Breaking Generations: Dutch Theatre in overview

“What did you see when you woke up this morning?”, reads the paper that someone has pushed under the door. I have to think about that. My girlfriend, perhaps? Or was it the cat that jumped on my feet to wake me up? Or did I see my shelves with the stacked up books? But why does the person on the other side of the door want to know? And why does he also wants to know what I dreamed last night or what my nickname is? This shouldn’t be about me, should it? It should be about the performance I’m going to watch while sitting in the anonymous dark of the auditorium. Right?

I’m visiting the show You are here by Dutch theatre maker Dries Verhoeven. In an old industrial hall he has built a hotel with 40 or so rooms. The audience checks into a room, leaving his shoes with the friendly receptionists. In my room there is nothing but a single bed. Not knowing what to do, I lie down on the bed. Looking up, I see myself reflected in a mirror. I’m looking somewhat stupid, laying in a bed in an empty room. Then someone slides a piece of paper under my door with a couple of questions: “What did you see when you woke up this morning?” Despite my hesitation, I try to answer the questions as truthfully as possible. Then I lie down back on the bed again. While I look at myself again, something changes. At first I don’t know what it is, but then I notice that the mirror is slowly rising. It now shows not only my room, but also those of my next door neighbours, and their neighbours. The mirror rises until I can see the whole of the hotel, and can see all the other people lying in their beds and looking upward. I’m alone, but I’m not. I hear a voice talk about someone who saw the same thing as I did this morning. I follow a stranger through the hallways of the hotel. Someone sings next to my room. Someone enters, tucks me in and hides under my bed. Someone calls my name and I have to call back so he can find me and give my children’s night lamp.
You are here was presented for the first time at Festival a/d Werf, one of the more interesting Dutch theatre festivals. The festival specializes in location theatre (theatre outside of the theatre) and in what is called ‘experience’-theatre: theatre in which the central focus point is not a story that is played out on a stage by actors, who are watched by a silent audience in a dark auditorium. Instead the central focus point of You are here and similar performances is the individual audience member and his of her subjective experience. In the last couple of years, the most interesting theatre by young theatre makers has been in this genre of theatre. For directors like Lotte van den Berg, Boukje Schweigman, Jetse Batelaan, Dries Verhoeven and groups like Wunderbaum, Deuten and De Goeij and Le nu perdu this kind of theatre is the best way to find a new relationship with their audience and to give their audience a new perspective on the reality of every day life. With their search for new subjects for their performances and at the same time looking for new ways and spaces to present those subjects, a new generation of Dutch theatre makers breaks with the older generation.
In the Netherlands the big national theatre companies (like Toneelgroep Amsterdam and Het Nationale Toneel) are run by older white men, who grew up in the sixties and seventies. Their generation was formed by the big events in this period: the Cold War, the war in Vietnam, the break-up with traditional institutions and the search for a new sexual morale. Those events influenced their daily lives. Also, and because of these big social changes in the sixties, there was a radical change in the Dutch theatre world. Until 1969 the dominant form of theatre in the Netherlands was a traditional, bourgeois form of text based theatre. The artistic choices of the directors in selecting and staging the (mostly) classical plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Molière etcetera seldom reflected the social turmoil in the real word, to the dismay of the younger generation of theatre makers and -students. They thought that theatre should say something about what was happening outside the theatre walls. To demonstrate their dismay, a couple of theatre students started throwing tomatoes at the stage during a performance of Shakespeares The Tempest on the 9th of October 1969. With these tomatoes started what is called Aktie Tomaat (Action Tomato): the revolution of a younger generation for a new, more political and artistical form of theatre. The result of the revolution was a flood of artistic experiments in content and form which to this day gives the Dutch theatre landscape its diversity. The most important directors who in the eighties emerged from this landscape are Johan Simons, Gerardjan Rijnders, Ivo van Hove (originally from Belgium), and Theu Boermans. Although there are more people who influenced theatre in Holland, these directors are still important today. The performances these directors make differs of course. But they are all highly political and/or esthetical and still carry within them the inheritance of Action Tomato. Johan Simons is searching for the relationship between the individual, society and morale, Ivo van Hove wants to dissect social institutions like marriage and politics. Rijnders has always searched for radical new forms to tell old stories in. Theu Boermans searches for the contemporary relevance of classical repertoire. And they all think that their ways are the best and that young directors should learn from them. But a lot of young directors don’t want to.
