It could be because of the weather, or my mood, but 2022 was one of the best editions of Theatre Festival Boulevard I have experienced in decades. From the interesting, and also a little disruptive opening to the final night, which I experienced yesterday, I saw guts, passion and pushed boundaries. Not everywhere all at once, but on separate stages, and on different levels. And that's just a fraction of the 120 things I saw.
Take yesterday, for me the last day. This hot Saturday, I saw a show by Lisetta Ma Neza. It was a re-acquaintance. In 2021 I saw her for the first time and she convinced me. I had some caveats: for instance, I felt she laughed off too much of her message. As a result, it didn't hit as hard, and with the content Lisette Ma Neza brings with her, that's a bit of a shame. Her Rwandan roots, her Breda childhood, the tornness that comes with the generations: enough substance for fierce poetry and ditto stories.
Still something to moan about
This year, with the programme Your Mother Heals Wounds, she happily takes a step forward. Gone is the shyness, feigned or otherwise, Ma Neza now gives her anger full rein. That feels better, even a little uncomfortable in the right way. When she laughs something away now, it magnifies the pain. When she sings, she stays close to her speaking voice more often, which increases eloquence and reduces the chances of shrill outbursts.
I wouldn't respect my name and profession if I didn't have something to bitch about anyway, and it's about improvisation. Like last year, Ma Neza sometimes gives her backing band impossible improvisation assignments, such as "combining the fate of a refugee, a bomb attack and a rainstorm", to name a few. Like last year, this does not result in surprising musical explosions, but thoughtful notes that are mostly easy on the ears and sound the same every time.
That's more often the problem with improvisations: if you don't keep fixed, exciting ingredients in reserve, don't dare to cross your boundaries, you almost always get stuck within your comfort zone, and that's exactly what this programme doesn't need. Perhaps Lisette Ma Neza herself should take more of the reigns really, and show her players every corner of the room in a serious rehearsal process. Maybe a composer(s) should watch and write with her. Next year, as far as I'm concerned, it could be a pooh-pooh more adventurous.
Colonial past
Where sharpness does come into its own is in The Indian Interior, the show I saw as a try-out, at the since the Volkskrant wrote about it world-famous Rosmalen. Bo Tarenskeen wrote it, and on the empty stage, six characters dance around each other. The occasion is the announced death of the pater familias, a mixed-blooded repatriant from the former Dutch East Indies, played by Hans Dagelet.
Around him, besides the carefully preserved legacy of centuries of colonial melancholy and vital Indonesian animism, are two sons and 1 daughter, plus a grandson with blonde following. The family appears to consist entirely of architects.
Author Tarenskeen, who plays along himself, so clearly indicates that these people are much into shaping other people's lives, and that they like to talk about eloquence, but that it is a bit lacking in their own lives.
Gloating
The play is indebted to Judith Herzberg's Leedvermaak, a play that, when published in 1982, legendarily directed by Leonard Frank, first made the traumas of the first and second generations of Jewish war survivors palpable. And just as that play should really be performed every year around 4 May, Indisch Interieur was made for 15 August, the day that should be at least as important for our country, because it marks not only the real end of World War II, but also because that day in 1945 marked the rather bloody end of 300 years of colonial rule by the Netherlands.
The tornness this creates to this day, not only within the 2 million soul community with Indian blood, has been hidden behind a facade of sober survival for too long.
Colour counts
What unexpectedly brings the two plays of this evening together is precisely that colonialism and the position of refugees. A possibly deliberate choice by the new festival management to make social current affairs palpable to summer festival-goers in a way that is not too emphatic. Lisette Ma Neza who reminds us that the war in Ukraine made it clear that refugees are only welcome if they are not of colour, and Bo Tarenskeen who gives the insight that it was precisely that skin colour that bothered the Dutch Indies so much, and which the 'first' generation tried so hard to deny.
Meaningful theatre with eloquence and so much of it, and so early in the season: Boulevard has definitely given the term Summer Festival a deeper layer.
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