What They in Weimar can learn from We in Rotterdam

'Plattenbau,' the driver says with some horror as we pass some boarded-up concrete porch flats. The GDR-built flats are in Alt Schöndorf, two kilometres outside Weimar's historic centre. Nailed shut for years, and squatters didn't look after them either. A hated legacy, but more by the West than the East. 

The neighbourhood had its own cohesion, now the poor houses that remain are for the people you find in the inner city only in serving roles, or in one of the four falafel restaurants downtown: 'immigrants'.

Schöndorf is being renovated, but slowly. According to residents, the money from Berlin first passes a number of bows in the west before it reaches urban renewal in Thuringia. 

Much more extreme

Thirty-three per cent of Thuringian residents voted last Sunday for the party that openly carries Nazi slogans, and is best known here as an anti-immigration front. Less than the 45 per cent that insiders last year still feared, but enough to worry about. AfD is many times more extreme than our lightweight variants PVV and BBB. Still, I refuse to believe they are all Nazis. 

Although that is made easy. After all, the fact that AfD also wants to cut the Buchenwald memorial centre, and in particular wants to curb international art even further than is already happening, gets little attention in the Netherlands. Kunstfest Weimar, the reason I myself was in Thuringia for the third time this year, noticed that art-hostile sentiment much earlier, by the way. In 2012, the federal government cut the subsidy from over 12 million to barely 1 million, on the grounds that international art was a matter for the capital and needy states like North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), where the Ruhrtriennale did win awards this time.

Mainly news from the west

Free State of Thuringia could then continue with support only if all the creators were also from Thuringia. Reason why the festival is kept afloat with partners from other countries and (federal) states, from Spain to Chile, or the aforementioned NRW. 

This year, for example, I saw an anarchist street theatre group from NRW cultural city Bochum perform at Alt Schöndorf. Rumpel Pumpel is a funny club of parade-like performers who have already gained their anarchy during singing lessons, back in the day, because the songs they deploy in their fairground performance are rather deliberately false and arrhythmic.

They want to bring theatre love to places where people never come into contact with theatre, and of course that is only to be commended. Whether this is the method? Youth or family theatre could be so much better. But maybe we are spoiled in the Netherlands. 

At least the children enjoyed a spin on the old merry-go-round afterwards. Would with more quality the sparse crowd in the car park between the nailed-up plattenbau not feel taken more seriously?

Us in Rotterdam 

I wondered all that when I went to see 'We' last week, after returning from Weimar. It is the presentation of a kind of summer camp set up by Maas Theatre and Dance in Rotterdam. A large group of children, under the guidance of professional actors, rappers, composers and designers, get to work on their own imaginations. 

In the end, that resulted in an afternoon where you, the audience, split into groups and experienced a series of small presentations that the children and young people came up with. 

It is all pure, what happens. The children are not drilled, but their spontaneity is so coloured by the accompanying artists that it all becomes more than the sum of its endearing parts. Here, children of all layers and colours found in Rotterdam learn what it is to make art. They learn what freedom is, in fact, and you get that feeling along the side, as an onlooker, in no uncertain terms. And then the 15 minutes you had the chance to help clay yourself suddenly turn out to be part of a grandiose final image. 

Here, too, theatre love is conveyed to people who are usually not so quick to encounter it. Rotterdam too has its own backlog, although it is less in 'plattenbau' than in old neighbourhoods. But such missionary work does require you to bring quality. If those kids in Weimar could do something like 'We' in the Maas stage? 

Perhaps they in Rotterdam and Weimar should start talking to each other.