TivoliVredenburg is a building like a festival. countless stages, bars, a café and a restaurant, hundreds of people at work, thousands inside on a night. I always came there too little. But when I did get there, it was a party. A building run by and attended by super-motivated people with only one goal: as much music as possible for as many people as possible. Until 12 March 2020.
For a while, I thought everything about the lockdown had already been written and said. I even notice a solid corona fatigue. Among myself, but also among visitors to this site. We want out again, and it takes more and more effort to understand the inconsistencies in the policy that equates festivals and packed shopping streets with museums and theatres. So reading about what can't be done is depressing. So is writing, you may rest assured.
Comfort
But so now there is a book that somehow offers solace: 'OFF/ON, concert stage during a pandemic', written by journalists Nicoline Baartman and Jos Stoopman, featuring Jeroen Bartelse, director and boss of the cultural sector task force. It is the story of the building as a festival that suddenly closed, from which the lifeblood disappeared in the form of the kilometres of beer pipe emptied by staff on the first lockdown night. But it is also the story of people who developed something completely new with an absurd amount of creativity and, above all, perseverance.
Would Corona ever lead to anything new? Everyone wondered and it became the cliché of this pandemic: never waste a good crisis. And though I would rather not repeat this fat neoliberal deadpan: TivoliVredenburg used the crisis to survive, developing something new while doing so. Meanwhile, the festival palace is not only able to continue working with mini-concerts for as long as it can, in the meantime it has become a media palace.
Never waste?
What began as streaming out of necessity, with material and technology flown in at the eleventh hour, has now, in a fat year, grown into a well-oiled cultural multimedia organisation, providing space for an incredibly wide range of online culture.
This book describes how it could come to this, and it's good to read that it's not because of clever minds who sat down together for once under the motto of 'never waste...', but because of sheer panic, agony, human courage and inventiveness, thanks to an organisation that makes room for it at all levels. And why is that good to read? It shows how people sought out and held on to each other when everything was against them.
Taskforce
Director Jeroen Bartelse, who shares his diary as director but also boss of the Taskforce who lobbied for support and roadmaps, we get to know as someone who sometimes wants to stick 'his' minister behind the wallpaper, but is diplomatic enough to recognise when things do not work out. The battle for millions has been rock hard, that much becomes clear.
A cultural sector in a bitter fight for survival, in a world trying to figure out by the day how to cope with a global pandemic. The book Off/On could, at best, have been a nice conclusion to an absurd year, in which this building stands for a sector, a country, a population redefining itself out of survival instinct.
It is now - unfortunately - an intermediate position: a reminder for further on in this crisis, when hope has once again sunk into our shoes: in that first year, we got so much done. Despite everything.
We need to hold on to that.
English (UK) 
Nederlands 
Français 
