Shape your own Festival

In autumn 2025, Tanzfabrik Berlin BÜHNE put out a call to young people between 14 and 17: come help design, plan, and bring to life the very first edition of a new professional art festival. Prior experience with art or dance? Not required. What mattered was curiosity, a point of view, and the drive to shape culture on your own terms.

From a strong field of applicants, a group of six teenagers was selected – and week by week, that group turned into a real curatorial team.
They met regularly at Uferstudios in Berlin-Wedding, where they discussed, disagreed, and found their way back to consensus.
Together with the Tanzfabrik Berlin BÜHNE team, and in exchange with professional artists, the six young festival directors took on everything a festival involves: programming, artist selection, budget, communications, production. In between: shared outings to art events, where the group developed its own criteria and its own eye for contemporary dance and performance.

The result of this months-long process of discussing, discarding, and deciding anew carries the group's own signature – their themes, their aesthetic, their questions about the world. On October 30 and 31, it's finally happening: the festival goes live, along with months of work behind it.

"Shape your own Festival" shows what happens when young people are given real responsibility, not just a say. The six teenagers helped build a professional art format from the ground up – and along the way, discovered what collaboration, self-efficacy, and cultural confidence can mean. Tanzfabrik Berlin BÜHNE is excited to celebrate this chapter together with them: a festival that stayed, start to finish, in the hands of its young makers.