere David Bowie Stage on 14 February 2027 in the Uber Arena rather than in a cinema is an unusually tasteful entry in that category, and worth attention for the specific choices it makes.

Brett Morgen is the obvious director for it and not only because of access. Moonage Daydream, his 2022 feature, declined almost every convention of the music documentary: no talking heads, no chronology to speak of, no interpretive voice other than Bowie's own, and a sound mix engineered to be felt rather than followed. What he appears to be doing with Stage is removing the last mediating layer, the cinema screen, and substituting the room. The source material is 35mm footage from the Isolar II world tour of 1978, unreleased until now, produced with the David Bowie Estate and Wonderworld, the company established by the promoter Rob Hallett.

The curatorial logic is tighter than these projects usually manage. Isolar II sat between Heroes and Lodger, in the stretch when Bowie was living in Berlin and working with Brian Eno and Tony Visconti, and its staging was deliberately austere: fluorescent tubes, a stripped band, a performer who had spent the preceding years dismantling the personas that made him famous. To premiere that tour in a Berlin arena, in the month the Berlinale occupies the city, is to let the biography sit in the architecture rather than in a caption. It also quietly reframes the festival, which has spent recent editions arguing about its own relevance, as a venue capable of hosting something that is neither a film nor a concert.

The commercial model is the part to watch. Stage is scheduled to tour arenas through 2027, which means it is being sold as an event with a ticket price rather than a title with an admission price, a distinction worth several multiples of revenue per attendee if the demand is there. The risk is equally plain. Immersive experiences built on archival footage have a short half-life once the novelty passes, and the audience that paid to see Bowie in 1978 is now in its seventies, while the audience that discovered him through Blackstar has no memory of the tour at all. Berlin in February will tell the producers which of those two groups actually buys the ticket, and whether a concert can tour successfully almost fifty years after it was played.

posthumous

Happening after someone's death.

catalogue

The whole body of recordings an artist has released.

monetise

To turn something into a source of income.