“But why are you all so negative about men! Men are sweet and good too, aren't they?” It came straight from the heart of the young mother, who had earlier exclaimed how happy she was with her baby daughter's father. In the tent where we, the 150 dinner guests and spectators (m/f/x) of Dance, Man, Dance had been making merry about pedantic, wide-eyed and emotionally immature half of mankind, a somewhat contrived laugh sounded. Indeed, weren't we being too negative, all of us?
Every reason for lively, beer- and wine-lubricated conversations between total strangers, which such a group meal at long tables invites. That we men have been a bit of a nuisance in the news lately is an extreme euphemism, according to some. At the same time, at the finger-pointing event led by the wonderfully gender-fluid Anne Kuit, aka Young Leo, only a few of the men present preferred to be a woman, as opposed to quite a few women who preferred to be men, if only to be able to walk the streets alone at night.
Lola Tuthola
A summer performance by Het Nut, Leidsche Rijn's city theatre company, is never just any performance. It is almost always accompanied by an (exceptionally delicious) meal. And that meal is also an integral part of the performance. That way, you get to meet strangers informally, with whom you share curiosity about what the makers have come up with this time. Usually this is the work of artistic director Greg Nottrot, this time the text is written by Lars Brinkman, who goes through life at times as Lola Tuthola Lollipop.
Dance, Man, Dance is about what masculinity really is, and it starts (after the main course and before dessert) with Lola, who needs to go so badly that she visits a Dixie on a construction site. And the six construction workers on duty have their own thoughts about that. The hour-and-a-half-long play then meanders between horror, menace and absurdism, with some very nice construction worker dancing at times,
230 metres
There, on the spot where a (presumably male) architect had conceived a 230-metre-high residential tower, we become profoundly confused about what it means to be a man. Because that phallic Belle van Zuylen tower has since been replaced in the planning phase by three towers that will be slightly less high, one of the last bits of Leidsche Rijn lies fallow here. It awaits the life to be brought by the 10,000 new residents, and that's when the concrete barrenness of the already built environment becomes all the more striking. Brick brutalism, tall and angular, with mirror facades on the plinth, and IT buildings that seamlessly merge into hermetically sealed residential blocks.
On the way back to the sleek Leidsche Rijn station, the thought loomed, what has gone wrong with the art nouveau and art nouveau, with graceful, graceful forms still so widely present in Utrecht's old city centre.
Were those shapes too feminine? Or did men dare to dance back then?
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