What we do & who we are
Our mission
We are all involved in a complex and dynamic field of work in which it is quite possible to succeed without mastering all the basics in detail. However, it can happen that you reach an invisible limit and development stagnates on different levels. This is where Guterplan’s offer comes in. Guterplan enables artists and cultural professionals to feel more confident with their tasks, have more fun with them and thus increase the quality of their artistic work.
The quality, stability and sustainability of artistic production depends not least on the continuous acquisition of knowledge and the expansion of methods. These make it possible to carry out practical production tasks as well as strategic planning tasks within the production structures in a self-determined manner and to provide guidance within the team. This is not just about coping with everyday life, but about actively shaping one's own working structures through well-founded concepts, successful applications, communication that maintains and expands the network and a functioning management that keeps the apparatus running.
Guterplan offers a moment of reflection for experienced artists and art producers, through which they can refocus and improve their own working methods in order to achieve new goals. Likewise,Guterplan offers bundled knowledge for beginners as a basis for self-taught work.
The team
We are Guterplan - Matthias Quabbe, Mechtild Tellmann and Felix Wittek have been running the Guterplan platform, which offers advice and digital training for dance professionals, since 2020. We have many years of collaboration with dance artists in various fields of work. With our experience, we ideally cover the field of production practice. We support the independent scene by imparting specific specialist knowledge in a sustainable and contemporary way in the entire field of production practice.
Felix Wittek
is an independent ISO-certified EU fundraiser and producer in the field of performing arts. He develops and applies for EU projects for cultural institutions and has specialized in the production of complex cooperation projects and consulting for artists and funding institutions since 2016. From 2013 to 2016 he was director of the internationale tanzmesse nrw and afterwards innovation manager at Hamburg Kreativ Gesellschaft. In recent years, he has worked as a cultural producer for Kampnagel, the 7th Biennale Tanzausbildung and the Hamburg VRHAM! festival
Mechtild Tellmann
is a cultural manager for contemporary dance and circus. Her work focuses on company consulting, press and public relations work, as well as the conception and realization of sector-specific events such as "Re-thinking funding practices in dance" for the Kunststiftung NRW and the "flausen+bundeskongress" on behalf of the FWT Cologne and flausen+headquater. She has taught or teaches at CIAM Cologne, SpoHo Cologne and Ruhr University Bochum. As a cultural producer, she has been working in the field of company development since 2013 with Overhead Project, Cologne and from 2010-2022 with CocoonDance Bonn, she has been Business Manager of Circus DanceFestival, Cologne since 2019 and founded the festival and network tanz.tausch in 2010.
Matthias Quabbe
is a dramaturge in contemporary dance and works with Reut Shemesh, Rykena/Jüngst and Alexandra Waierstall, among others. He develops working concepts, gives workshops (Landesbüro Tanz Köln, Tanzbüro München) and writes about dramaturgical practice. In his work, he combines conceptual project development, production dramaturgy, strategic orientation of artistic development processes with fundamental considerations of dramaturgical methods and challenges in choreographic projects. From 2007 to 2019, he was dramaturg at K3 | Tanzplan Hamburg, where he was responsible for the residency programs, among other things. At the ArtEZ Hoogeschool vor de Kunsten Arnhem he taught "Dramaturgical Practices" in the MA Performance Practices from 2021 to 2023.
This newsletter is a good plan
Here you can find out useful tips and tricks about contemporary dance and how you can make your (working) life a little easier.