Ponderosa welcomes international guests and artists to their studios located on 5.5 hectares of an old farm outside of Berlin in the Brandenburg region of Germany.
We offer artist residencies, studio rental, lodging, and an annual summer dance festival with workshops, contact jams and performances. We are a non-profit organization that belongs to a larger cooperative, we give space to many different ways of living, creating and developing our farm, and the Brandenburg region and it’s surrounding history and landscape.
The ponderosa e.V. is a non-profit organization consisting of 18 people. Our main purpose is to create an annual 3-week International dance festival in the countryside outside of Berlin. We come from wide ranging backgrounds, but share a common experience of embracing the arts, living on a broken down farm and encouraging an event that inspires people’s creative sources and gives them a place to enact their own desires and visions. We depend on the form of improvisation to help create our structures and our solutions. We are a team of organizers, teachers, builders, performers, artists, cultural managers, producers and hosts. Our goal is to bring as much uniqueness, clear thought and spontaneous action to our yearly festival while remaining intact as a self-sufficient group and as a building community.
The second goal of the organization is to continue to develop cultural events in the Brandenburg area, offering ideas and events that develop a sense of place in the region and welcome locals to join an experience that is extraordinary, original, inviting and stimulating.
We would like to bridge the gap between the ages and borders that exist in the surrounding villages; from young people to old people, from Poland to Germany to the International community. Working with the body, the land, the architecture, the history, and with what we know as dance, theater or visual art, we are happy to teach and perform in the nearby towns and villages.
The organization has a small seed group, consisting of 5 people, who meet throughout the year to cover financial planning, grant writing, renovation and creative building, artistic direction, and community outreach. The rest of the team commits to running the 3-week festival in July.
We also have a Circle Of Friends membership that allows people to support the project with a small donation. Send us an email to request more information on how to support the organization.
