About

I am a Frankfurt based freelance creative producer for contemporary theatre performances and a copywriter for and with artists and agencies. I trained as an office administrator and studied Applied Theatre Studies in Gießen with an interest in aesthetics of the body and concepts of body politics.

As a creative producer for contemporary theatre performances, I work with artists and collectives on project concepts and frame the artistic process by implementing supportive administrative, financial and strategic forms of organisation.

As a copywriter, I develop concepts, texts and content strategies for agencies and brands. For art collectives I develop project-related campaigns as well as press and reference texts.

Projects

Recent

Judith Altmeyer

20.01.2023
21.01.2023
22.01.2023

more info:
www.mousonturm.de

As a production consultant, I assisted the following processes:

application
budgeting and monitoring
rehearsal
accounting

The barrel is brought to overflowing, the air is fattened and all screws are loosened. The Esca-Late Night Show resembles the glamorous idols of night-time television; except that here everything escalates.

The male-dominated late-night business gives perfectly prepared show interludes, hair-trigger punchlines, musical numbers that bring tears to the audience’s eyes and guests in dazzling costumes with brilliantly prepared answers. In short, it provides a wonderful template to break this well-built, detailed perfection.

This late-night show explores the worst-case scenario. The audience is invited to plunge into the abyss together with the Esca-Late Night Show: The show must go down!

© Tillmann Zizka

© Tillmann Zizka

© Tillmann Zizka

Past

Theater neben dem Turm

December 2021 - June 2022

more information:
www.theaternebendemturm.de

My service as a consultant

workshop conception
moderation five workshops
follow-up of discussions
documentation

The Theater neben dem Turm (TNT) is a free production space for the performing arts in Marburg (Hesse). 

In order to be able to react to current challenges as a team of four, I accompanied discussion and exchange formats within the framework of five workshops I designed.

In different constellations (as a whole team, as duos, as individual discussions), four challenges could be identified and the tasks necessary for overcoming them could be derived.

© Marburg Stadt und Land Tourismus

FESTIVALFRIENDS
c/o NRW Landesbüro
Freie Darstellende
Künste e. V.

FESTIVALFRIENDS - a festival association of the independent performing arts in Germany

since July 2021

more info:
www.festivalfriends.de

My services as project manager PR:

Commissioning Logo conception

Service description Internet presence

Design Approach Barrier-free

Application CD concept print & web
Content conception and production

Development of content strategy Social Media

The FESTIVALFRIENDS association consists of seven independent scene festivals.

In cooperation with the commissioned design agency, I designed the brand identity for this association.

An additive logo approach shows the structure of the association - as a network of different positions that can be shown in their diversity and different connections. A clear formal language creates a restrained framing, which shows the content accents of the individual festivals and the network formats with a solid colour concept.

The development of the website followed a low-barrier approach. The clearly visible page levels are accompanied by navigation texts in plain language. In this way, we create visual and content-related transparency - regardless of where visitors are.

Martin Bien

Online publication: 07.08.2021

Access to the text (in German):
Das Andere als Standard

Publication of an excerpt in Kultur Management Network Magazin No. 164, Jan/Feb 2022 (in German):
To the excerpt

This text was written in the context of an individual research on the question: What does it mean to produce within the independent performing arts?

In my everyday work as a freelance creative producer, I encounter an often anticipated notion of the scope of production management: project organization and financial administration. Starting from the development of the directing position from process organization to artistic direction, my essays tries to present current problematics of artistic practice and entrepreneurial responsibility of artistic directors. In the connection of art and enterprise, of unique project and administrative standards, I see the producers and production managers as mediators between exactly these two areas.

Production managers and producers, according to my thesis, imitate a theater organization without being theater and without having an organization. From the lack of this organization as a sustainable, resilient apparatus - and this does not necessarily or automatically imply a desire for precisely this - they work out a membrane at which artistic and production processes touch, at and with which a flexible framework and the uniqueness of an artistic project can be mutually dependent.

With my text "Das Andere als Standard", I personally try to conceptualize and locate the field of producing.

