the house of legacies excludes no one.

The Need For Legacy is a foundation formed by a young generation of theatre makers of colour who strive for an inclusive Dutch theatre history. The foundation is committed to a different way of archiving the performing arts and wants to change how that knowledge is made accessible – in theatre schools, among other places.

With its own online platform, thehouseoflegacies.nl, The Need For Legacy can offer relevant content and unlock its archive of materials and data on the performing arts by artists of colour.

The Need For Legacy asked us. to develop an accessible, flexible and scalable platform in close collaboration with the foundation and its partner LFMC, where all types of visitors can quickly and easily find the information relevant to them.

The goal: bring the stories of forgotten performing artists to life and connect them with a broad audience – from theatre professionals to new and young generations of dramaturgs.

us. developed a website for the stories of performing artists of colour, plus a data platform with a database, API, search interface and data entry tool. Where relevant, the two are interconnected: users looking for specific information get a direct entry into the database, but there are also implicit content-based entry points – via related content linked to an article, for example.

Technically, the data platform consists of a NestJS application with a Neo4j graph database, strong at efficiently querying connected data and complex relationships. The website runs on a cms with WordPress as its foundation, adapted with custom work for the Google Cloud environment. Hosted with Cloud Run, the solution is scalable, secure and highly available.

The portal enables users to acquire and share knowledge – making the history of performing artists of colour not only a source of inspiration, but also a tool for empowerment.