White balls are quite in the news, lately. For instance, they molest compatriots as a holiday pastime. Or they shout 'Snollebollekes' to a black champion. So the fact that white balls can also be fine is news. You can experience it at Festival Boulevard, where in a small, narrow tent, thousands of white Styrofoam balls, driven by huge fans, give you a fine massage shower, while they dance around you on all sides.
According to its makers, it is a 'sensory and overwhelming experience, inviting you to explore your own place in an endless chaos.' It is called White Noise and it does indeed make a huge bucket of noise. In six minutes, you'll be outside again, purified.
Likeminds
That, this Saturday in Den Bosch, was, for now, the last good news about white balls, because the two performances on my programme mainly showed how impossible it still is for black people to be seen as full in a white-ball world.
Amro Kasr of Likeminds tells you in a tight half-hour about black opera singer Roland Hayes, who captured hearts with his voice at the beginning of the last century but garnered hatred with his skin colour. Because it plays 100 years ago, you might think it is something we have left far behind. But sadly, the monkey and jungle noises that befell him in Berlin at the time have not yet died down.
White mistrust
How that works was made clear by the phenomenal dance piece 'Born To Protest'. The piece created by choreographer Joseph Toonga with black dancers makes tangible how any fun of black youth is nipped in the bud by white mistrust. For it begins with a frenzied hip-hop party. That dance is passionate, but people may mistake that for aggression. And then a vicious cycle sets itself in motion.
Arms go into the air, hands fold into pistols. Exhilarating music gives way to terrifying jungle sounds,the same that befell that opera singer in roaring-twenties Berlin, or that sound at a missed penalty in the 2021 football arena.
Hard bubble
The play, a sequel to Born to Manifest that also featured in this festival, plays among the bare concrete walls of a non-descript schoolyard north of Den Bosch railway station. We, the white boulevard visitors, became one with that hard merciless concrete for a moment. The sadness of the dancers reflected against us as hard as against the concrete. It makes you aware of your colour, however much you might want it to play no role at such a festival, in the middle of a fairly left-wing bubble.
There is still a lot of work to do. For now, we have dance to make us feel what that could be like: understanding. At the end of Born To Protest, Joseph Toonga opens a small window to a better future. According to him, it lies in the hands of women. In the podcast I made with him, he talks about it.
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