Amsterdam Weekly, Volume 4 issue 35, 30 August - 5 September 2007
It’s fringin’ awesome
Binge on the outer limits of Amsterdam’s theatre world
by Marinus de Ruiter
Fringe festivals usually pop up spontaneously as counterpoints to mainstream festivals. Most famously, the Edinburgh Fringe sprouted 60 years ago as a platform for alternative performance acts that felt left out of the traditional Edinburgh Festival. Since then, similar initiatives have developed in many other cities around the globe, but not in Amsterdam. Until last year, that is, and with a little help from the establishment itself.
Jeffrey Meulman, director of the new TF theatre festival, the showcase for the main Dutch and Flemish drama groups, decided to create his own rival by launching the Amsterdam Fringe Festival, for which anyone and everyone can apply to take part. This year, the peculiar formula caught on, with more spontaneous applications by new groups and venues.
‘You start up something and then you have to let it go,’ says Meulman. ‘We provide publicity, a little financial support and occasional guidance, but we can’t direct where it’s heading.’
Amsterdam Fringe is a welcome gesture at a time when Dutch theatre often plays it safe, to please either the crowd or the subsidisers. ‘Young theatre-makers often seem to storm directly towards the establishment, instead of developing their own language or idiom,’ says Meulman.
‘Only a handful of them are willing to stick out their necks and show guts. We’d like to stimulate that sense of freedom, where people choose their own paths, unafraid of being judged in the end.’
Wipe that smile off your face
With around 60 shows divided over 25 locations, the scope of Amsterdam’s fringe festival is still a far cry from its Edinburgh counterpart, which has over 2,000 acts playing in approximately 300 venues. The Flemish theatre group Ontroerend Goed, who will play the Amsterdam Fringe this year with their show The Smile Off Your Face, have just returned from their first stint in Edinburgh, where they managed to rise above the heap of the programme.
The Smile Off Your Face won two awards in the Scottish capital—the Fringe First award, handed out by newspaper The Scotsman to a dozen new works, and a Total Theatre Award in the experimentation category.
Although the show earned a raving five-star review in The Times newspaper, Ontroerend Goed’s artistic director Alexander Devriendt was still quite surprised. ‘It’s exceptional for a foreign group to be given such awards,’ says Devriendt. ‘Mostly large and noted productions were nominated. We are very unknown there.’
Aside from their obscurity, Ontroerend Goed have a very unusual, experimental approach when compared to most theatre companies performing in Edinburgh. The Smile Off Your Face is a continuous show, in which visitors are blindfolded and seated in a wheelchair. Then they are led through a series of spaces, where they are submerged in sounds, smells and sensations.
‘With every performance, we’re looking for an intimate, direct experience of the here and now,’ says Devriendt. ‘This is our most extreme example of that principle. I think it’s necessary to point out what is distinctive about theatre, because film and television are taking up so much space in our lives. The unique thing about theatre is the live experience, although with some shows you feel as if you’re watching a television show. We want to explore the things in theatre that you can’t do in any other art form.’
Each participating audience member in The Smile Off Your Face can choose to be guided through the show in either English, Dutch or French.
Crossing the language border
Bearing in mind the international audience that such events attract, Amsterdam Fringe has plenty of other shows suitable for non-Dutch speakers. For instance, in Mo(ve)ment, at the Veemvloer, dancer Benno Hübner interacts with live painter Tali Farchi. On 30 August, they
will be accompanied by improvising musicians Ernst Reijseger on cello and Steve Cohn on piano. Aside from dance and musical theatre, there will be plays combining Dutch and English in a playful manner, like No Jizz Upon That Sofa by De Maan. This show, about the shooting of Andy Warhol, uses lyrics by Lou Reed and Frank Zappa.
Play the Beat by De Mannen Spelen is a bilingual experience as well. In theme and form, the show reflects the spirit of beat poets Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. Although the three authors became notorious in the 1950s for a new form of poetry and prose shaped by jazz music and modern culture, their work hasn’t been adapted for stage as much as actor Mark Colijn would like to have seen. ‘We want to play texts and pieces that haven’t
been played for a long while,’ says Colijn, who is one of the four members of De Mannen Spelen. ‘Also, we aim to take plays that are considered incomprehensible and make them accessible—we think there’s an audience for that.
‘We want to go back to classical forms of theatre, to the core of what acting really is,’ he continues. ‘Instead, many groups open a box of tricks and when they don’t know what to do next they take off their clothes or throw expensive projections behind the stage. We think it’s time to concentrate on the acting again, and to find out more about that.’
Play the Beat will be performed in the back-room theatre of the poetry bookshop Perdu on Kloveniersburgwal.
Fun with plunder
Hospital for Skeletons, an English language show that will be performed at De Nieuwe Anita by Sin Sin, is described as ‘truly pan-media’ by Sam Heady, one of the members of the group. ‘We plunder different art forms and bring them all together,’ she says.
