Queering Puppets' bus still has room

When your evening starts with a stripping festival director and ends with pole dancing, you know you are not in a regular theatre. True, I was at the opening of the Queering Puppets Festival at Amsterdam's Plein Theater and it was a party. The Plein Theatre largely owes this to that stripping director Berith Danse, who exudes in everything what she also says in her opening speech: there is a place for everyone on the bus. 

Now the Queering Puppets Festival is well aware that that bus does not run everywhere. After all, the festival opened on the day a negative travel advisory went out for queer people to the US. You know: that area across the Atlantic where power has fallen into the hands of a rancorous kindergarten class sending each other happy emojis via Signal about an attack that killed 50 civilians. 

Bullied professor

The borders are increasingly closing for people who are poorer and different from us. The fact that the border between Europe and the US has become a bit more problematic for certain people among us is disproportionate to the inhuman conditions that a resident of, say, Tunisia is exposed to if they want to come to Europe. 

Imagine, as a puppetry artist, being allowed to come and play a show in Amsterdam. It's almost impossible, which led the Cat Smits Company to create a performance with those puppeteers about exactly that humiliating process. The initiator was anthropologist Yentl de Lange, who gave a blazing and word-stumbling account of how her Tunisian professor was bullied while applying for a visa to give lectures in Italy. 

Vis à Vis(a) was the opening performance of Queering Puppets and it was as touching and loving as it was saddening. The Dutch puppeteer who is only very slowly learning to understand how his colleagues have now landed on another planet. Their puppets could cross the border effortlessly, they themselves represent everything Europe hates.

Big hand

Object theatre is an underrated child with us, and that's a shame, because that pole dance with which the evening ended shows exactly what it is capable of. A fragile dancer was enveloped by a giant male hand with dirty nails. The pole dance in that huge hand looked almost loving at times, which only made the image more pressing. Eventually, the dancer, Josje Eijkenboom, managed to break free. 

The disco afterwards was liberating. The biodynamic wine tasting there was heartwarming.