Friederike Thielmann & Jacob Bussmann

Premiere: 16.07.2021
studioNAXOS

More information:
https://studionaxos.de/programm/in-grund-und-boden-premiere

My services:
management
contracting
finance administration
infrastructure
organisation
communication
controlling
billing

It is the soil (of the earth, of the stage), soaked up with toxic materials, that may no longer carry meaning here. But now it washes upwards. And with it the sucking sounds of the mould that we call sad and sombre. A musical-essayistic encounter with mud and showers of dreary surroundings and states of being.

© Charlotte Bösling

© Charlotte Bösling

© Charlotte Bösling

© Charlotte Bösling

© Charlotte Bösling

NRW Landesbüro
Freie Darstellende Künste e. V.

a network of seven festivals of the independent performing arts funded within the framework of the pilot phase of "Verbindungen fördern" (2021 - 2023) of the Federal Association of Independent Performing Arts (Bundesverband Freie Darstellende Künste, BFDK)

March to June 2021

more information:
press release

My services as interim project manager:

organisational overhead structure
administrative overhead structure
budget & liquidity planning
meetings/reporting
network communication
BFDK communication
Public Relations Concept
contracting
network coordination
collaboration on participation concept

festivalfriends is a joint initiative of the association of regional festivals of the independent performing arts, consisting of Performing Arts Festival (Berlin), 6 tage frei (Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg), Hauptsache Frei (Hamburg), RODEO (Munich), FAVORITEN (Dortmund, North Rhine-Westphalia), IMPLANTIEREN (Frankfurt am Main, Rhine-Main region) and neue unentd_ckte narrative (Chemnitz).

As interim project manager, I develop the basic administrative, organisational and communicative structure of the festival network. I act as an intermediary between the association, the festivals organised in it and the Federal Association of the Performing Arts as the funding institution. With the objectives of the festival association, the individual needs of the participating festivals and the specific requirements in funding administration, I develop a basic structure that functions as a legal, organisational and contentual framework for the start of the festivalfriends' joint work.

Asja Mahgoub

Premiere: 19.10.2021
Frankfurt LAB

More information:
mousonturm.de/en/events/sticky-matter/

My services:
Production consulting

A spaceship drifts between planets, between the past, the forgotten and the lost – through the void. Or is something there after all? To get the ship running again, performance artist Asja Mahgoub explores dealing with the unknown while moving through sticky material. She tests narratives of discovery, tales of progress and descriptions of the foreign. What aggregate state are our identities in? The performance Sticky Matter welcomes you on board for this mission. Keep calm and stay alert.

© Florian Dobener

© Charlotte Bösling

© Charlotte Bösling

© Charlotte Bösling

zaungäste

Premiere: 23.01.2021

Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, digital

More information:
mousonturm.de/en/events/ich-trinke-mein-glas-leer/

My services:
Finances
Contracting
Accounting

Six performers, countless party props and the question “How many parties have we actually celebrated together?” – What began in 2019 as a theatrical experiment to challenge the zaungäste choir and explore its limitations has long since been overtaken by subsequent events: the subject of isolation and distancing suddenly became highly charged and real. What, then, is left of community when we can only gather online? And is it already a party when we stare at each other on screens while drinking wine? “Ich trinke mein Glas leer und träum, dass es schön wär‘. Ein Chor vermisst Dich“ (I empty my glass and dream that it would be nice. A choir misses you) picks up where “Diesmal machen wir alle alles allein“ (This time we all do everything by ourselves) left off in December 2019. The point of departure are the solos written at the time about loneliness, (failing) to get to know each other, the difficulty of remembering each other’s names, the sorrow and pleasure of missing each other.

