It is with great pleasure that we present Performance Platform – a website and webapp listing the public activities from four different organizations based in Amsterdam: Het Veem Theater, NBprojects, If I Can’t Dance and DasArts. In addition, it calls attention to other performance-related events in the city and abroad.

Performance Platform is a subjective, broadly oriented mapping of the performance landscape. More than a user-friendly listing, it opens up existing pathways through the city of Amsterdam and invites discovery across the various institutions where (performing) arts take place. Far from attempting an all-encompassing survey of the field, we include performance-related activities that have captured our imagination: mainly in Amsterdam – to strengthen the local scene – but also elsewhere in the world (see: ‘our picks’ and ‘elsewhere’).

Every month the delegates of the four partner organizations – Frédérique Bergholtz, Nicole Beutler, Barbara Van Lindt, and Bojana Mladenović – come together to discuss preferred landmarks within and outside of the Amsterdam performance field, unfamiliar artists, or events that arouse our curiosity. We draw attention to the things that are already here, close-by, but which are perhaps overlooked, inconspicuous or as yet unnoticed. Every month a new landscape of artistic activity arises; full of not-yet-visible links and possible interconnections, new perspectives, viewpoints and secret gardens. A monthly Performance Platform Letter written by one of the delegates signals the update of the calendar.

For us – a venue and production house, a dance company, a visual arts institute and a training programme for masters of theatre – approaching the arts from a disciplinary angle does not correspond to the way we work, think and talk. Performance allows another perspective: less sticking to orthodoxy within disciplines, more addressing qualities of presence, the experience of an event, and the politics of show and tell.

Via the Performance Platform website you can subscribe for the monthly Performance Platform Letter, an editorial of one of the four partners signalling the monthly update of the performance agenda. Subscribe here: www.performance-platform.org/subscribe

The website is designed by Kommerz (Marcel van den Berg and Bram Nijssen) and is financially supported by the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts.