It is immersive, placing participants inside emotional and social situations that no laboratory can replicate, where behaviour reveals itself rather than being reported after the fact.

It is disruptive, deliberately introducing moments where someone breaks the rules, goes off script, or upends the expected order, because real social complexity rarely announces itself in advance and neither should the research that studies it.

It is connective, creating conditions for genuine human connection between participant and character, between strangers sharing the same experience, and between individuals and the larger social fabric our research seeks to understand.

It is reflective, creating structured space for participants and researchers alike to examine their own assumptions, behaviours, and blindspots from the inside, turning lived experience into lasting insight.

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.

Are you looking to build capacity in arts-based research methodology — for yourself, your students, or your programme? We teach arts-based research at the UVA and offer methodology workshops for researchers at all career stages.

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.

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.

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.

Huis G. addressed domestic violence and coersive abuse. Beside the music theater piece, we created a big side program with social expert organizations and a research program together with the Radbout University.

‘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.

‘Instant Loneliness’ was the finally 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 side programs together with social expert organizations.

MEN4DEM has published a new report, Interventions to Shape More Democratic Masculinities, authored by Tomasz Besta (University of Gdańsk), Dagmar Slagmolen (Via Berlin), Magdalena Iwanowska (University of Gdańsk) and Aleksandra Cupta (University of Gdańsk). The report presents 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.

Rather than focusing on changing beliefs after radicalisation has occurred, the interventions take a preventative approach. They equip participants with the skills to recognise manipulation techniques, reflect on group dynamics, and build resilience against anti-democratic narratives.

With a team of researchers, writers, theatre makers, musicians, dancers, and many other creatives, we developed an immersive theatre experiment around seven fictional family members preparing for – which they expect to be a tense family dinner. Each character represented a different worldview and political message. Spectators first listened individually to one of these character’s personal stories through headphones. After these monologues, the audience watched a live theatre performance in which all seven characters took part in a heated, confrontational family dinner.

Before and after the stories and the theatre performance, we measured spectators’ political attitudes. We also examined whether people felt transported into the narratives, identified with the characters, sympathized with them, and experienced strong emotions. Finally, after the performance, we organized focus groups to better understand how participants interpreted what they had just experienced. In this way, spectators became more than just audience members: they also became research participants.

In recent years Via Berlin shed light in its music theatre productions on the invisible victims of financially lucrative, suffocating societal systems (clothing, human trafficking). In Acts of Citizenship we place at the center the paradox between the growing desire for and appreciation of a powerful nation state on the one hand, and on the other 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 whether intervention always improves a situation. It is interesting to explore how such interventions are often qualified, in the mind of the intervener, as “doing the right thing”, frequently motivated by good intentions or a sense of humanity. But such an intervention or good deed never stands alone. There is always a social and political field in which this “good deed” unfolds and there is always a counterparty who either passively undergoes the act or experiences its effects.