Cackling fresh location artists prepare for Festival DE BASIS

With a few creative friends and a nice budget, romp around in a playground of many tens of acres of pristine nature. Surrounded by the remains of military might. It automatically makes you talk riotously. But that's how it goes sometimes. With art.

So, to get right to the point: austerity is not always a bad thing. The disposal of the Soetserberg Air Base, for instance, has created a colossal new and largely unexplored area just outside Utrecht. Such a former war site is a perfect place for De Vrede van Utrecht, the festival that will come to a climax in 2013 after years of quiet, and sometimes somewhat vague, build-up.

Part of that build-up is Festival THE BASIS: on 10 and 11 September, the public can see the first steps of a brand-new generation of artists on location: visual art, landscape art and site-specific theatre by graduates and near-graduates of the art schools in Maastricht and Utrecht.

For the makers and organisers, the festival started on Tuesday 23 August with a meeting in an empty hangar at the airbase, which is now the domain of sheep, silent flyers and walkers. For us, the festival began a little then too. From that day on, The Dodo Festival Day newspaper has been following the festival closely. And not just THE BASIS. We are also there with a liveblog on the day Utrecht commemorates the 2001 attack on the WTC in the city centre's only skyscraper. And on the International Day of Peace, we report on all the activities. As you would expect from the Cultural Press Agency: involved, critical and quick.

Read about the visual arts programme at The Base here more.