© Charlotte Bösling

© Charlotte Bösling

© Charlotte Bösling

PINSKER+BERNHARDT

Premiere: 01.11.2020
Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, BAU
in the frame of Tanzplattform Rhein-Main

More information:
mousonturm.de/events/body-boom-boom-brain/

My services:
finances
contracting
graphic design
visual identity
public relations

This moment, when everything gets out of control! Where you just wanna disappear or wish for the ground to swallow you up. When your ears get hot, the face turns red and your hands just don’t know where to put themselves. Welcome to the universe of pbrty. Would be real nice, if someone could help out. If only the hairy leg could make a clear announcement, just how to put those arms casually into some pockets. But no, everything is always growing, shrinking, too dry, too moist, too greasy, too big or small and weirdly colored. Yeah, just keep staring!

PINSKER+BERNHARDT invite (indeed!) everyone over age 12 to explore fucking pbrty as the ultimate brain-body-killer of all human conditions. The theatre becomes a laboratory, in which pimples and pubic hair take over, while the staff tries to get to the bottom of this absurd spectacle.

© Martin Bien

© Jan Bosch

© Jan Bosch

© Jan Bosch

© Jan Bosch

zaungäste

Premiere: 03.09.2020
in the frame of IMPLANTIEREN2020-Festival

More information:
mousonturm.de/en/events/trip-of-a-lifetime/ 

My services:
financial acquisition
security concept
contracting

The chances of being killed by a falling coconut are higher than the odds of being attacked by a shark. You’re more likely to die operating a vending machine than from a falling coconut. A left-handed person is more likely to die from improper use of a right-handed product than from using a vending machine. Often what we ourselves consider to be probable bears no relation to the statistical frequency of an event, or else not as many people would play the lottery or wait for love at first sight. 

Trip of a Lifetime is a performative city tour with the rather unlikely goal of encountering a single specimen of the world’s largest living mammal, the blue whale, in the city. The whale serves as a metaphor for something unexpected, something sublime, something out of place. You are more likely to be eaten by a whale on the banks of the River Main than to be killed by a falling coconut.

© Christian Schuller

© Christian Schuller

© Christian Schuller

© Christian Schuller

ID_Frankfurt e. V.

Festival period: 20.08. - 06.09.2020
Frankfurt, Offenbach, Darmstadt

More information:
implantieren-festival.de/en/

My service:
Conception festival budget monitoring

IMPLANTIEREN is a biennial performance festival by ID_Frankfurt e.V. (Independent Dance and Performance e.V.). It emerged in 2013 from the Tanzpanorama and Rough Cuts festivals and, as a format for site-specific performances, explicitly responds to the lack of space experienced by many freelance artists. In addition to nine artistic works, most of which were produced especially for the festival, discursive formats and an educational programme were also developed for the 2020 festival edition. These also focused on the public as well as the communally used space.

© Christian Schuller

JASCHA&FRANZ

going live: March 2020
showcases: jaschaundfranz.net

My services:
Text structure concept
Text production

JASCHA & FRANZ work with a wide variety of accomplices on the conception and realisation of pleasurable spaces and their content. Spatial design or designed space: for them, architecture and design merge. They create their spaces, installations and designs out of a desire for interaction and participation. They are always holistically participatory and above all collectively conceived. Their spatial and design works are both an invitation and an instigation - to immerse oneself and get involved.

I developed the reference texts for the previous projects of the space design duo JASCHA&FRANZ.

© Jascha Kretschmann, Franz Thöricht

Kristin Gerwien

Premiere: 23.02.2020
Sandbar, Frankfurt am Main

More information:
theaternebendemturm.de/show-item/schreien-in-angemessener-lautstaerke/

My services:
application conception
dramaturgical consulting
accounting support

Schreien in angemessener Lautstärke deals with the staging, control and controllability of the phenomenon of screaming. In its cultural-historical development, the scream was primarily seen as a loud, vocal expression and acoustic sign of an affect, but neglected as a technique. Kristin Gerwien (voice) and Moritz Junkermann (DJ) playfully combine the many manifestations of the scream into a sound collage in an experimental set consisting of voice, sound carriers, effects devices and performative interludes.

