Reasons to do go to theatre Kikker (1: The Men's Night Out)

Despite the crisis in the performing arts, there is still a lot of young talent roaming the Netherlands and beyond. So much that keeping track is impossible. After all, who can visit all the festivals, from Festival Boulevard to Noorderzon, from the Café Theatre Festival to Festival Cement and from the Amsterdam Fringe Festival to the Zeeland Nazomerfestival? And then also pick out exactly those four or five performances from the programming that are interesting, promising or innovative?

For the professionals, it is already quite challenging and sometimes you just have to wait and see if you get paid by a boss. For the 'ordinary' interested theatre-goer, it is practically unfeasible and unaffordable. Fortunately, solutions to this have been devised.

Solution 1: Follow the programmers

One such solution is to send programmers (like Jolie Vreeburg of theatre Kikker) all over the country and then have them put together a week entitled 'the Winter Collection', with a nice cross-section, a sampling of current and young talent. A week of Kikker and you're back in the swing of things.

Solution 2: Keep chatting

Kicking off this festival week will be the, to my mind, very fascinating Jens Maurits Orchestra with Blogpera. A robot mask welcomes us, the audience, and invites us on an exploration of the special unique power of music. We get to click on icons with a mouse and those 'chapters'/blogs the three musicians/makers will play for us. What follows is somewhere between a broadcast of Freek's (Vonk, ed) Wild World, musical theatre and poetic, absurdist stories called, for example, 'Adventures of Jean Godefroy' or 'the spell of the Rainbowsnake'. Each time, someone from the audience stands up to choose, sometimes resolutely and sometimes hesitantly. But this keeps both the audience and the artists very sharp and alert. Because what is coming next?

Yet as we went along, I wondered more and more whether our audience involvement was making the story too non-committal, too random? However cleverly the pieces of the puzzle were devised beforehand, how do you make a performance meaningful if randomness is an intrinsic part of this Blogpera. The Jens Maurits Orchestra has two simple 'tricks', it turned out in the follow-up talk, which allow everything of importance to be addressed. And everything puzzle pieces do build up to a climax. A hall singing 'Only You' together at the top of its lungs. Even if you are as false as a crow or sing worse than Florence Foster Jenkins, after Blogpera you are convinced of the importance of music for the overall good of the world and sing along anyway.

Solution 3: Take time off from your washboard

A show created and performed by mimers. But 'mime new style' as programmer Vreeburg called it. Macho Macho performed at the Amsterdam Fringe Festival earlier this year, winning the Dioraphte 'Best of Amsterdam Fringe' Award 2016. Who are you, how do you come across and what social pressure do you feel to be a man-man (in this performance) or a woman-woman.

I have seen such a topic come up many times in theatre, but vear new fresh twenties it must be very urgent and topical again. Vrebac has also incorporated an element of improvisation for his players, who perform shorter or longer movement patterns according to their stamina. Two men assume all sorts of attractive and cool poses, like those you find in any Coca Cola or aftershave advert.

But when the muscles start twitching, the sweat starts dripping and the unnaturalness of the pose becomes pregnant, the vulnerability begins. Being a man is suffering, the performance seems to want to shout. In the afterword, Vrebac also talks about how striving for a washboard added nothing to his life. He grew one for his 30th birthday and then released himself from this overly one-sided male image. Hopefully, there will be more performances like this to come.