Tweetakt opens with experience festival: please do this at home too

My mother did not like football. Whenever we watched a World Cup match with the rest of the family, she would hide behind a knitting or a magazine. At a just-missed chance, things went wrong. Her leg shot out and the coffee table flew a long way into the air. Mother had been watching anyway and her mirror neurons had betrayed her. But back then we didn't know what you called those things.

Visitors to dance know it, air guitar players know it, men who deploy quotes from The Sopranos at parties know it: art is not just an experience to look at, it intervenes on many more levels. Experiencing art is physical, and where better to discover this than in theatre for children?

Fantasy you have

On Saturday 6 June, the official opening of Festival Tweetakt coincided with the Utrecht Pride canal parade. Despite the somewhat drizzly weather, the city was at its most festive. Meanwhile, in the small hall of Theater Kikker, I saw how three theatre-makers managed to convince an audience of three-year-olds with very simple movements. Spiel im Spiel by Ceren Oran & Moving Borders actually plays for how children can discover for themselves what magic is. That you can pretend to move your own limbs, or someone else's, with a piece of string, or that you can cross a liquid floor with a bridge made of your own clothes.

Fantasy you have, but using it, you can't get enough lessons in that. That's what these German creators are doing. At least it works for three-year-olds. Are you three years older, you already need a bit more, and that was offered by the makers of Fest by Zonzo Compagnie. Three makers from Antwerp take on the phenomenon of children's music with separate homemade instruments and a lot of electronics. Faster than you expect, they have set up a raucous score with loops and sequencers, and move to it as wildly as the ladies of Pussy Riot at the Venice Biennale.

Punk party

But then you have vocals from Junior Akwety, an impressively large man from Congo, who boasts an angelic head voice. Fest is indeed a punk party that may be a bit too intense for some of the bewildered six-year-olds in the room, but their older companions go hard on it, and that is also a way of activating art.

For the real participation, we had to go outside, where on the Cathedral Square spirits were made ripe for doing things together by a large and colourful choir of about 50 soloists. They sing fresh pop songs and it's all pretty tight, but not with cadaver discipline. Here, they are all individually freaking out about whether they are the soloist on duty and it is infectious. Within no time, the Cathedral Square is singing and dancing along.

Hard-nosed boomers

For those not yet swept away by that, Tweetakt's organisers had hired Molar. The Spanish dancer Quim Bigas has been touring the world for a decade with a work that consists of turning a waiting audience into a yelling mob within half an hour. It was not just because of the atmosphere that was already in the city because of Utrecht Pride that it worked here too.

Quim Bigas does little more than convey enthusiasm, but in and such artful and above all frenzied way that only the most hard-nosed boomers be able to resist the urge.

Joining in, taking the movements learned home, working out new ideas there, sometimes at the expense of the furniture. Art is something you experience with your whole body, and secretly do, even if you say very loudly that you don't. It is like football.