Berliner Festspiele Polaroids

Five festivals – one house, one framework. With our point of departure in the Berliner Festwochen, the Berliner Festspiele have organized a multiplicity of highly specialized festivals, exhibition projects, and individual events. Our activities are devoted to the presentation of exceptional contemporary artistic positions in the fields of music, the performing arts, the visual arts, and literature – in this sense, every season generates fresh Polaroids, since our festivals and exhibitions are snapshots which reveal underlying attitudes in two ways: through the language of the presented work, and through the perspective of the program designer.

The Berliner Festspiele live through the intelligence and the emphases of its curators and jurors in the projects realized at Martin Gropius Bau and at various festivals: MaerzMusik, Theatertreffen, Musikfest Berlin, Spielzeit’europa, and Jazzfest. We are simultaneously producers as well as hosts to and partners with a range of national and international institutions – from the Berlinale to Berghain, from the Sophiensäle to MoMA in New York. Over the years the Haus der Berliner Festspiele has transformed itself continuously – from campus and display window for competitions showcasing young talent, to a stage for authors from around the world during international literature festivals.

As an institution of the German federal government, the primary task of the Berliner Festspiele is to stimulate exchange. Here at the centre of Berlin, it is a question of movements between inner and outer, between individual and society. Art is not only that which is pleasing. The Polaroids created in the framework of the Berliner Festspiele move us as well. They focus attitudes which respond to clashes between the contrasting visions or prophecies embodied in the works of individual creators. Emerging from such collisions are symphonies, performances, dramas, poems, and images which then take the form of programmatic orientations, festivals, celebrations. Which is why the framework of the Berliner Festspiele, as you and I now perceive it, must be mobile, never a firm boundary.

Thomas Oberender
Artistic Director, Berliner Festspiele