‘There’s a lot of comedy, with theatre, songs, short films, animation and interactive media,’ says Heady, an Australian, who is joined in the collective by Irish, South African and Dutch artists. ‘It’s like a revue, influenced by Dutch culture and set in Amsterdam. One of the things we do is an avant-garde piece of performance based on Johnny Jordaan, as homage. We love him.’
The Sin Sin collective originally started in Dublin in the previous decade, making performances and visuals for nightclubs and dance halls. Recently, its core members settled in Amsterdam. Although they haven’t performed since 2000, they hope to start afresh and tour other festivals with this new piece.
Like some other venues in the Amsterdam Fringe Festival, the Sugar Factory has selected its own range of performers. The club will be closing the festival with a performance by international group Von Magnet, a name that might ring a bell with the city’s theatre-going audiences.
‘We started twenty years ago in Amsterdam and we have a long history of performing here,’ says Phil Von, founder of the company, which is now based in Nancy in north-east France.
Their upcoming piece De L’Aimant revisits a central motive in the oeuvre of Von Magnet, which is the contemporary rendition of Flamenco dance. The group use machines to write the music and mix the mechanical sounds with guitar and foot percussion. Although most of the music is based on Flamenco rhythms, the actual dance performance is very futuristic and gothic at the same time.
‘We take the origin of the style and we transform it,’ says Von. ‘This might seem impure, but for us it’s still pure, because the emotions in the original style are still there—the feeling of solitude, of loss and pain. We don’t like the fun or party aspect of Flamenco. We prefer the more dramatic side.’
Experienced groups, new ones, established companies and outcasts are all welcomed by Amsterdam Fringe director Meulman. ‘This is intrinsic to having an open subscription’,
he says. ‘We’re tapping into a new category of theatre-makers that normally remains invisible.’
Fringe Rouge
The Red Light District and theatre street the Nes are usually worlds apart. But this year, both universes got a little closer together, when a judge decided striptease and peep show dancers were entitled to charge 6% VAT, just like regular theatre actors in this country. ‘We thought that was quite hilarious,’ says Meulman. The Fringe programmers decided not to argue with the law, but instead cooperated with the (in)famous Casa Rosso sex theatre and assigned
a curator to look for XXX-rated entertainment suitable for the fastidious Fringe festival audience. Log onto www.whattf.nl and enter your mobile phone number to receive last-minute SMS information about the eyebulging shows you’ve always wanted to see, but didn’t
dare to visit. 18+ only!
TF-2, 30 August - 9 September, various locations,
www.whattf.nl.
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TF-1
A fringe festival cannot exist without its official counterpart, and in this case that’s TF-1, the Dutch and Flemish theatre festival which began last year. A professional jury selects 10 established theatre productions that are considered to be the finest the industry had to offer in the last season. During the festival, the audience votes to decide which show wins the Toneelpublieksprijs. This year’s Theaterfestival opens with the family epic De geschiedenis
van de familie Avenier by Het Toneel Speelt. Over the course of a week, Amsterdam’s main stages are the scenes for adaptations of classic plays, like Richard III by RO Theater and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Hummelinck Stuurman, classic themes like Mephisto, adapted by Flemish writer Tom Lanoye, and contemporary comedy by cutting edge company mugmetdegoudentand with Mug Inn, a play about four barflies, which closes the festival.
TF-3
Bigmouths take notice: the current state of Dutch theatre is addressed in a series of discussions and workshops under the banner of TF-3, which also encompasses film
screenings and masterclasses by renowned actors including the likes of Gijs Scholten van Aschat, who will teach a class of Shakespeare acting to 10 theatre students and
fledgling actors in De Balie. At the same location, theatre professionals, writers and politicians will discuss issues like multiculturalism in theatre, government funding and
the continuing lack of adaptations of Dutch plays. The premiere of Mijke de Jong’s new film Tussenstand will take place at the Stadsschouwburg. And closing this part of the festival is the celebratory event Feest der kritiek in De Brakke Grond, where the audience will be able to
meet and listen to critics and essayists as they expound their learned views of dramatic analysis.
TF-4
The Flemish cultural centre De Brakke Grond hosts a selection of the best and most relevant theatre productions, chosen by a jury, from both Flanders and the Netherlands. TF-4 has four shows lined up, starting with the bleak We People by Union Suspecte, a multicultural
clash between two men staged on a car wreck. Liga by Kassys follows a theatre group backstage, right after a show has ended. With Bonanza, the Antwerp theatre group Berlin create a mixture between theatre and film. The play is set in the smallest town in Colorado, a settlement with seven inhabitants. Despite how fascinating each piece may seem, the strongest marketing element of TF-4 is that it ends with phone sex. In The Bult and the Beautiful by Antigone, something beautiful arises from a tragic but also comic meeting of two lonely people flirting over the telephone.
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