© Frank Bender

© Frank Bender

© Frank Bender

© Frank Bender

© Frank Bender

zaungäste

My services:
finance administration
accounting

Susanne Zaun and Marion Schneider have taken the “small world phenomenon”, discovered by social research in the 1960’s, as the basis and starting point for the development of six different solos with performers, who usually stand on stage together as a choir. The six solos are simply sketched experiments focusing on the subject of loneliness. They are episodes in a series. Each of these episodes aesthetically stands for itself, yet – as in every good series – it’s all about the internal references that connect the soloists to one another and allow previous scenes to take on new meaning.

© Charlotte Bösling

© Charlotte Bösling

© Charlotte Bösling

Lisa Schettel

Premiere: 05.12.2019
taT studio stage, Stadttheater Giessen

More information:
archivierung.stadttheater-giessen.de/spielzeit-2019-2020/stueckansicht/tausend-tode-die-ich-sterbe.html

My services:
application concept
funding acquisition
public relations
accounting

Lisa Schettel, Laura Eggert, Constantin von Thun and Nils Weishaupt consciously bring shame onto the stage. In a major research project, they shared personal experiences of shame, exposed themselves to their own shame episodes among themselves, conducted interviews with friends and family, with researchers and experts.

In their show, they bring these experiences and reports to the stage to show the familiar affect in a new light. It is not about scandals or naked skin. Rather, the team explores how we can experience in which ways our togetherness is shaped through accounts of shameful events. Shame thus becomes a pleasurable search for speaking about what makes us blush and sweat. Can we transfer shame from the stage to the audience? And what happens when shame spills over into the shame of others? What remains of shame when everyone is ashamed? Ideally: the insight that shame does not have to divide, but can unite.

© Charlotte Bösling

© Charlotte Bösling

© Charlotte Bösling

© Charlotte Bösling

PINSKER+BERNHARDT

Premiere: 21.05.2019
Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Studio 1

More information:
mousonturm.de/en/events/paare-sind-feindliche-inseln/

My services:
graphic design
campaign concept
campaign visuals

The regime of couples is omnipresent: going through life as a duo is still considered the ultimate relationship goal. While this form of coexistence brings affection and trust, it also contains potential for competition and anxiety. It can feel great and awful at the same time. It can make you both co-dependent and free. In Paare sind feindliche Inseln, Janna Pinsker and Wicki Bernhardt attempt to navigate the ideological map of desire. For this, they transform the object of their desire into … an actual object. “Do you think she fancies me?” they ask as they leer at a vacuum cleaner.

With its animistic approach to objects, Paare sind feindliche Inseln is the great white shark in an ocean of love.

© Martin Bien

© Martin Bien

Kristin Gerwien

Premiere: 10.11.2018
Frankfurt LAB, stage 2

in the frame of Tanzfestival Rhein-Main
invited to Körber-Studio für Junge Regie on 15.06.2019

More information:
mousonturm.de/en/events/down-where-the-trees-grow-together/

My services:
Application concept
Funding concept
accounting

Kristin Gerwien carries us off into an intermediate sphere. She is a musician, performer and costume designer all at once; she created a piece full of sculptural power and a fine sense of tonality that is neither concert nor performance. It is everything at once! The piece by this young artist plays with disassociation and alienation. Gerwien stages and multiplies herself as an artistic character. The cover of a chronicle of possible meetings is opened; it tells of human skin, loss, touch, excess and other chasms between reality and fiction – all accompanied by electronically influenced songs.

© Frank Bender

© Frank Bender

© Frank Bender

© Frank Bender

© Frank Bender

Martin Bien

Premiere: 10.11.2017
taT studio stage, Stadttheater Giessen
in the frame of Lange Nacht der Wissenschaft

More information:
archiv.stadttheater-giessen.de/2017-2018/spielzeit-2017-2018/stueckansicht/on-counting.html 

My services:
Concept
Direction
Choreography
Video
Cooperation acquisition
Funding acquisition
Finance administration
Press relations

We know: 1 and 1 is 2. We also know: 1 minus 1 is 0. But what is already lost in these basic equations: a discussion of those two less tangible quantities that mathematics has been trying to calculate since the beginning of its emergence and at that time still had much in common with its friendly discipline, philosophy. If we try to return to the roots of mathematics and philosophy, of calculating and thinking, we will get to the bottom of what mathematics with formulas and philosophy with words have always tried to determine in the service of science: void and infinity as quantities difficult to grasp or calculate.

