Learned on @TFBoulevard: Young creators, please, fail big!

That you wake up at night and there is a full-blooded hipster sitting at the foot of your bed. One of those whose beard has two ragged tips, whose hair is in a messy bun and whose right ear has a tuft of hair bulging out of it. This pretty much sums up my worst nightmare. Well struck, then, by Lisah makes ruffled feathers, to start a performance about sleep and dreams with that very image.

Lisah Makes Roezemoes is a company around young theatre-maker Lisah Baert, and she has been making performances for a few years, most of which have also been shown at the Bossche Theatre Festival Boulevard. Touching performances, if at least this piece, titled 'Sleeping', is normative for her work. Freely improvising on the concept of 'dreaming', we see three actors moving in a long line of scenes, sometimes associatively, sometimes completely unexpectedly connected, as in a real dream. The performance's me-character tries to turn things into a lucid dream, so a dream you can adjust without waking up. Her attempts have varying degrees of success.

Significantly more successful, she is at getting the audience out of the dream. From time to time, her playing becomes cabaret-like, she connects with the audience with a firm wink and we are reminded that it is all not real. It may be because of the heat in the small auditorium, but I suddenly began to find that very irritating. And I still had a second performance to go, that sweltering Friday night at the new theatre house of Den Bosch, Pand 18, with Berlin Beer Garden in the courtyard.

In that second performance, the 'No Future Show' by theatre company The Flower of the Nation, was again not played to capacity. Stepping out of the act was also elevated to a norm here, and as a result, things didn't work out, that night. With me, at least.

There is nothing new under the sun. This so-called 'transparent acting' has been a trademark of Dutch theatre for at least two decades. In fact, it is one of our biggest export successes. It was developed to great heights in the 1990s by theatre collectives such as 't Barre Land and Dead Horse. It could become so special because it fits well with the Dutch tendency not to act crazier than you usually already are. But therein also lies the risk.

To act well 'transparently', you have to be able to act much better than all those actors who are completely absorbed in their roles. You have to both maintain the perfect illusion and visibly respect the connection with the audience. Transparent acting, only the really great ones can do that: Jacob Derwig, Pierre Bokma, that order. With many others, showing that as an actor you know very well what you are doing leads mainly to vanity and shameless self-promotion.

Now that transparent acting has been elevated to the norm by drama schools, this weakness of the acting style is coming to the fore. It is also a perfect cover for performing artists not to have to go all the way. Roles don't get any further than a sketch, whereas it would be so nice to see the full colours being thrown onto the canvas in thick splotches. Especially if you improvise a performance yourself, this unbridled, relentless effort is necessary.

Young creators who are blessed with a scarce spot in a talent development programme should take the opportunity to fail big and thunderously in their immoderate pursuit of making the artwork that makes everything else redundant. Now those young makers in their talent development programmes are saying 'sorry' before they have even started properly.

And so that's at least an hour early.

More information: Theatre festival Boulevard