Cultural discomfort is Artemis’s trademark. In the latest festival production by the Den Bosch-based youth theatre company, that discomfort soars to unprecedented heights – where, incidentally, it’s quite a pleasant place to be: it’s not an unpleasant kind of discomfort. It keeps things exciting. ‘Arty Farty In The Playground’ is a delightfully subversive commentary on art and what it is supposed to do.
Artemis has set up a little station on the edge of De Parade, the square in Den Bosch and the festival hub of Boulevard. There, you can hop aboard one of those dreadful little tourist trains that catch you off guard in far too many historic city centres and theme parks. Now it’s your turn to hop on, and you’ll set off on a fantastic journey through the bustling city centre of Den Bosch, in search of three children’s playgrounds where real art is about to unfold. This is made clear by the ‘curator’, a marvellous character in a typical curator’s outfit, complete with outrageous pink glasses and platform shoes from a visibly expensive brand.
A banana that’s gone off
That curator takes her work dead seriously, despite the banana serving as a faulty microphone, and despite the fact that we’re walking past a children’s playground. The adults amongst us listen somewhat uneasily to introductions about artists and their post-capitalist intentions, or other terms from the handbook of vague art jargon.
Once they arrive at the play areas, the children in the audience do what children in the audience are supposed to do, especially at Artemis: they take over the play areas, despite the fact that an artist is also at work there.
It gets off to a good start with a scene reminiscent of the famous gorilla performance from the art-world satire *The Square*, when a man with a steaming bag disappears into the ground. He later emerges to give everyone a proper fright. And on to the next attractions, all the while waving awkwardly at the somewhat bewildered-looking city dwellers. Because that’s what you do, riding on a tourist train through the human menagerie that a city actually is.
The curator remains true to her role, as she should; the artists perform their sometimes rather baffling acts with imperial gravitas and equally bitter seriousness; and a family crisis that unfolds at the final venue – complete with an aggressive father – seems to fit right in. Or does it?
Lonely souls
Arty Farty in the Playground is so delightfully disorientating that, after an hour and a half of driving round Den Bosch and experiencing things in the most beautiful spots, you’ve lost your bearings. That’s what Artemis’s theatre does to you. At a festival like Boulevard, you can just let that happen. In fact, that’s exactly what you’re there for. Take, for example, the phenomenal ‘Nergens’ in the basement of the Theater aan de Parade. It’s a VR film by the artist duo Schippers & Van Gught. The experience builds on their VR film ‘Ergens’, which left me spellbound and bewildered last year. You sit on a swivel chair and look around in four directions, where a different solitary figure keeps moving towards you, until all four of you end up at a bizarre children’s party.
With ‘Nergens’, the Breda-based artists’ collective paints a sometimes moving picture of disembodied souls in a world that is no longer their own. It bears a certain resemblance to the world of Artemis, where artists and children also moved so remarkably past one another.
Crazy mythology
Of course, Boulevard also has a reputation to uphold as a festival featuring ‘mainstream’ theatre. This year’s opening performance was *Ruination* by Lost Dog. Directed by the choreographer and director Ben Duke they tackle the classic story of Medea. It is the story of the ‘Daughter of the Sun’ who, as the spoils of war of the ‘hero’ Jason, is forced to endure seeing herself and her sons enslaved in Jason’s own city upon his return, after her husband has found a more suitable – local – bride.
It is also the story of the mother who murders her sons, under the approving gaze of a chorus of women who lament her fate. Was that infanticide an act of revenge, or was there something else at play? That question has preoccupied humanity for just under 2,500 years. In *Ruination*, Hades, ‘Chief of Death’ in the underworld, attempts to answer it once and for all. In doing so, he acts as Jason’s defence counsel, whilst his fellow underworld goddess Persephone takes up the defence of Medea, who wishes to prove her innocence.
An interesting detail is that Persephone herself is not entirely there of her own free will. She was raped and abducted by Hades, and, following Zeus’s intervention, is allowed to return to the surface every six months to be with her mother Demeter, who, as the goddess of fertility, thereby governs the changing seasons. When her daughter is with Hades, Demeter, in her sheer grief, causes the land to wither and the livestock to die; spring then returns as a result of her joy at her daughter’s return. This phenomenon has been beautifully celebrated in song by Martha Wainwright, although that song was about the Roman version of Persephone: Proserpina.
All this explanation? That’s what mythology does to you. It’s why a story like that of Odysseus remains unrivalled to this day. It compels creators to reflect. You can see and feel that in this incredibly well-crafted, musical production, which offers so much humour and emotion that you’ll find yourself thinking about it for days and nights on end. The fact that there’s also a fantastic countertenor singing along and the music ranges from Rachmaninoff to Radiohead rounds the picture off perfectly.
Medea’s true story
In *Ruination*, a prominent place is given to the alternative story of Medea. In this version, she is not a witch who murders her children, as the conventional story goes, but a refugee whose children are lynched by a frenzied mob of angry townspeople, who believe she must make way for the local bride.
That version of the myth is as old as Euripides’ original play – it is also referred to in the original play – and strikes a frighteningly familiar chord when we look today at the raging mobs turning on fleeing women and children. Even close to Den Bosch, in Engelen.
In the Ruination court case, this highly plausible story is swiftly dismissed as a myth by the cosy alliance between Hades and Jason. We recognise this as a miscarriage of justice, yet do nothing about it.
And so, late one evening in Den Bosch, you suddenly find yourself complicit in a distortion of history that began at least 25 centuries ago. It’s certainly something to mull over after a sun-drenched day at a summer festival like Boulevard.
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