Overview

The award-winning global theatre portal The Theatre Times launches Performap, an Interactive Digital Map of Global Theatre Festivals. With hundreds of festivals browsable and searchable by festival location, type, and date, Performap is the first extensive digital index of its kind in the field. It is built expressly for artists, audiences, critics, scholars, festival organizers, curators, and presenters from around the world. Performap also includes reports written by local writers and traveling reporters published by The Theatre Times.

Festivals of theatre and performance are hotbeds of creativity, experimentation, cross-pollination, and virtuosity: they’re platforms for artists at the forefront of their fields. Because of the rapid timelines and compact scales of festival production, they’re also stunning snapshots of the field’s acutest aches, anxieties, and addictions.

Designed to drive online traffic to the individual festival websites, Performap is a highly visible and reliable node in the festival ecosystem—not a destination but a well-trodden intersection. At the same time, Performap also enables quantitative analysis of that very industry. Its primary purpose is to facilitate real-time access to festivals worldwide, ideally by increasing public awareness and ticket sales, but it also articulates the contours of festival circuitry through the collection and organization of measurable data. This data is open access, so that anyone has permission to use its digital archive, run quantitative analyses, and create visualizations, maps, and models of its contents. Performap is an invaluable resource for scholastic, journalistic, and management research on theatre and performance festivals worldwide. Scholars specializing in theatre and performance studies, anthropology, sociology, economics, and urban planning will find it particularly attractive.

Performap was developed with funding from the Yale Digital Humanities Lab and a Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of Americas (LMDA) Innovation Grant.