About the project
A stage built against erasure
Queer performing arts from Europe's periphery are made under pressure — defunded, delegitimised, sometimes criminalised. The work exists anyway. What it lacks is infrastructure: time to create, routes to travel, and a memory that outlasts the season.
PERFORMA-Q builds all three. Over three years, six partner organisations run 18 artistic residencies, open touring and networking routes between their stages, and grow QTHEQ — a video archive so that queer performance is documented, citable and impossible to erase.
The platform is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and coordinated by NOMANTINELS, the Slovak queer theatre and civic association behind the Drama Queer festival.
How it works
Create · Circulate · Remember
- 01
Create — the residencies
Each cycle hosts artists and collectives for research and creation: shared rehearsal facilities, mentoring, work-in-progress sharings, and honest fees. Process is valued as much as premiere. Residency programme →
- 02
Circulate — touring & networking
Work developed on the platform travels between partner stages and allied festivals. Networking events connect artists with presenters, producers and each other — because a periphery connected is a periphery no longer.
- 03
Remember — the QTHEQ archive
Performances, interviews and documentation enter a living video archive, openly accessible. What history erased once, it will not erase twice. Enter the archive →
PERFORMA-Q is
Six words we answer to
The platform never speaks at people. Every call asks a question, every page invites a click, every show begins with a name and a hand.
Everyone who steps in — artist, audience, staff, partner — is met as a person before they are met as a category.
A person who is queer, European, and a performer finds themselves in our images and language without having to translate.
Every artist, work and gesture is one-of-one. We never run "campaigns featuring queer voices" — we run the work of named people.
We do not soften language for the funder, crop faces for the venue, or pretend the work is family-friendly when it is not.
We listen before we broadcast, ask before we represent, pay before we credit. Care is procedural, not performative.
Tone
Joy is a refusal.
Laughing out loud
is a politic.
A funded artist, paid in full, on a stage that does not flinch, making an audience laugh until they cry — that is the most affirmative refusal of erasure this platform can stage.
So the archive holds grief and glitter in the same shelf. The residencies make room for rage and for rock-star entrances. Never at the expense of a name, a credit, or a payment. Always at the expense of solemnity.
Cycle I
The Artistic Board
Twelve performing-arts experts — two from each consortium partner — read every application. Each proposal is scored independently by at least two members; a third reader settles borderline calls. The board also proposes a better-suited partner venue where that unlocks a project's potential.
Róbert Pakan
Founder and director of the Drama Queer Festival, Slovakia's leading international festival dedicated to LGBTQ+ performing arts. Theatre actor, producer and cultural manager focused on diversity, community engagement and new artistic platforms connecting local and international performing arts communities.
Sandra Polovková
Director of Post Bellum SK since 2016. Studied Theatre Studies at VŠMU Bratislava; formerly a dramaturg and theatre practitioner. Her work joins documentary storytelling, oral history, cultural heritage and arts-based education across national and international projects.
Maja Burazerović
Director at the Sarajevo War Theatre.
Ishak Jalimam
Producer at the Sarajevo War Theatre.
Alexandra Horoščák Bolfová
Theatre director, dramaturg and curator working in devised theatre, socially engaged performance and feminist perspectives. Member of the artistic and executive leadership of CO.LABS, active across institutional and independent contexts and in arts education.
Klaudia Klembarová
Member of the CO.LABS management team responsible for artistic project coordination, management, administration and marketing. Coordinator of support programmes and residencies, and curator of the music programme.
Bernhard Studlar
Artistic director of Wiener Wortstaetten, experienced playwright, mentor and senior expert in dramaturgy.
Martina Knoll
Managing director of Wiener Wortstaetten, cultural manager and producer working across contemporary playwriting, theatre, performance and music — artistic creation, strategic development and international collaboration.
Ulricha Johnson
Managing Director of the Swedish Performing Arts Coalition, the Swedish Centre of ITI. Founder of the Proud Performing Arts Network and Workgroup. Actor, translator, director and activist.
Malin Tengvard
Swedish actor educated at the Malmö Academy of Dramatic Arts; project manager for Proud Performing Arts festivals during Stockholm Pride.
Evangelos Kosmidis
Theatre director, writer, actor and Artistic Director of Mariupol Theatre of Ukraine in Exile. Creator and director of ALASKA, a multilingual devised-documentary performance. His practice centres testimony, memory, displacement, resilience and community-based creation.
Mariia Boiko
Ukrainian theatre practitioner, performer and coordinator of Mariupol Theatre of Ukraine in Exile. Core team member of ALASKA; her work joins artistic participation, coordination and support for international collaborations preserving the cultural memory of Mariupol.
Scorecard: 30% intersectionality & representation · 30% artistic quality & innovation · 20% relevance to the theme · 20% feasibility & transnational potential.
The platform refuses
Five things, by name
They are non-negotiable, and they are the floor: no co-branding with sponsors who fund anti-queer politics, no flag-only campaigns, no dark patterns in ticketing, no space we cannot keep safe.