Dear audience,

Together with the independent performing arts venues of the city, we warmly invite you to rediscover the diversity of Berlin’s independent performing arts community after two digital editions. This year, theaters and artists will present 50 artistic positions in a variety of genres in the Programming from the Communityon a wide variety of stages, in unusual locations under the open sky or in virtual spaces. 

In doing so, they negotiate, amongst other things, the spaces of experience between inclusion and exclusion, the role of bodies in the digital era, processes of aging and their societal significance, the future and history of urban space, the ways in which we coexist with the environment, queer feminism as well as contemporary performative forms of resistance.

With an eye toward this year’s schedule of programming, the question of what TOGETHER can look like in our world today recurs again and again. How do we want to live TOGETHER and shape our future, how do we want to work TOGETHER, find a TOGETHER with our environment and how to age TOGETHER? How can we develop TOGETHER so that a wide variety of lifestyles find space, so that we can provide solidarity to each other and break the dominant binary patterns of thinking that surround us?By coming to terms with a wide variety of histories, philosophies and lifestyles from the past and present with an eye toward the future, we want to encounter all of these questions TOGETHER and jointly move toward answers. 

Workshops, discourse and exchange formats as well as parties and a wandering festival bar invite all Berliners, members of the community and visiting industry professionals to meet each other and enter into conversation. In addition, the Day of Open House(s) provides the opportunity of getting to know the diverse landscape of performance venues in Berlin as well as the people and stories behind them. The popular platform Introducing…will once again place a special focus on newcomers. PAF will be the guest of the Berlin nightclub ://about blank for the brilliant opening of the festival and, for the crowning conclusion of the festival on Sunday, we invite everyone to join us at Panke in Wedding to enjoy selected short performances and to close out the festival. And, more than anything else, we are besides ourselves in anticipation to share and watch the impressive Programming from the Community TOGETHER with the audience.

We are very, very pleased that we can finally eat and drink, celebrate and dance, converse and discuss TOGETHER again as well as spend six days celebrating Berlin’s independent performing arts community and getting to know each other.

We wish you a brilliant, inspiring time at the festival,

The Festival Team

Anika Andreßen, Anna Florin, Anna Wille, Catrin Lichy, Clara Isenmann, Claudia Marks, Elmar Conzen, Jingyun Li, Leoni Grützmacher, Luisa Kaiser, Matti Swiec, Nora Wagner and Toni Zahn