wir reichen ein: unseren verschwendungsnachweis
At the end of this year, the federal program “Fördern Verbindungen” (Promoting Connections) will come to an end. Since 2022, this funding instrument has enabled us to grow as a network and to develop and successfully implement important formats for producers and interested protagonists in the independent performing arts in Germany.
With the publication of the results of the adjustment meeting for the 2026 federal budget, it has become clear that there will be no follow-up funding for the important program “Fostering Connections.”, hence no funding for produktionsbande.
For all funded networks in general, the lack of funding from 2026 onwards is a bitter setback. For producers and our network in particular, the lack of follow-up funding means a significant loss of visibility and recognition as eligible protagonists (whether as individuals, production offices, or networks). Not to mention the ability to exert influence as a multi-faceted network on cultural policy discourses, funding structures, and future developments.
If the prevailing belief is that producers are merely well-paid receipt collectors* who simply monitor public funds instead of being allowed to receive them as applicants, then we will do so in our last newsletters. In our own unique way.
We submit: our proof of uselessness.
* Yes: At least one person from our network was called this before.
texts for our futures
A colleague from our network once described the role of producers as magical creatures. So, in addition to being a jack-of-all-trades, they are also shape shifters. Because, as we know, we are many things.
Here, we are a spontaneous cable carrier during technical setup; there, we are an unskilled accountant filing GbR tax returns. Yesterday you were a co-author on the application, today you are a trained actor, but you are drawing up fee contracts with everyone involved in the team—and tomorrow you will be asked to play the role of a logistics specialist at a rehearsal: How can we get this huge stage set on tour easily and efficiently?
We are many things — to many people. But what are we actually as producers? To ourselves and to our colleagues? The following sections each suggest a facet of our work that leads to a text. With this collection, we want to show ourselves and all our partners in crime: we are more than just executors — we can be designers of a new, different way of producing and working.
Feel free to read on — the texts were written either by producers themselves or by people who recognize the importance of our work and put it down on paper. If you're looking for inspiration, recognition, support, or simply want to see what we as producers do on a daily basis: these texts were made for you and us.
l.m.a.: let's make art
Back in 2013, Thomas Schmidt formulated a new job description in municipal and state theaters: the artistic producer: “[The job profile] not only combines the organizational skills of the production manager, who oversees a production from its inception to its premiere and is usually ‘at home’ in both the technical and staging areas, but also links these areas with the clear requirement to provide artistic advice and support for a production.”
Producer Gathering—a UK association of producers in the independent performing arts—has simply gone ahead and done it: a self-care support reader by and for producers. One of the numerous articles hits the nail on the head: “Asking people who make things happen and get things done — or ‘produce’ — to reflect on their potential physical and emotional exhaustion tends to quickly push them away from reflection and toward something tangible and practical.”
Our role: multifaceted, complex, fluid. Our training: learning by doing, faking and failing. If there are no truly suitable training paths, we simply invent them ourselves. Katja Sonnemann illustrates this with the example of the Academy for Performing Arts Producers (2014–2018), which was offered by the Alliance of International Production Houses.
The essay “Das Andere als Standard” (The Other as Standard) proposes understanding producers as a permeable membrane that mediates between spaces of art (stages) and spaces of business (offices). What is special about this is that in the independent performing arts, art and business coincide in one space. And this unique situation presents production work with complex challenges that producers can solve.
Even during the coronavirus pandemic, it became clear that producers can (and must) navigate crises—both at the individual production level and at the structural level. In her publication Creative Production and Management in the Performing Arts: Modus Operandi, Vânia Rodrigues has already demonstrated that producers are a central element of sustainable artistic practices and can therefore also be change managers. The anthology “Modes of Production: Performing Arts in Transition” picks up on this discussion and uses further voices to show that producers shape (re)organization and (re)structuring processes.
In her text “Gouvernementality and Self-Precarization,” Isabell Lorey describes the working methods of freelance artists as forms of self-exploitation that reproduce the power relations and overproduction that dominate them due to a fantasy of self-realization. Although she writes about cultural producers, she is referring primarily to artists. From the perspective of a producer, this text can show the extent to which they can be a corrective to the self-exploitation of artists. For fun, we have already given producers a name in everyday life: killjoys.
In 2024, the Polish Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute conducted a qualitative study on the work and role of producers in the performing arts ecosystem. Over 80 pages provide insights into their research findings. Just one of many thoughts that goes down like oil in the publication: “Producers are at the heart of the theater ecosystem. They bring together the world of procedures, artists, audiences, technical staff, and logistics, ensuring the consistency and effectiveness of projects.” In other words: We are process designers and have an eye on all the individual parts that we fit together into a whole — and that in turn is embedded in the big picture.
In the introduction to their anthology Radical Realities: Festival Work as Performative Action, Julia Buchberger, Patrick Kohn, and Max Reiniger cautiously, almost shyly, suggest a connection between two areas that, once articulated, seems almost too obvious: If the frequently used term “performative” in theater studies means “reality-creating,” then the entire concept of performativity is applicable not only to artistic performances, but also to all the conditions that make it possible for shows or theater to take place in the first place. In other words, producers perform because they create specific working environments designed by them as realities for everyone involved in the production. In short, a locked room opens when the right key has been provided in advance.
the mindblowing introduction (and the whole book for free, in German): here