Boulevard diary #3: basil connects the world

The nice thing about festivals like Boulevard in Den Bosch is that after a few days, you automatically make connections between everything you experience. Not that everything starts to look alike, like in sport. There, a single chromosome or hundredth of a second determines the difference between world peace or the apocalypse. There, everything must be so similar that in a few years' time, only identical twins will be allowed to compete with each other for victory. 

At Boulevard, the festival that continues until Sunday, you will learn how subtle differences in accent actually give you a view of a world that becomes richer the longer you look at it. Or do you see similarities that are not there at all. Also good.

Sitting with about 10 people in a hermetically sealed wooden tent watching other, colourful, people in bushes, after which the floor turns out to be a mirror of water and you actually have to look at the depths below to find meaning in a text by Yoko Ono, you still feel parallels with 'Before they disappear', a beautiful, moving show about gnomes in an estate south of Den Bosch. 

Pope satisfied

Not that Schippers & Van Gucht, the makers of 'One Every One' on the Parade, the one with the water surface, have even for a second stopped by The Wooden House and Theatre Step with their gnome show, yet there is a connection, just because, as a human being, you like to make connections. 

What that connection is? No idea, but it doesn't have to be. There in Den Bosch, at the foot of St John's, you can safely believe there is 'something'. Is the pope satisfied again, too.  

The adorable gnomes at Blijdenstein Estate are played by the Down people who have long devoted their extraordinary lives to adorable performances about being different. I was once introduced to them in a play, created by a young Lotte van den Berg and a still brand new Jetse Batelaan, in which the inhabitants of a cabin on the savannah are disrupted by the arrival of a colleague from a totally different climate. That play, titled 'Somewhere an Igloo is now empty' would be impossible to stage now, if only because of the abundant use of black make-up on the white players. 

Forgery

In the review that I wrote about it for a national newspaper at the time, the n-word can still be found, as can the description on the company's website itself. Would I have to change my own archive to get rid of that nasty n-word, or would that be an attack on the history in which we all thought differently about what was normal? Would it make me want to unfairly pretend to be better than we all were, in 2003? Should there be a disclaimer? 

And so you come back to the present, where I wrote down the b-word on Friday from the mouth of a black dancer, and am now wondering whether I shouldn't correct him after all? Or am I distorting reality again? 

You can lose sleep over that.

Apparent similarity

And that reality, in turn, leads to the festival programming two performances at the Bossche Verkadefabriek on the same weekend, which seem to have a lot in common, but on closer inspection are totally incomparable. Indeed, they are so different from each other that the similarity found is rather disturbing. They are 'This is not a dance' By Nastaran Razawi Khorasani & Theater Rotterdam and 'Dance is not for us' By Omar Rajeh & Maqamat. 

Yes, they both have the word 'dance' in the title, with a disclaimer added, and the makers have strong ties to the Middle East: Khorasani was born in Iran, Omar Rajeh in Lebanon. And to make the differences even more confusing: they both use text projections in an otherwise black space. 

But then all similarity ends. In her performance, Khorasani seeks contact with dancers and choreographers in Iran, who are forced to operate underground because making a dance move in public carries a life sentence. For his part, Rajeh makes a philosophically rich statement about his hometown of Beirut, where dancing is not forbidden but the divisions, corruption and bureaucracy are so stifling, that after the fiasco of his last mobile theatre project, he said goodbye to his motherland and moved to Lyon. 

Grand finale

In Khorasani, we watch with her the projected transcriptions of anonymised video calls with Iranian dancers. The performance builds up to a grandiose finale in which she can still dance by herself without moving, thanks to an ingenious use of floor spotlights. It even results in a group dance, and at that very moment the loneliness of the smothered dancers hits you hard.

Omar Rajeh begins his meandering story with the anecdote that he always brings a plant whenever he is invited to people's houses. The performance builds to an increasingly wild and furious dance to hypnotic percussion. On the backdrop, thoughts, descriptions, words in English and Arabic. 

Here, loneliness and powerlessness battle each other. Is dance a salvation for a war-torn city? He tries, but it's tough. Heavier and heavier. It ends after an hour in fraternisation, even though it seems Rajeh has given up his fight for dance in Beirut. 

We all get a plant, though. Because that's life. Fresh basil. The whole theatre smells of it. So does the train back to Utrecht. That creates a connection.