Discomfort delivers little, so look for vulnerability on @tfboulevard. There is plenty of that.

Speaking of bubbles. In the middle of Den Bosch, on the parade square, there are three mega-play blocks you can enter. They are mini theatres, brainchildren of designer Theun Mosk. In one of them, you encounter a very large plastic bubble in which young, mostly naked, people move. The audience stands on either side of the bubble feeling uncomfortable. Partly because the naked young people inside also feel uncomfortable, or stand very loudly denying it. It is the second time I have felt uncomfortable during this festival, after earlier actress Els Dottermans pointed a machine gun at me.

That machine gun was during Milo Rau's opening performance, previously discussed here, and the discomfort had a purpose, even if it was spectacularly overshot. We had to feel helplessly agitated about the injustices in the world. But powerlessness, of course, is not an uncomfortable feeling. Powerlessness actually feels good to a reasonably thinking and consciously living theatre-goer.

Wall

The discomfort at United Cowboys was of a different order. It came from that metre-thick wall between the world of the visitor and that of the mover in his bubble. There is nothing in common.

That commonality was also missing from Koen Augustijnen's performance [B]. Here, three professional boxers compete with seven professional dancers. After a good hour, the boxers had won.

Boxing is not a team sport, a dance performance is. In this theatre, 10 islands were on stage, together on their own against the rest of the world. Something uncomfortable arose there. Sure, the world is tough and the aesthetics of boxing are close to those of dance. Only, the closed, always raised defensive fist created a thick boundary between us in the stands and you in the boxing ring.

Alice in Wound Land

So is it all about vulnerability after all? That awkward and somewhat worn-out art judging word? Perhaps it is. Because that very vulnerability opens doors. I experienced that in the triangular block of the cube box on that square in Den Bosch. there, Alexandra Broeder had turned it into a dark room, with a soft floor and a voice on headphones. The voice belongs to a girl in need of care, as Broeder was doing research for a few years at the Bascule, the AMC's department of adolescent psychiatry.

Something like that can be uncomfortable, but in the enormous heat of the afternoon in the square, I was left with nothing but surrender. To the heat, to that voice, to that Alice in Wonderland-like story, though it was more about wounds than miracles. Surrender is vulnerability, and vulnerability feels good. At least, in the theatre. Outside, we don't want to be bothered by it.

Tramp

Those who must have felt a little uncomfortably vulnerable in the theatre were Dorien van Gent's divorced, yet back together-or yet not-parents. I asked her if they had come to watch, and they did. The description of their reaction can be heard in the little podcast who made of this afternoon.

The still young actress/singer Van Gent stands a few metres from Brother's block in her own tent, with her own band. They are supposed to play the song 'Papa was a Rolling Stone', but during the half-hour the performance lasts, it hardly comes off. That's how much Dorien has to say about her father who misschoen wanted to be a bum, but failed miserably.

Jonkvrouw

Actress Elsie de Brauw is the queen of vulnerability. For her, I went to a theatre in Vught where, in all her noble nobility, she recited a text of a lady from higher circles who, out of kindness, becomes a nurse in the trenches around Ypres in 1914. Erwin Mortier's text is beautiful, and even if it had not been beautiful, De Brauw would have made it beautiful.

The biggest discomfort, however, was in the distance the First World War created between neighbouring Netherlands and Belgium. The 'Great War' was something of a distant foreign country in the Netherlands. We mobilised and caught, not only the German Kaiser but also Belgian refugees, near Ede a million in fact, but that was about it.

Here, no families disappeared and changed forever, no fields of death where farmers were still ploughing up bombs and bones every day 100 years later. So Dutch audiences are still a little odd about an eyewitness account of that other war, and it was palpable. It only made Elsie de Brauw more vulnerable, and that was beautiful.