This article first appeared in NRC Handelsblad, on March 29 th 2008 as ‘Kunst die buurtbewoners met elkaar verbindt’
The International Community Arts Festival goes into the neighbourhoods with performances.A Philippino theatre group re-enacts a mudslide disaster from 2004. There is also a play about the significance of Feyenoord in the neighbourhood.
For a moment it seems as if all possible prejudices are to be confirmed as the Philippino community-arts company Peta begins with the production Infanta. Some photographs are projected, then there is explanation about how people in the region of Infanta live and finally there are some pictures about the history of the company. It threatens to be another ‘worthy’ piece with nice ‘ethnic’ elements. It turns out otherwise as man walks on stage with a guitar over his shoulder, like a Jesus carrying his cross. There is a rag tied round his head. A boy pulls on it revealing the word democracy. He is immediately handcuffed by police and taken away. Another man - the popular Philippino folksinger Noel Cabangon - gets the guitar from ‘Jesus’ and sings a song.
This appeared to be nothing more than an introduction for an international audience. Peta presented Infanta on Thursday at the International Community Arts Festival in the Theater Zuidplein in Rotterdam. It is a festival of dance, music and theatre made for and with ordinary people’, about subjects that are current in their community.
The Philippino Peta continued after the beginning of Infanta with surprisingly modern theatre, with storytelling, songs, and above all, many beautiful images, sometimes in dance. The performance is about three students who dream of a life in the city. It is also about illegal logging and the disaster that hit the town on 29th November 2004, when, after a hard storm and heavy rainfall, a twenty million cubic meters of mud crashed into the valley leaving a trail of death and destruction behind. The story is told first in pictures and then you get the facts in spoken text or on the screen. But the mood is always immediately and clearly conveyed by traditional bell sounds or loud rumbling, for example. The stage is almost empty, with blocks that are by turns a tree-stump, a bus, a piece of furniture and at a first highpoint, an enormous electrical saw. To end the story: all three students survive the mudslide. After the disaster they do not want to go to the city anymore but want to rebuild the town and protect the land, and to try and prevent a repeat of events.
The organiser of the International Community Arts Festival is the Rotterdams Wijktheater (RWT), besides Stut Theater in Utrecht, one of the most important community-based theatre companies in the Netherlands. The RWT makes several productions annually, often about the contact between neighbourhood residents from various cultures. The premiere of Hand in Hand, a production about the love of supporters and neighbourhood residents for Feyenoord, opened the fourth edition of the festival. There are in total sixteen productions to see, from seven countries.
“The most important aim of the festival is to allow the companies to learn from each other”, says Peter van den Hurk, festival director and artistic director of the Rotterdams Wijktheater. “Community arts provide a podium for people who otherwise have no natural connection with theatre. They have usually never been in a theatre before when they begin. It means nothing to them because they do not recognise themselves in the stories that you see there. By making productions based on their stories, community arts try to recover what theatre has lost: a direct connection with society.”
Peta has been in existence since 1967 and is most definitely a part of the society there. Infanta was originally a piece about young people who move away from their town. Joan Varges (20), one of the students, was already performing with them. She comes from Infanta and experienced the disaster herself. Her family survived thanks to large trees around their house. but she lost acquaintances and friends and saw the damage. “After the disaster, all the actors talked about what they had experienced. We have adapted the production on the basis of those stories.” The production could already be seen a couple of months after the disaster and was very important, for the actors as well as the audience. Joan: “It has helped me to carry on. People who saw it were shocked because they didn’t know how bad it had been and that the disaster was caused by the logging. The government denies that.”
Great Britain is the most important country for community arts within Europe. Almost every city has at least one company. That does not mean that community art can be seen in British theatres everywhere. According to Peter van den Hurk, the people from Acta Community Theatre from Bristol were so impressed by the previous festival that they performed in a real theatre. “They were used to performing in halls where one half of the neighbourhood where in the audience and the other half on the stage. The festival inspired them to offer to perform in the Bristol Old Vic, a classic city theatre. Against every expectation, they sold-out. It was recognition. The theatre is also theirs.”
Translation: Terry Ezra
Photograph: Roy Goderie (www.godefotos.nl)