New theatre incubator De Dapper in Amsterdam Oost

In Amsterdam East, the new theatre breeding ground De Dapper will be located in the former Muiderpoort Theatre, which was established as a dance theatre in the 1980s. The development of Broedplaats De Dapper will be carried out by PodiumPartners Foundation and supported by Bureau Broedplaatsen of the City of Amsterdam.

Stichting PodiumPartners/ Plein Theater is thus fulfilling a long-held dream of creating available space for experimentation, crossovers and collaborations for stage makers at the intersection of contemporary dance, music, visual theatre and night theatre.

"The incubator is going to be a platform for positive-critical contributions to contemporary developments in the world. It will be a place to form and share opinions through performance arts. In this way, The Dapper will provide a home for performance artists who want to contribute substantially to their art form and to the world." - said Berith Danse, artistic director and director of Stichting PodiumPartners.

Alderman Touria Meliani (Arts and Culture): "Breeding places offer space to artists and makers and play a connecting role in the neighbourhood through the many activities organised there. They are also important platforms for talent development, which is also very evident at Broedplaats De Dapper. Broedplaats De Dapper will be a great place for Amsterdam Oost and the rest of the city, for the whole of Amsterdam to enjoy for a long time."

Since the 2008 merger, two presentation and makerspaces fall under PodiumPartners Foundation: Plein Theater and the Muiderpoorttheater, the latter becoming Broedplaats De Dapper. Affordable, good rehearsal spaces and try-out stages are scarce in the centre of Amsterdam. The breeding place aims to be an incubators space that becomes accessible to CAWA-registered theatre artists and curators from various performing arts disciplines.

"The Dapper grants artists the space and time to develop contemporary performances that blur the boundaries between composed music, experimental dance, crossover theatre and other performance disciplines. We like to call the intended disciplines by their names: contemporary composed classical music (western and non-western), contemporary theatre (mime, ritual, location), contemporary dance (urban, non-western), contemporary figure and object theatre and contemporary virtual applied forms in theatre and everything that moves in between."

"Amsterdam deserves a new kind of breeding ground," says Berith Danse, and also wants to give the knowledge of her previous international production house Theatre Embassy space for new creators. In it, experiments, residencies and crossovers took place around the world and had as its objective the development of the performing arts in its most diverse cultural forms. The Dapper and Plein Theatre place themselves in a network of local and international venues and makerspaces.

De Dapper will be an affordable place for performance makers, where they can experiment, design and enter into dialogue with residents of the Dapper neighbourhood. A place that makes the ideas of performance makers a structural part of developments in the special Dapper neighbourhood.

De Dapper will be made more sustainable and improved with the help of subsidy from the City of Amsterdam in early 2023, after which the first stage makers will be able to start working during the year. Plein Theater and De Dapper will work together as production houses and stages.