We need to handle our last days differently, that much is made clear by POW-WOW by Minou Bosua. 

We die too late. Most of the time. After all, no one wants to spend the last years of life leaking in a nursing home, cared for by ever-changing staff who do their stinking best but are not capable of the love that children, or close friends for want of it, could give.

Better a pill than dementia, we say, but then you have to be able and willing to say "Yes!" once the diagnosis is there. The fact that people with dementia are still being cared for already shows that this is not a given.

Village Festival

Making theatre about something like this is quite difficult. Minou Bosua (for those who haven't forgotten, once half of De Bloeiende Maagden), succeeds brilliantly with Pow-Wow, a performance that is touring theatres this season. Bosua has brought along a team of elderly people, who help out front and backstage to find out what it is: getting older and changing roles: those who first cared become caregivers.

The form is that of a village festival, a POW-WOW, which among the original inhabitants of the United States represents the celebration of one's culture. Here, it stands for the culture of ageing, which in our country usually culminates in leaving one's own home and being accommodated in a nursing home. Minou Bosua questions that culture, partly from her own experiences with the illness process of her mother, who died of dementia in a Brabant nursing home in July this year.

Communications

'Who dares to ask for care?", Bosua puts to the packed room at some point. Only a handful of people raise their hands. When she then asks who would like to be cared for, almost everyone raises their hand. So there is something wrong with the communication, notes the inspired Bosua, because why then is there so much loneliness, and why can't we assist our elderly in their own homes in their final phase of life? Is it because of the elderly who do not dare to ask for help, or all those others who may want to, but ultimately cannot?

That we should honour our elders and preferably put them on a pedestal is what Minou Bosua suggests to us. An Iranian woman comes on stage and tells us that in her culture the elderly are greeted with a knee. Then there is a disarming performance by a daughter with her demented mother, who turns out to still be able to sing fantastically. OK, she might have to change a nappy afterwards, but mother used to do that to her, so that the you.

Disarming

Maybe we need to go back to a smaller scale. That's the sort of thing this show puts to us: you need a village to raise a child, so maybe you also need that village to let people grow old in an environment that is familiar and doesn't feel like a waiting room for death.

Enough questions that you appear to be able to raise with a performance that lasts only an hour and a half. A pleasant hour and a half, thanks to Bosua's disarming direction and the relatable presence of the elderly who are part set, part sounding board, part actor. It's also a nice way to get back into the theatre, and be able to be socially active again after all those months of lockdowns and loneliness. Maybe that's why the performance hit me so hard.

Good to know

POW-WOW by Minoux is still playing. Playlist and information.