The MONTH OF PERFORMANCE ART is a 31 day citywide platform supporting, celebrating and presenting BERLIN’s independent, contemporary and experimental performance art scene.
MPA–B is not a festival; it has neither an artistic director nor an annual theme, and it is not an initiative for performing arts.
It is a platform for performance art that connects and brings together hundreds of performance artists, spaces, networks and initiatives who collectively contribute to a unique and radical month-long programme, featuring: indoor and outdoor performances, site-specific interventions, talks, workshops, screenings, public encounters and interactions, dinners, durational and days-long actions and other formats and projects which do not have, or reject, any definition.
With its broad programme, diversity of locations and geographical outreach, MPA–B lays bare the world of performance art to as wide an audience as possible. And with its work in areas such as promotion, network development and artists’ mobility, it supports the city’s performance art community working at the fringe of institutionalised performing arts structures.
Now in its third edition, MPA–B will not only feature Berlin’s wide network of independent performance art practices, and the projects of dozens of international artists coming especially to the city to contribute to its programming, but also performance art works by a core group of 23 Associate Curators (whose projects are highlighted in the PROGRAMME with a diamond).
These are members of the new MPA–B-led CURATORIAL COLLABORATION INITIATIVE (CCI), developed with the aim of sharing practices, exchanging knowledge and generating a discourse on contemporary performance art’s qualities and values as a cultural phenomenon, and to explore and develop new performance art formats that challenge and re-examine traditional and contemporary notions of “curating” and “curator.”