ON COUNTING brings the basic instruments of mathematics - numbers, counting, forms, patterns - onto the theater stage in order to consider them in relation to their developers: the thinking human being.

© Elena Giffel

© Elena Giffel

© Elena Giffel

© Elena Giffel

© Elena Giffel

Services

As a producer, I accompany the conception, realisation and documentation of contemporary theatre performances. On stage or in public space. 

I offer company for the whole project development but of course can also individually support certain parts of the process:

ARTISTIC DIRECTION & PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT

In my everyday work as a creative producer, I encounter an often anticipated understanding of the scope of production management: project organization and financial administration. Starting from the historic development of the directing position from process organization to artistic direction, the below linked essay tries to present current problematics of artistic practice and entrepreneurial responsibility of artistic directors. In the connection of art and entrepreneurship, of unique projects and administrative standards, I see the producers and production managers as mediators between exactly these two areas.

Production managers and producers, according to my thesis, imitate a theater organization without a theater and without an organization. From the absence of this organization as a sustainable, resilient apparatus - and this does not necessarily or automatically imply a desire for precisely this - they develop a membrane at which artistic and production processes meet at and with which a flexible framework and the uniqueness of an artistic project can be mutually dependent.

The text can be read here: "Das Andere als Standard" (in German only)

Filing
  • conception of a general or/and project-specific filing system

  • implementation of an analogue and digital filing system

Budget monitoring
  • conception of a superordinate and project-specific controlling structure

  • development of easily manageable and scalable cost recording and monitoring systems

  • updating, maintenance and administration of project and overall budgets

Application
  • advice on the conception of the content

  • support in funding-specific application documents 

Funding concept
  • development of financial plans

  • deduction of a corresponding funding acquisition timetable

Project Management 
  • project and team planning on the basis of acquired funding

  • travel, accommodation and transport management

  • acquisition, commissioning, coordination of third party service providers

  • communication between all project participants, institutions and partners

  • contracting

  • additional project-specific tasks

Finances/Controlling
  • monitoring and management of cost and financing plans

  • cost and document recording for personnel and material costs

  • cost centre and cost unit accounting

  • communication with respective funding institutions

  • consulting regarding accounting for project participants

Public Relations
  • development of campaign concepts
    design of channel-specific public relations materials (graphics, text)

  • creation and distribution of target group-specific press materials

  • invitation and hosting of press contacts

Accounting
  • checking all invoice documents regarding accuracy

  • preparation of funding-specific accounts

  • writing project reports and evaluations

Documentation
  • compilation of reference materials

  • compilation of press reviews

  • filing project-related documents (for e. g. guest performances, festivals)

As a copywriter, I develop concepts and text bodies for brand agencies and art collectives. I can offer:

  • development of superordinate structures for text production (wording concept)

  • development of brand-related text styles, tone of voices, contentual structures

  • development of content strategies and campaign concepts

  • development of text bodies on the basis of a briefing/concept

  • text production with reference to text/wording concepts

  • orthographic, grammatical proofreading

  • stylistic, structural proofreading

kontakt@martinbien.de

Imprint

Information according to § 5 TMG and responsible for the content according to § 55 para. 2 RStV:

Martin Bien
kontakt@martinbien.de

c/o Base 9 GbR
Basaltstrasse 9
60487 Frankfurt am Main

Picture rights:
The rights to the production photographs are held by the photographers named in the respective projects.

Concept: JASCHA&FRANZ
Font Headlines: Regular Bien (JASCHA&FRANZ)
Font Body: Basier Square (atipo foundry
Web programming: (Squareclouds Design)
Images: Photographers and copyright holders are identified by name.

Imprint as of 22.05.2023