DAS Theatre – one programme, two profiles
We believe that an intense dialogue between theatre makers and practitioners of expanded curation offers an inspiring environment that instigates new ideas, approaches and practices – for both.
“Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
- Doris Lessing
Arts practitioners today - especially in Old Europe - are facing conditions that radically challenge their values, their habits, their ways of working and collaborating.
We see artists adapting and responding by developing a hybrid professional practice: combining the ever-more specialized roles within the field of the performing arts, setting up artist-run organisations and platforms, teaching and/or working outside of the arts field.
Curators and (creative) producers are also redefining their roles and developing new models. Through expanded practices, collaborations with diverse partners and reaching out beyond the artistic realm, they are transforming their roles and contributing to new perspectives on a sustainable art practice.
This is the current state of the arts. Criticality and experimentation can generate proposals for a theatre of the future.
DAS Theatre: Expanded Curation
This journey reaches much further than the invention of new business models in a market-driven society, where funding opportunities are decreasing. The art world needs to develop new models for a sustainable practice. Along the way, negotiations with complex digital and analogue environments, quests for (new) audiences, and the call for participation in larger movements for social change are altering the way art is being created, produced and experienced.
Contributors and guest teachers invited to DAS Theatre (especially our block programme) are artists, curators or theoreticians who relate to these shifting conditions and new challenges in a critical, committed and outspoken way.
DAS Theatre (previously DasArts) is part of the DAS Graduate School, established in 2016 by the Amsterdam University of the Arts to bring its masters, doctorate and research programmes together under one roof.
For students in the Expanded Curation profile, DAS Theatre offers a place where:
- You are supported to develop new models of Expanded Curation by investigating and inventing new contexts and links between artists, art works, audiences, cultures, social and political realities, parallel worlds, discourses and institutions.
- You will share the main parts of the collective programme with theatre makers, while other components will be dedicated to the discourse and practice of Expanded Curation, with guest teachers and workshops, the reading group, the theory seminar, an individual tutor and advisors.
- Experimental projects in the wider professional field will become part of your study course. They are the counterpart of an artist’s studio practice.
- With an extensive network at hand of former (DasArts)DAS Theatre mentors, alumni, and associated international curators, artists, dramaturges, theorists, festival directors and policy makers, offering a rich resource for encounters and exchange.
- With a cosmopolitan student population, where not only the artistic exchange but also the sharing of curatorial practices from all over the world will provoke new approaches to aesthetics, ethics and politics.
We invite practitioners from diverse backgrounds and interests rooted in theatre, contemporary performance, dramaturgy, production, performance theory, and other disciplines related to the performing arts.
Applicants should have some experience in the field of Expanded Curation and want to further develop their practice and methods. We expect an eagerness to influence, re-define and reinvent existing practices of curating and producing within the performing arts.
Practical info
Early Bird Assistance - before 17 October
Take advantage of our personalised advisory service. Send in your application and you will receive feedback.
Open Day - 4 November
Ask questions about our curriculum, meet the staff, share activities, and see the work of artists currently studying at DAS Theatre. Register: dastheatre@ahk.nl.
Application deadline - 17 November