1:1 Conversations About Artistic Practice

This year, the Berlin Performing Arts Festival is offering the format 1:1 for the first time. It provides artists within the city’s independent arts community the opportunity to meet with an invited dramaturg to discuss and mutually reflect upon a question the artist is pursuing over the course of their work.

1:1 provides a (safe) space for intimate conversation, concentration and care amidst the hustle and bustle of the festival. Here, time is taken to speak about topics surrounding the artistic practice and to just take a minute to breathe together in the middle of an art market whose permanent hunger for results, presentations and innovations can be exhausting.

1:1 is a format that the dramaturg and curator Jessie Mill has realized successfully for the last four years under the name Clinique dramaturgique in DescriptionMontréal during the FransTransAmérique Festival. Each year, she invites up to five external dramaturgs deal with the questions of the city’s artists over the course of a tête-à-tête. The format was created as a reaction to the observation that independent artists working in the performing arts lacked the means and resources to work with a constructive view from the outside.  

Knowing that, due to the precarious production conditions within Berlin’s independent performing arts community, dramaturgs or other forms of constructively critical companions during the process of artistic creation are expense that often cannot be afforded, PAF will adopt the format by Jessie Mill and invites all interested artists to sign up for a 1:1.

The dramaturgs invited this year are Anke Euler (Bremen), Fanti Baum (Dortmund), Ute Gröbel (Munich), Alexandros Mistriotis (Athens, Greece) and Elise Simonet (Paris, France).

The conversations with the dramaturgs are limited to 90 minutes and are dedicated exclusively to questions regarding the creative and working processes. Questions dealing with distribution and production will not be answered.

If you are interested in a 1:1, please fill out this PDF form and send it to the following email address: tessa.hartig(at)performingarts-festival.de. Submission deadline is May 4, 2019.