Masterpiece Hieronymus Bosch dominates opening Festival Boulevard #tfboulevard

Adding three tonnes a year is cause for celebration. But Viktorien van Hulst, at the helm of the Bossche Theatre Festival Boulevard for the second year, had to hold back in her opening speech. Because the subsidising Performing Arts Fund subsidised a large number of well-performing fellow institutions despite a positive assessment no money, transcends suffering in the performing arts the joy. Tornness is called that. That is also why 'The Garden Of Earthly Delight', a dance performance inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's masterpiece Garden Of Delights, was a fitting opening. In that work, paradise and hell stand side by side, like watchdogs around earthly vice.

The show played at the Brabant Hallen, an alternative to the Theater aan de Parade, which is closed due to the discovery of asbestos. Something that Theatre Festival Boulevard was also badly affected by last year, as a fluff of the grey stuff was then found near the Tramkade site, the Berlinesque fray where the young and alternative part of the programme was to take place. Then too, with the efforts of a host of local businesses, volunteers and authorities, a solution was found. As now. Boulevard is a festival that can count on broad support from the local community.

Accessed

That support also stems from the long tradition of the festival, which once grew out of the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. That tradition, reinforced here by the southern temperament of Den Bosch, is one of accessibility and approachability, without sacrificing quality.

Viktorien van Hulst stands in that tradition with new shoes. This year, approachability and accessibility are central in many more ways than before. The performances and 'events' should not only be low-threshold and accessible in terms of content; technically too, everyone should be able to access everything. This is quite difficult for a festival 90% of which takes place in outdoor and indoor locations that do not exist for that purpose. And it's not just about wheelchair ramps and loop systems either. For the deaf, there are interpreters, for ME patients awakeners, for the blind audio descriptions, and so on. A beautiful endeavour. We are going to see this festival how that maintains itself in the slippery and muddy environments of location theatre.

Magnificent

The performance Garden of Earthly Delights with which the festival opened was accessible and low-key in every conceivable way. Marie Chouinard, a renowned avant-garde choreographer from Canada, literally brings Hieronymus Bosch's painting Garden of Earthly Delights to life. At the beginning, we see the triptych open in all its glory, and what a magnificent image it is. For those people who have not been able to see the painting 'live', this is already a godsend: you never see it this big and up close.

Then the image zooms in, and white-skinned, completely naked dancers appear on stage except for a white slip, adopting poses from the painting. To facilitate searching on the zoomed-in search image, two round screens have been installed next to the stage, showing the detail the dancers are portraying. From that pose, the dancers adopt other poses, and each time they are images recognisable from the painting on which they vary, from which they derive themes and which they multiply or magnify.

Explainer

On me, it all made a bit too much of an explanation. Without that dominating painting, the dance would have been more impressive. The focus was always on those beautiful colours and wild images of Hieronymus Bosch himself, dancing and jumping and splashing from the (projected) canvas. The dancers added little, especially at the beginning. In the second part of the performance, when it came to hell, it all became more dynamic and scary, though. Only, throughout, Hieronymus Bosch himself remained prominent.

At the end, in paradisum, the dancers multiplied the image of God bringing Adam and Eve together. Similarly, the message is crystal clear: we are all God and man. Je suis Dieu, je suis Adam, je suis Eve.

The 'story' must have been comprehensible to everyone. So it is wonderful that this avant-garde dance sets up no barriers and opens all doors. It is just a little less wonderful than that phenomenal, more than 500-year-old painting by that painter from Den Bosch. There is no way to dance to that.