After a year and a half at home, Boogaerdt/VanderSchoot's Fremdkörper with testing access is pretty tough

There are reasons not to live in Belgium, but yesterday I was intensely longing for an evening with my southern neighbours. After all, they have 'testing for admission' in the cultural sector just a little better regulated than here. When I went to a 'testing for admission' performance in Antwerp, there was a tent in front of the theatre entrance where, with a time appointment, I walked in, got a cotton bud up my nose, waited for 15 minutes for someone to tell me personally that I was ok and then hopped into the theatre where the one-and-a-half meter seats were waiting. And then the performance turned out to be wonderful too (Sheep Song by FC Bergman, about which more in a later article).

How different things were arranged yesterday when I took my first tentative steps into the outside world. For the Holland Festival.

Digital savvy

Dystopian experience. This is not even so much true of the performance (more on that later), but of the state before it. The shed on a chilly Zaans industrial estate was empty and deserted; after all, it was nearing closing time. The reception was non-existent, the cotton wool deep and hard. The e-mail I received with the results less than 15 minutes later was extraordinarily complicated. It required pressing buttons to eventually retrieve two text message codes, then at the last retrieved action, after another button press, an app lit up with a result. I am fairly digital savvy, but imagine the position of a slightly less goochem, or older, type, and the panic is imaginable.

Why not a Belgian solution? Why so clumsy and with an efficiency focused not on the user but on the provider? So why at a bargain? Rarely did I see the inhuman side of entrepreneurial paradise the Netherlands more sharply than with this bizarre circus.

Chamomile tea

First of all: the Holland Festival can't do anything about this. Emily Ansenk, the director, has already explained this crystal clear in our podcast. This is purely due to the 'figure it out yourself, we just enforce the rules' approach that has been the practice for about 10 years. Festival goers who are crushed by that system are not comparable to the victims of UWV or Tax Office, but the principle is the same. I want to go to Belgium, to a tent on the doorstep.

I longed for theatre and - after an hour on a beautiful terrace overlooking oil terminals that made my Rotterdam heart beat faster - got an installation. Nothing wrong with installations, but Fremdkörper by Boogaerdt/VanderSchoot is one of the trickier kind. A kind of hospital room from an episode of Dr Who, filled with dolls that seem to breathe, and populated by impersonally moving helpers. All this as a backdrop for a vaguely English-language story from speakers about space, air, breath and new time. And a cup of chamomile tea.

Science fiction

There were too many parallels with the test experience of a good hour before to be really happy with this hour of SF art. However happy I am that a new generation of - mostly female - artists has embraced the narrative freedom of science fiction. Because that's what great examples like Star Trek and Dr Who are all about, or the American muscle-bound Marvel universe. All of them odes to fantasy and imagination.

Testing did not help, but the dehumanisation of Fremdkörper could not move me. After a year full of streaming and Netflix, in which I was mostly in touch with the world via grocery deliveries at one-and-a-half metres and zoom calls with groups of increasingly vague acquaintances, I needed something different.

Good to know

Fremdkörper has not required negative test evidence since 5 June.

More information: https://www.hollandfestival.nl/nl/programma/2021/fremdkoerper/