In 2024, the Berlin Performing Arts Program is launching Community and Neighborhood Projects for the very first time. Berlin’s venues, artists, and socio-cultural structures aim to forge new connections between the city’s diverse communities and the wider society through audience engagement strategies, while also strengthening existing relationships.

In an open call, projects were selected that will be realized and presented during the joint community-wide campaign Spielraum – Freie Szene Tage der darstellenden Künste Berlin 2024 (Spielraum – the 2024 Berlin Days of the Independent Performing Arts Community). The idea is to build up long-term relationships with individual communities or the audience in the neighborhoods.

Taking new audience groups into account and actively reaching out to them has long since part of the daily work for the independent performing ats community. Taking community building more strongly into our focus can serve as an important approach for this. Independent performance venues can work in an especially flexible manner and establish closer relationships to their neighborhoods and civic society in their direct vicinity. The mediation work associated with this is not only extremely important for audience development, it also underscores the nature of theater itself, of third locations in which societal participation takes place.