Twenty years from now, I can say that I saw Daniëlle Deddens play once before she was a world star. It was on a somewhat chilly Saturday in June 2024 in the storage attic of an old mill in the centre of Delft. I was with about 20 other Delft citizens, who had plunked down a few euros for Nora - a POP concert. The performance lasted barely half an hour and contained everything that would later make her so good: an exciting self-written soundtrack, a confident presence and a voice that didn't need the loud volume that often makes musicals so Celinedion-esque.
So that is the great thing about a festival like Delft Fringe. I got to know it on that chilly Saturday in June this year and was permanently surprised by the quality of the organisation, the offerings and the audience. In Delft, a city I had never really looked at properly up close before, there is a different audience wandering among small venues, micro-theatres and exhibition spaces than in Amsterdam.
Latitude art
Delft Fringe is a festival of up-and-coming talent operating in genres from cabaret and musical to modern dance and drag. High culture enters into a pleasant marriage with wide-ranging art, and that is also because it often takes place in the living rooms of ordinary Delft residents.
Well, ordinary? Whoever has a floor free in their house to accommodate 20 spectators at a performance of Haus of 4D is not the most basic minimum sufferer, but a good heart for amateur art beats there. That the music is not allowed to be too loud because of the neighbours does detract a little from the campy show by Delft queers who don't want to fit into a pigeonhole, but it doesn't lessen the fun. You can't lower the thresholds.
Mel Gibson
That the new generation of makers taking their first steps towards the big stages in Delft has their own views on diversity is interesting to see. Indeed, my day started with Jannes Laven deploying his fascinatingly androgynous charisma in an entertaining half-hour in which he held up a mirror to real men. There were a few in the audience who revealed that they liked to beer and burp in groups. Laven nicely mirrors the male obsession with being straight together, farting and busting things together, with Mel Gibson's skirt in Braveheart and his own desire to surprise his girlfriend in women's clothes.
If such cabaret has to rely mainly on the later hours and somewhat looser quality standards, that does not apply to Rite of What Was, a dance performance about Greenwashing that I experienced in the exhibition space of Royal Delft. After a tour of overpriced Delft Blue, Margarida Constantino shows an inspired dance quartet, driven even by palpable anger, about which we are free to associate. Do we see the last strands of tropical rainforest losing the battle here, while they keep repeating the mantra that it is all the fault of greenwashing? The performance is powerful and therefore even moving.
Delft Fringe's performers are constantly playing at different venues. So Daniëlle Deddens plays her own sung vision of Ibsen's 150-year-old theatre classic 'Nora, a doll's house' only twice in that mill. Next week, she will be in someone's living room. I'm sure there are still tickets.
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