Theatre lectures at the Holland Festival and Theater Rotterdam: how can knowledge be made truly exciting?

In the newspaper, you can read that the theatre lecture, also known in proper Dutch as Lecture-Performance mentioned, is on the rise. So it’s no coincidence that I was able to attend two such lectures with slides this week. First there was ‘A Bigger Story‘ by Bureau Vergezicht and Theater Rotterdam; yesterday, ‘Honour‘bij’, by Suzanne Bocanegra, at the Holland Festival. As well as their form, the performances also share a great deal in terms of content.

‘A Bigger Story‘ is still in the development phase, which means that, as a member of the audience, you can watch the creative process unfold and sometimes have your say. On Friday 19 June, that wasn’t the plan, I was told by director Erik Whien, as the intention now was to let actress Romana Vrede try out her talents as a solo performer. It went quite well, I can now say, although it remains tricky to turn the enormous pile of books and facts that the creators, Anouk Nuyens and Rebekka de Wit, send her onto the stage with into a story you want to be part of. As a member of the audience. ‘Shock and Awe’ hasn’t proved to be the best approach in the past.

A dreadful time

They should certainly consult Suzanne Bocanegra for their research, who, with Honour chooses precisely that form. Her theatrical lecture begins as an art history lecture with slides of a Renaissance tapestry hanging in New York, but gradually develops into a reflection on the horrific era in which that magnificent work of art was created, and the bizarre fixation on the Renaissance that has taken hold of the people of her native Texas.

The interesting theatrical device Bocanegra employs is that she herself whispers her lines into a microphone to an actress, Tanya Selvaratnam, who relays her words to us as if they were her own story. According to Bocanegra herself, she does this because she has attended enough lectures by expert historians to realise that she lacks the entertainment skills to hold an audience’s attention for an hour, but it also serves a substantive purpose: it adds a layer of fiction to a story about the reality behind fictional art.

Book learning

Romana Vrede is in A Bigger Story She also acts as a mouthpiece for Anouk Nuyens, who is exceptionally well-versed in the subject matter but less gifted when it comes to performance. At the research meeting I attended, she was also seated on the left-hand side of the stage, just like Bocanegra in Amsterdam. In both cases, the involvement of an actor specialising in storytelling is also essential, because the story contains, above all, a vast amount of bookish knowledge. And, what’s more, a great deal of American bookish knowledge. You can’t fill an entire evening’s theatre with bookcases: they can only topple over once.

Is everything alright with A Bigger Story on how everything, from slavery to climate catastrophe, can be traced back to European colonialism, in Honour The elusive concept of ‘Honour’ takes centre stage as a masculine and European leitmotif. It has produced a history rife with disease, war and torture, in which it fell to the women to cover it all up with cheerfully woven fabric. Both performances also interweave their storylines in such a way that the analogy with the art of carpet-making is obvious. The surface is a complex weave; we add the depth ourselves.

Drifted away

At A Bigger Story A clear focus is still something that lies in the future: the production is far from finished. After the performance, this viewer was left longing for more playfulness that leads to new insights, going beyond the surface of the facts. Honour It does that, but it’s also almost too technically perfect. It’s a narrative-driven stand-up routine with detours, the sort we’re most familiar with from the better New Year’s Eve shows.

Bocanegra’s story made me realise, above all, just how far the United States has now drifted from Europe. This is not just a matter of plate tectonics; it is also a cultural estrangement that is evident in the romanticised image of the European Renaissance that apparently persists in the US. Here, I was brought up in the 1970s on the story that the horrors of the Crusades led to the ‘unlocking’ – or rather, the plundering – of scientific knowledge and classical literature from libraries in the Middle East. In the US, the focus seems to be mainly on fairy tales, splendour, pomp and kings. With green ponds and plastic gold.

A European story

It is clear that beneath both narratives lies a thick layer of lava, full of atrocities and betrayal. Whether it concerns colonialism, which continues to fester in the power of tech bros, or the cultural devastation and climate damage caused by tourism, or the quintessentially American Renaissance myth that led to a think tank named after that period, where the script for Donald Trump’s seizure of power was devised: it is material for far more theatrical readings than just these two. Although a more European perspective would be welcome amidst the American deluge of books from both reading performances. Insider tip: the book by Stedelijk Museum researcher Charl Landvreugd, recently discussed here, provides a way in.

Can we live in a way that does justice to everyone, without anyone having to be humiliated, destroyed or ‘cancelled’? The question is how we can achieve that state of enlightenment through a lecture accompanied by light projections. Whether it’s the ironic or sardonic smile at Honour goes, or A Bigger Story that mainly results in powerless anger or a nagging sense of guilt: with a good story, you create a bond between the storyteller and the listener that tends to widen rather than narrow the gap between them and the ‘uninitiated’ outside world.

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