Ocupied Stage is a performance art festival that reclaims the stage as a site of evidence, critical inquiry, and collective truth-telling. Taking place in Berlin — a city shaped by division, surveillance, and unresolved histories — the festival approaches performance as both commemoration and confrontation. It positions the stage as an occupied terrain where narratives are contested, silenced voices re-emerge, and truth is articulated in real time.

Against silencing, propaganda, and the weaponisation of memory, Occupied Stage asserts performance as counter-performance: a cultural practice that refuses erasure and challenges enforced neutrality. The festival brings together artists working across performance, music, dance, theatre, sound, and interdisciplinary practices whose work engages with questions of power, displacement, censorship, and social responsibility.

Rooted in Berlin’s paradoxical landscape — a city that carefully curates remembrance while increasingly restricting present-day dissent — Occupied Stage insists on accountability in the present tense. It foregrounds artistic practices that function as testimony, examining how violence is normalised, histories are rewritten, and non-violent forms of political expression are delegitimised through dominant narratives. The festival prioritises voices from migrant and diasporic communities, particularly artists whose lived experiences are often marginalised within mainstream cultural institutions.

Occupied Stage is a temporary occupation of cultural space — where performance becomes a method of witnessing, critical presence, and imagining alternative futures grounded in dignity and ethical responsibility.

Palestine first — but never alone.

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Artistic Director: Khaled Barakeh.
Curators: Dr Maiada Aboud & Savanna Fortgang.

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