About the Visiting Program:

Festivals of the independent performing arts are regarded as motors of innovation for artistic positions and aesthetic practices. But they also offer important potential for networking, for getting to know new places and regions, stages and protagonists – outside of one’s own local or regional work environment.

With the format &FRIENDS VISIT, together with the FESTIVALFRIENDS network we invite artists to our festival, to come to Frankfurt during IMPLANTIEREN’s second gathering format, and to immerse themselves in a very intensive program of workshops, participatory performances and learning situations as well to attend the conversation and mediation formats with artists from Frankfurt developed especially for the format. While all projects have their own rhythm in September, October and November, IMPLANTIEREN hosts three gatherings - one at the end of each month, where all artists and their audience have the opportunity to interact in an intensive full-day program consisting of their own performances/hostings/workshops.
We would like to invite people who are concerned with issues of sustainability, body positivity and staying with the trouble to join us and also bring their own understanding of learning in and with a group to the festival by participating in the proposed performative processes. One of our ideas is to make visible the art that transcends the boundaries of culture and the culture that transcends the boundaries of art. To this end, we have prepared a lot of meetings with local artists and players from the independent theatre scene for our guests.

FESTIVALFRIENDS Network

A total of twelve independent performing arts festivals in Germany have joined forces under the name FESTIVALFRIENDS.

Together we share knowledge and experience from our own festival work and strengthen the development and expansion of festival structures across federal states. We see our local festivals as supra-regional and international platforms and as important sources of inspiration for contemporary artistic practices and aesthetics. It is a central concern of ours to bring artists and their positions beyond their local sphere of influence into new regions and contexts. With our &FRIENDS formats, we offer festival-related formats to strengthen artistic production and its touring and to focus on the specific working and organizational structures of independent theater and performance festivals.

The FESTIVALFRIENDS Network currently consists of the following festivals (August 2024): Der Rahmen ist Programm (Chemnitz), FAVORITEN (Dortmund/NRW), Fringify (Hamburg), Implantieren (Frankfurt/Rhein-Main), Performing Arts Festival (Berlin), Phoenix Theater Festival (Erfurt), Rodeo (München), 6 Tage frei (Stuttgart), FREISTIL FESTIVAL (Völklingen), OSTEN (Bitterfeld-Wolfen), THEATERNATUR FESTIVAL (Benneckenstein/Harz), Impulse Theater Festival (Mülheim a. d.R./ Cologne/ Düsseldorf).

FESTIVALFRIENDS is being funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as part of the German Association of Independent Performing Arts’ programme “Verbindungen fördern”.