Wine tasting and listening to medieval music are usually things people only do with very serious faces. So it took five glasses, three drunken singers and a good hour before the mob in the sober Heilig Hart church in Den Bosch loosened up a bit. With a Frontignan to boot.
You do start fantasising about the amazing dinner you could have enjoyed with these wines. The 'Lassus Grand Cru' event was a wine tasting with music and appetisers. The appetiser part was unfortunately limited to six cheese cubes and four mini sandwiches for tables of five, but the wines were divine.
Drunken amateurs
The bus back to the festival heart sounds very different after such a wine-soaked concert than a Utrecht city bus during Festival Oude Muziek. Anyway, theatre festival Boulevard is more burgundy than that Utrecht gourmet event. There has to be a difference. Although I would still love to hear medieval drinking songs once performed by the drunken amateur singers they were once intended for. Speaking of original instruments.
Especially on Boulevard, that could very well be the case. Of course, it takes some guts to crack open a drunken crack to lute and flute music. It happened once during the concert. Let's try more often next year, shall we?
Appropriation
'Typical Boulevard', said a festival visitor to her company after the end of 'Indian', the play I saw after 'Lassus'. That production by the young guard of the now quite established company De Warme Winkel is indeed a real Boulevard performance. Inspired by the wooded surroundings of psychiatric hospital Coudewater in Rosmalen, the five members of De Hotshop created a play about Native Americans. Pretty tricky, of course, because in these times, when appropriation is quite a thing, as a white Dutchman you don't go dancing around a totem pole in an Indian costume.
So you have to start talking about the slow mass murder that the conquest of the Americas by our ancestors actually was. But then again, that subject is so big that by the end you would prefer to disappear into the ground. Which is what they do then, the young actors. Rightful self-deprecation.
Major problems
Fine open-air theatre, then. You would wish the makers would escape at some point from the contemporary need for young artists to relate to the big issues of life every time. They could learn something from the generations before them. A small story may very well stand for something much bigger. We, the audience, are perfectly capable of imagining the big implications of those small stories ourselves.
That is perhaps the biggest insight of the past 10 days of Festival Boulevard. The new generation of theatre-makers in particular has a tendency to moralise. Something the Bossche audience, especially the Bossche audience, does not need. They are perfectly capable of coming up with those morals themselves. I hope that in future editions these two groups will talk to each other even more intimately than now, especially outside the performances. The festival offers every opportunity for this.
English (UK) 
Nederlands 
Français 
