We turn questions into worlds to enter, explore and feel
Via Berlin is an arts-based research and performing arts company. We are a living laboratory where creators, artists, musicians, scientists, and civic organisations work on the most urgent questions of our time. Together we create immersive performances, games, installations, educational programs, and research formats. The result is works that move people, shift perspectives, spark debates and remind us of what’s at stake.
Art offers insights that complement scientific research, revealing dimensions of human experience that are difficult to capture through surveys or laboratory settings alone.
With arts-based research we foster co-creation across art, science, and society, resulting in insights that inform audiences, policy makers, social practice, and future research.
Our unique approach
Some stories are told. Others are lived. Via Berlin immerses.
Our methodology places participants inside experiences that evoke genuine emotions, deliberately introduces the unexpected, and builds in structured and safe spaces for reflection. This combination of immersion, disruption, connection and reflection is what makes our methodology distinctive: not simply observing people, but generating insight with them, through experiences designed to last.
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Immersion
Via Berlin places participants inside emotional and social situations that no laboratory can replicate, where behaviour reveals itself rather than being reported after the fact.
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Disruption
Via Berlin deliberately introduces moments where someone breaks the rules, goes off script, or upends the expected order, because real social complexity rarely announces itself in advance.
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Connection
Via Berlin creates conditions for genuine human connection between participant and character, between strangers sharing the same experience, and between individuals and the larger social fabric.
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Reflection
Via Berlin creates structured space for participants and researchers alike to examine their own assumptions, behaviours, and blindspots from the inside, turning lived experience into lasting insight.
“The ability to get to the heart of the matter, both musically and theatrically, with minimal means is something to be cherished.”
“Visually compelling and deeply affecting theatre that lingers in the mind long after.”
We collaborate with academic partners, educators, schools, professional teams, organisations and artists. Our work ranges from developing research methods and artistic interventions with universities, to introducing students to arts-based research and creating tailor-made experiences for organisations. Through our large-scale music theatre productions, we reach wider audiences.
Who we work with
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Organisations
Are you looking for a live immersive experience that reveals how your people actually behave; under pressure, across hierarchies, in moments of genuine conflict? We bring performances, installations, and games to professional teams, schools, and organisations.
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Researchers
Are you looking for a partner to co-design an immersive research instrument around your research question? We embed artistic direction inside the research design from the start and co-author, co-publish, and co-apply for funding alongside you.
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Educators
Are you looking to build capacity in arts-based research methodology for institution, your students, or your programme? We teach arts-based research at the UVA and offer ABR methodology workshops for researchers and students at all career stages.
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Audiences
Are you looking to experience art-based research from the inside? Our large-scale immersive productions at Oerol and beyond have brought tens of thousands of people inside stories that turned out to be experiments and left them changed by both. Find out what’s next.
“Via Berlin is a company that seeks to tell universal values, themes and emotions in a completely distinctive way. Sometimes with words, sometimes without, but always in the spotlight of beauty.
It may well have been the most beautiful thing I have seen at Oerol in recent years. Theatre that moves you, stays with you, changes you.”
Highlighted Projects
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An immersive Installation
In the interactive installation ‘Invisible city’ you view the city from a single room. A city that seems far away.
Invisible city works with people on a growing collection of painful words and sentences that have been said to people in the past.
You can leave those hurtful words with us, and continue your journey through the city relieved.
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Dance performance
Huis G. addressed domestic violence and coersive abuse. Beside the music theater piece, we created a comprehensive context programme with social expert organisations and a research programme together with the Radbout University.
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Scripted Nordic LARP
‘What Happens When We Meet? is not a performance you simply watch, but an experience you step into. Instead of sitting in the audience, you take on the role of one of the characters yourself. You experience their memories, play out their emotions, and are coached live.
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Music Theater
‘Instant Loneliness’ was the finale of our triptych with Cello Octet Amsterdam. Together we created three big music theater pieces: Instant Happiness (about the consumption society), Instant Love (about Human trafficking and the consumption of each other) and Instant Loneliness (about the loneliness underneath it all). As and addition to the shows, we created in depth context programmes together with social expert organisations.
“Music and text complement each other effortlessly, with the music either reinforcing the story or acting as a counterpoint. Music and text are entirely equal: sometimes the story is told through sound, sometimes through words.”
“The way the company connects contemporary music with current social issues is distinctive within Dutch music theatre.”
Highlighted Publications
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Policy Brief
DEMOCRACY UNDER PRESSURE: NEW TOOLS TO COUNTER GENDERED RADICALISATION
MEN4DEM is a Horizon Europe-funded research project that brings together the knowledge of academics, artists, and activists to co-create and test interventions that engage men in strengthening democratic resilience. We conducted a systematic, evidence-based review of intervention effectiveness and synthesized these scientific findings with best practices from MenEngage Europe.
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What happens when we meet?
MEN4DEMs new report on Interventions to Shape More Democratic Masculinities; presenting two complementary interventions designed to prevent radicalisation and strengthen democratic, egalitarian masculinities by helping participants recognise and resist the social and rhetorical processes through which anti-democratic narratives take hold.
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Can Stories shift political view?
When Did You Leave? is an immersive theatre experiment on populist radical-right narratives.
In a time of growing political polarization, these findings matter far beyond Terschelling. PRR politicians and influencers are skilled storytellers. They know very well how to effectively convey their nativist, populist and sexist messages. Our study helps illuminate through which such persuasion works.
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Acts of Citizenship
In Acts of Citizenship we place at the centre the paradox between the growing desire for and appreciation of a powerful nation state on the one hand, and on the other hand the ambivalent relationship citizens maintain with the institution that acts on their behalf on the global stage.
We zoom in on the dilemma of whether to help or not to help, whether or not to intervene, and on the question of intervention always improves a situation.
Our Partners
