Artemis brings rock-hard, dreary punk for thirteen-year-olds

Just a few weeks ago complained I about the lack of punk mentality in the arts. A week later, a group of makers turned out to have organised a punk night at Amsterdam's Frascati theatre, and yesterday I attended a distinctly punk event in Den Bosch. And as it should have been, ‘Worldwide International Global Idiodrama 13+’ was a rather rowdy and hard-to-digest happening to which the premiere audience reacted somewhat uncomfortably. The incomprehensible pussy art I asked for, on a silver platter. Exactly the point, in other words. Proof that there is a need for punk.

Idiodrama, a co-production of Den Bosch-based Artemis and Flemish (youth) theatre companies LOD and HetPaleis, is very much punk. Shoegazer-grunge punk of the kind that would make Kurt Cobain of Nirvana look like a smooth folk singer by comparison. The cause is Lies Pauwels, who, together with actress Willemijn Zevenhuizen and electropunker Hantrax, decided to pull out all the stops in a piece about the deadly fear of being excluded as an ‘idiot’. Artemis leader Jetse Batelaan, known and loved for his unconventional approach and aversion to neat narrative theatre, did the final direction.

Dark thoughts

The show, for adolescents aged 13 and above, deals with depression of the near-suicidal kind. Not exactly uplifting. You might, as a concerned millennial parent or educator, be worried about the sanity of the adolescent audience, who could possibly be led to dark thoughts by so much hopelessness.

The flirtation with self-destruction shown by this Idiodrama is just not that much more dangerous than what a thirteen-year-old is presented with by the average social media algorithm. We boomers also survived The Doors and Nirvana, so let's especially not panic.

Bots cars

What is boomer-friendly is the show's flyer and the difference between that announcement and the final result. In text, a kind of out-of-control talk show is on the cards; in reality, we see a wild shouting and brawling in which any line is hard to detect. Lots of shouting, lots of repetition, lots of aimlessness. The image on the other side of the flyer shows a kind of fairground, with a prominent place reserved for bumper cars.

And then - rather loudly - a penny dropped. Lies Pauwels began her career as the main character in the revolutionary theatre trilogy Mother and Child, Bernadetje and All India in the 1990s. The three plays from the pen of Alain Platel and Arne Sierens are the most beautiful and intense theatre seen in recent decades. The loosely mounted, improvisation-based performances have left an indelible impression. Not only on the audiences and critics who had to recount it, but also on the makers themselves. That bumper cars appear on one flyer of a play by Lies Pauwels cannot but be as a reference to Bernadetje, which took place in the ‘autoscooter’ of the same name that you, the audience, took your seat at.

Merciless

Is it a tribute, a sign of trauma? In this world of Lies Pauwels, it could be both. What the comparison does evoke is the harshness of this Worldwide International Global Idiodrama. The performance is quite merciless. So were the plays in which Lies Pauwels began her theatre life, but then there was lyricism in those, courtesy of Alain Platel.

That lyricism, that specific drive that you end up left in tears after all three of those events, that was what I missed in this return to the old pain of eccentrics and misfits that Pauwels has a great affinity for. Touching is what is needed, because then you can also get comfort. But comfort is nowhere to be found, which is why I do worry a little about my 13-year-old self who would have experienced this.

Surely, I hope there is some aftercare for the adolescents who go through this hell ride.

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