Young directors like Lotte van den Berg and Dries Verhoeven are from a totally different generation than the directors who run the big companies. Born at the end of the seventies, these younger artists never really experienced the Cold War or any war whatsoever. They grew up in a period that world politics were relatively stable. Of course there were wars in former Yugoslavia and in the Congo’s. But they didn’t threaten us the way the Russians once did. The economy was booming and there was no worry in the world. There was nothing to rebel against like our parents did in the sixties. There was no need for a revolution. This has, of course, consequences for the way these young directors think about theatre. In stead of trying to dissect big social structures or to make political theatre, many members of the young generation want to bring theatre back to the individual questions: who am I, how do I relate to the world, how do I relate to others? As Lotte van den Berg puts it in an interview I had with her: “There is so little time to listen and sit down, to find some real peace and quiet. I sense people have a need for calm, for concentration. Therefore I create in my theatre a space to sit and watch. I don’t want to tell the spectator something, I want to show him.” To do that Van den Berg starts from daily reality and how you look at it. For her performance The blue hour she took her audience to an empty street at five in the morning to watch the street waking up. She worked with real prisoners for Begijnenstraat 42. And she put a big box in a city square from which the audience looked at the city. The actors in Rumour mingled with the shopping people, making the real people actors too. Van den Berg doesn’t ask political questions. She only forces her audiences in a tender and friendly manner, to look at the real world in a new, curious, even childlike way.
This search for a new theatre that asks questions about what it means to be human and how we look at daily life is one of the more interesting developments in Dutch theatre of the last five years. A name is also been coined for this new theatre: the intentional naïve. The name suggests that these directors wilfully ignore all the bad things, the wars and the Dutch political turmoil of the last ten years. On the other hand one could say that the political always starts with the individual, and with what makes him human and how he looks at the world. In this sense the intentional naïve theatre is also political, but in a radical different way than the older generation. Some of these directors mentioned, as Van den Berg did, that they want to give their audience peace and consolation in a world that at sometimes is too fast and too complex to comprehend. They feel that theatre is the best form to do that, because it involves togetherness and concentration like no other art form does.
Because this young generation of theatre makers is searching for new ways to make the audience experience themselves or their daily life in a new way, they often (but not always) move their audiences away from the theatre buildings, but use the city, the open air or other ‘found’ or ‘created’ spaces for their performances. In the performance Drift by Boukje Schweigman (one of the most talented makers of her generation whose work can be described as a crossover between dance, theatre and art) the audience drifted in a tent on a lake, from which the performers emerged. Magna Plaza by Wunderbaum (a young group discovered by Johan Simons) was played in a shopping centre, the audience sat on stools between the shopping public.
Because the most interesting things in Dutch theatre happen outside the theatre and in the smaller theatres, the theatre festivals have gained a lot more importance in the Dutch theatre landscape the last couple of years. Especially festivals like Festival a/d Werf, Oerol (on the island of Terschelling), Over het IJ and Boulevard which specialize in location and experience theatre have been a breeding ground for young talent. These festivals also give young theatre makers a budget for making shows especially for the festival. These festivals draw a lot of people and a lot of attention. Apparently the Dutch audience likes to be consoled and likes to change their perspective on daily life.
This all doesn’t mean nothing happens in the big playhouses. Platform by Johan Simons was the best show of 2006. But there is a gap between the generations and how they view the role of theatre. It is a gap that will not quickly be bridged, but which makes the Dutch theatre landscape all the more interesting and diverse.

Robbert van Heuven, 2008