The Ballery

The Ballery is a multidisciplinary cultural space in the heart of Berlin Schoneberg's Rainbow Kiez, founded and directed by Simon Williams, a dancer, choreographer and performer whose international career in dance and musical theatre preceded and continues to shape the institution's artistic identity. Williams arrived in Berlin in 2013, drawn by the city's affordability and openness to creative experimentation. He soon founded Speak Easy, a language exchange event that grew into one of the city's most popular networking gatherings, before opening a Pop-Up Art Gallery in Schoneberg in the summer of that year, an initiative that showcased more than one hundred Berlin based artists in its first year alone.

In September 2014, Williams secured a larger venue on Nollendorfstrasse, a street with its own layered cultural history as the former operations office of the original Theater am Nollendorfplatz, and situated only a few doors from where British writer Christopher Isherwood once lived and wrote the Berlin stories that would later inspire the film Cabaret. The Ballery opened at this address with an exhibition and performance event titled The Birth of the Cool, establishing a space explicitly conceived to connect visual art, performance and community from its very first programme.

The institution's contemporary importance lies in its consistent commitment to multidisciplinary programming, bringing together exhibitions, concerts, dance and public events under one roof while engaging directly with the cultural history and contemporary voices of its Schoneberg neighbourhood, an area long associated with queer culture and artistic life in Berlin. This grounding reflects Williams's own artistic trajectory, which has moved fluidly between dance, music, spoken word and visual art across collaborations in London, Paris, Zurich, Taipei and Vienna prior to his arrival in Berlin, an approach to cross disciplinary collaboration that continues to define The Ballery's curatorial outlook today.

Curatorially, The Ballery's programme emphasises accessibility, artistic quality and dialogue across disciplines, presenting a rotating series of exhibitions, performances and collaborative productions under the collective banner of Ballery Productions, alongside opportunities for visiting curators and artists to rent the space for their own projects. This structure allows the institution to remain responsive to both established and emerging Berlin based and international artists.

The Ballery's core organisational pillars are its exhibition and performance programme, its Ballery Productions initiative supporting original multidisciplinary work, and its accessible rental model for external curators and artists. As an independently run cultural space under Williams's direction, The Ballery is sustained through exhibition and event proceeds, venue rental income and the sale of limited edition artworks and prints, a model that reflects the institution's grassroots, artist led character within Berlin's cultural landscape.