
A joint symposium by SIBMAS, Theatermuseum Düsseldorf & Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln
6-7 June 2025
In recent years, the question of mediation has played an increasingly important role in the arts, cultural institutions, and the corresponding fields of researching and teaching. Mediation can be pedagogical, political, cross-disciplinary and cross-media, intertwining, reconciling and culturally effective, etc. With the symposium Building Bridges: Collecting, Researching and Mediating the Performing Arts, we invite representatives of the performing arts, theatre and dance researchers, archivists, librarians and curators to discuss together what connects us: the shared passion and curatorial or scientific curiosity about the performing arts in all their facets – present and historical.
The notion of “building bridges” forms the dramaturgical framework of the symposium. This allows for a variety of thematic approaches:
- The future meets the present meets the past – of the performing arts
- Analog meets digital
- Archive meets museum
- Theatre meets dance
- Scholars meet archivists, curators & librarians
- Young scholars meet more experienced scholars, archivists, curators& librarians
- The present and future of theatre audiences
- Public spaces – public stages
- The city meets the archive/museum – and vice versa
- Cologne meets Dusseldorf – and the world
- Performing arts scholars meet archivists, curators, librarians and information professionals
- Performing arts meet scholars and specialist information professionals or collections
- Young scholars meet experienced scholars, archivists, curators & librarians
We invite archivists, librarians, curators, scholars and artists of all career levels to join this symposium with their individual contributions to building bridges between theatrical arts, their scholarship and archiving/collection development.
Proposals (200-300 words + a short biography of ca 200 words) are invited for short 20-minute papers, poster presentations or digital formats that address the “bridges” outlined above -– from a local, regional, national or global, interdisciplinary or inter arts perspective.
Building Bridges flanks the IFTR annual conference in Cologne, which will be held from June 9-13, 2025 under the theme “Performing Carnival: Ekstatis, Subversion, Metamorphosis”. The conference theme can, but does not have to be addressed at the symposium.
The symposium also aims to bring the members of the IFTR and SIBMAS together for a dialogue. The two sister institutions last met in 2010 – and what better opportunity could there be to resume the dialogue than a joint meeting in Düsseldorf and Cologne, these two different cities on the Rhine?
- Dates: Friday, 6 June -Saturday, 7 June 2025
- Venue: Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln (Friday, 6 June) & Theatermuseum Düsseldorf (Saturday, 7 June)
- Deadline for proposals: February 16, 2025. Postponed to 5 March.
We look forward to your proposals.
To send it to us and if you have any questions, please use the following contact address: symposium2025@sibmas.org AND COPY to theatermuseum@duesseldorf.de AND tanzarchiv@sk-kultur.de
Organizing team: SIBMAS (PD Dr. Nic Leonhardt), Theatermuseum Düsseldorf (Dr. Sascha Förster & team), Deutsches Tanzarchiv Köln (Thomas Thorausch & team)