In France, theatre audiences rarely see theatre work from across the border. In the Netherlands, on the contrary, we usually get our text theatre from outside. Last weekend, in the 14,000-strong town of Pont-à-Mousson, between Metz and Nancy in Alsace, France, I experienced what happens when you connect the two. At the festival Mousson Pont-à-Mousson, between Metz and Nancy in Alsace, France, with what happens when you connect the two things. At the festival Mousson d'été d'ete (Summer Monsoon), Kunstenpunt and Literatuur Vlaanderen, Fonds Podiumkunsten NL and Maison Antoine Vitez presented the result of four years of collaboration to bring Dutch-language drama into French translation.
A total of 34 texts, by authors such as Jibbe Willems, Alex van Warmerdam, Peer Wittenbols and George Elias Tobal, were transcribed into French. My contribution to the whole consisted of an essay on the state of Dutch playwriting, entitled 'De la nudité fonctionelle dans les oeuvres théâtrales néerlandaises' (On the functional nakedness of Dutch theatre texts).
Warm welcome
The project, poetically titled 'Ivre de Mots' (word drunk), was warmly received by a dedicated and remarkably young audience of French theatre-makers, translators and writers. Venue: the enormous 18th-century Premonstratensian Abbey which dominates the town and now lives on secularly as a cultural and congress centre for the region. In the monumental halls, simple party tents and separate outdoor stages along the Moselle, three cultures met: Flemish, Dutch and French. They are cultures that are quite different from each other.
Foreign valuation
It is no secret, even a scientific fact, that a Dutch theatre text is usually performed once. Which then has the advantage over a Dutch music composition that the performance involves a series and a tour, while composers of 'New Music', music that adds something to the corpus for classically engaged ensembles and orchestras, often hear their work performed just once.
But even then. Andriessen's 1976 musical masterpiece De Staat, was only performed again in the Netherlands last year. Herzberg's theatrical monument to war survivors, 'Leedvermaak', only got a revival in professional theatre more than 40 years later. So for both categories, it does matter if your work is picked up abroad. Usually, then, domestic appreciation also rises, and your work may be re-released, by others.
Floral and expressive
Against the Dutch theatre's focus on the foreign market, then, is a French theatre culture that actually hardly looks outside. French people are very fond of their language. You can hear that even on regular afternoon television. Their penchant for flowery and expressive language makes an encounter with theatre work from the northern Netherlands quite exciting.
Take the extremely austere work of Magne van den Berg, who writes dialogues consisting mainly of a few words, and lots of silences, and contrast that with Edouard Louis, who is even on the bare side for French, and you can hear and see the difference.
But just as we eagerly embrace the latter's stage work, the reverse can now happen. And so it can because France has an institution like Maison Antoine Vitez, which serves no other purpose than importing non-French texts. Now they have been able to do something with the hugely export-oriented departments of the Dutch and Flemish performing arts. then it may just happen that we will start to understand each other a bit better within Europe again, and in the Flemish sense of that word,
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