Art Climate Transition
Co-funded by the
Creative Europe Programme
of the European Union
Theater Rotterdam Rotterdam

Theater Rotterdam

Rotterdam

The Netherlands

Theater Rotterdam is the city theatre of Rotterdam. We present every year around 500 productions of theatre, music, opera, youth theatre, festivals and dance. We invite a diverse and urban audience to our own three venues, offer our hall as a commons, and present artistic productions on site, throughout the city.

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Our focus
  • #DECOLONISATION
  • #NEW-RADICALISATION
  • #community
  • #NEW – RITUALS
  • #activism

In 2017 a merger of four theatre organizations in Rotterdam resulted in Theater Rotterdam. A city theatre, first of its kind in the Netherlands. 

Theater Rotterdam allows to be more than a station where companies pass from time to time. In addition to unconventional programming where quality is paramount, we also create new work ourselves. Young talent has a special role to play in this. With our own Productiehuis we support emerging artists in building their career, allowing them to develop skills and feed their artistic work with engagement and activism. In addition to these emerging artists, 13 artists and collectives were in diverse ways connected to Theater Rotterdam. For the coming four years a new artistic perspective will be built, on the foundations that were created in the recent years.

The themes of diversity and generosity are at the heart of our working. Theater Rotterdam celebrates the difference, the diversity and the change. We don’t want to harmonize, equalize, but add things up and literally create space, a lab. We belief that emphasising differences lead to new thoughts, imaginaries, perspectives. It enables ‘Moglichkeitsdenken’, as Robert Musil calls it.

“Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something.” Donna Haraway

In the past period we have been partner in the Imagine2020 project. We have built with our Club Imagine a community of engaged and committed ‘agents of change’, crossing the borders of science, philosophy, long term policies and instant action. We developed with our artists a wider understanding of the idea of ecology. Find it in the constellations of Lotte van den Berg’s work, the generation Z of Zarah Bracht, in the non-human agencies that are explored in the work of Boogaerdt/Van der Schoot. We value the possibility of connecting this artistic development to a wider European discourse on the connection of artistic activism with ecological awareness. The deepening of the agenda that ACT proposes, connects this for us even more to the deeply rooted local issues of inequality and injustice in our world-city. It gives hope to connect this with artistic practices and tactics throughout Europe.

Theater Rotterdam

articles

#learning to impact Sarah Vanhee: Impact? It’s very unspectacular, actually
Sarah Vanhee: Impact? It’s very unspectacular, actually

By Arie Lengkeek & Jacco van Uden

#learning to impact Davy Pieters: we are shocked into thinking
Davy Pieters: we are shocked into thinking

By Arie Lengkeek & Jacco van Uden

#collection europe take care
take care

By Arie Lengkeek

#localising Becoming-World
Becoming-World

By Rosi Braidotti

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Theater Rotterdam

activities

#localising #localising
Theater Rotterdam Rotterdam
5 Jun 2023 - 30 Jun 2023

TRipp [space]

with Merel Smitt and Floor van Leeuwen

For the 5th edition of TRipp [space], Merel Smitt will travel to Skopje to participate the SummerLab #4 where she will encounter with urbanists, ecologists, activists and other 10 artists of ACT ) Art, Climate Transition Network. After that she will return to Rotterdam and start to collaborate with Floor van Leeuwen for the preparation of new cycles of  How To Start A Movement? In collaboration with Humanistisch Verbond from Ecohumanist perspective. Floor van Leeuwen will participate to Relay Lecture in Rotterdam and will kick off their Swarming project in collaboration with Arts Admin in London in the end of June during What Shall We Build Here – a festival of art, climate and community –   and will continue to work there with the LGBTQ+ community till end of August’23.

#localising #localising
Theater Rotterdam Rotterdam
7 Jun 2023

Moving in Concert, in Rotterdam

Mette Ingvartsen

Moving in Concert envisions a universe in which people, technologies and natural materials coexist to create an abstract series of movements. Inspired by the way bodies are sensory influenced by living in a digitized world, the performance explores a poetics of plasticity, abstraction and imagination.

#localising #localising
Kampnagel HamburgTheater Rotterdam Rotterdam
16 Aug 2023 - 20 Aug 2023

Ophelia’s Got Talent

Florentina Holzinger

A wet terrain that is the stage and the training ground to find out how to become like Ophelia – embodying the laws that govern a special environment to satisfy the desires and fantasies of others. Water is the element of assimilation and adaptation, a symbol of the limitless capacity for expansion, of an eternal, inseparable unity with the outside world. Symbolically, water is associated with femininity – and with death. An oceanic landscape emerges, full of illusions, cultural and historical references to all kinds of aquatic creatures and drowned strangers, a scenario that not only asks the question… whether training and exercise can help us escape the precarious conditions of the present with climate catastrophes and other disasters to come. It also invites speculation about future life forms that have assimilated these conditions, transformed them and created new forms of being.

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Theater Rotterdam

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