On Monday 23 and Tuesday 24 May, the VSCD met, and the Congres Podiumkunsten (@congresPK) was going on at the Nijmegen Concert Hall De Vereeniging. I went to check it out and discovered some new things.
1 The eminent gentlemen are gone.
Things have changed in Dutch theatre since the beginning of this century. Somewhere around the year 2000, I was a guest at a meeting of the Association of Theatre and Concert Hall Directors, and it was a bizarre experience. I found myself among a gathering that could best be described as a gentlemen's club, where the number of upstanding municipal officials exceeded the number of artistically inspired theatre lovers.
Now, 16 years later, the picture is rather tilted: the grey near-retirees with forty years of service in various municipal departments, serving out their last months at the local theatre, have disappeared except for an invisible few. In their place came a younger company, a more cultural company and, above all, a more female company. And that changes the atmosphere, not only because the president of the club, which now includes Association of Theatre and Concert Halls Directorates called, is also a woman.
2 Visiting attracts
On 23 May, the VSCD also announced its 2015 annual figures. And what emerges: stages in the Netherlands are doing well. Visits are picking up, revenues are increasing. Average audience occupancy rose from 69% to 72%. Now the VSCD releases jubilant figures every year, even when things are bad, but this time there really does seem to be a turnaround in the air. That turnaround is mainly due to commercial programming: in addition to pop venues and concert halls running ever better on the bigger acts, theatres and theatres have discovered the alternative shows: college tours, TED talks, cooking shows. The offerings that are made with government subsidy, or the 'more difficult' theatre, the 'bigger' dance, the 'more complicated' music, fell by 1 per cent from 15 to 14. The fact that the buildings themselves still derive at least 40 per cent revenue from government subsidy does show that things are still suffering from some skewing.
3 The market is gaining momentum
One of the nicer presentations during the first day of the congress was that of the Cultural Participation Fund. They had looked into an English movement that has led theatres to work hard on embedding themselves in their immediate surroundings. In the Netherlands, this leads to the 'Meemaaktheater' project, and so we must understand that including pun. What it boils down to? Actually quite simple: let the local residents themselves decide what to see in 'their' theatre. By letting them choose from what's on offer, and by letting them make things themselves.
There are already good examples of this in The Hague. Vailliant Theatre, located in the middle of The Hague's Schilderswijk district, decided to take the plunge and enter the neighbourhood, which is 99.9 per cent non-theatre-goers and 90 per cent non-Western Dutch. With some simple rules in hand, such as: not too private, not too one-sided, other groups are constantly being approached to programme the theatre themselves. As a result, since the project started, the theatres have been packed with a diverse and surprising offer. Many a city theatre could learn something from that.
4 The creator changes
Eric De Vroedt, from 2017 the new artistic director of the National Theatre, has plans to go far into the neighbourhood. He wants to start making performances that connect to immediate current events, that grab ordinary people's daily lives by the head, and he also wants to go into the Schilderswijk, and get the Schilderswijk into the theatre. He backed up this announcement with a fierce lashing out at art schools, where he himself learnt directing: 'Especially in the 1990s, we were taught to work as intricately as possible. The more incomprehensible the better, was the adage. That hurt the art a lot.'
This triggered wart reactions when I quoted the statement on facebook and there was immediately someone labelling his plan to bring more daily current affairs into the theatre as 'dangerous'. Grist to De Vroedt's mill, of course. I hereby also give you Vincent van Warmerdam's reaction, on my personal facebook timeline: 'Stop getting on your knees in front of the audience. Stop making accessible theatre. Accept that the world has changed and that, for all kinds of explainable and inexplicable reasons, far fewer people go to the theatre. If necessary, let the theatre die out in order to reemerge. Maybe that way we will also get rid of that surplus of dead, provincial theatres once created in hubris where we all try to keep up appearances.'
5 Artists know nothing about selling
Especially in the circuit of small venues, music venues and galleries, the artist is still the great ruler. It not only interferes with the artwork itself, but also wants to have the last word in marketing. In the afternoon, two marketers (from a small venue and a small maker) in Amsterdam decided to come out of the closet: 'how can we make subsidised art more sexy?'
It did not prove easy. As a 'vendor' of an artist with whom you are often even in the same room, you have no freedom whatsoever. You are distrusted anyway, it turned out, and if you want to write a clear story about a deliberately cryptic work of art, you get wind of it. Some directors also don't want their main selling points: the well-known protagonist and the exciting story, to be highlighted in publicity, for reasons of artistic purity or simply, because they shouldn't: publicity.
Help did appear to be on the way for the harried marketers: they can leave the dirty work to the theatres where those people perform. Those theatres still determine their own marketing and can therefore cycle right through the artists' sensibilities. And the artists' own marketers are quite willing to lend a hand with that, provided they can blame those theatres. But perhaps it would be better if artists stopped getting involved in selling their work. You may say
6 We are still muscle white
The Diversity Committee of actors' union ACT tried to get a remarkably small audience in one of the halls of De Vereeniging to reflect on the problem that the Dutch established art world is still muscle-white and highly educated. We all sympathised with them, understood the problem and didn't see a solution so quickly either. In the end, it will have to come from the top. I suspect. There will really have to be a personnel policy that deliberately seeks technicians, box office staff, attendants and bar staff among non-Western Dutch.
A good start would perhaps also be - as the proportion of women among VSCD members slowly but surely rises - to also increase the proportion of non-Western Dutch among theatre and concert hall directors.
There is still much to be gained.
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