Party Dialogues
highlight of the lowlands at Theaterfestival Boulevard
Are you over thirty, and sometimes nostalgic for when you were still becoming someone? Not to worry: follow Theater Artemis’ ten special shamans and saunter right back into your past. Back to that sense of everlastingness, dynamo strength and snow-white naivety. Ten teenagers are offering you an opportunity. Just this once, you can join their party, in a special location. At the box-office you hand in your mobile, social status and responsibilities. You bring your own booze and questions. But think: will this be an ordinary underage get-together or a confronting ritual? Will you take home some of their youthful insights and energy? A pilot light, a drop of the elixir of life?
Theater Artemis, the stage anarchist company from ’s-Hertogenbosch, made the hit show Hallo Dampkring (Hello Atmosphere) for Oerol and Boulevard 2017. Children called grownups to justice about the climate. Now, teenagers are addressing us. Liesbet Swings has been associated with the company since 2014. Liesbet studied scenography in Barcelona. She has designed costumes and sets for numerous theater projects in the Netherlands and Belgium and has also developed joint musical performances – alone and together with many others. She combines her artistry with the open and adventurous context of Artemis. In addition to the performances by Jetse Batelaan she develops innovative, stand-alone art projects that arise in the encounter between artists and children or young people. Her projects question and disrupt social conventions.
“For a moment we relive why merging into a partying mass gives you that energy.”
“Filled with nostalgic confusion, you leave the dance floor at the end.”
ABOUT PARTY DIALOGUES
“When I started to work with teenagers on the use of party language, I got the impression that their seemingly endless fiddling and partying might just as well be a self-initiated, contemporary and long-stretched version of the classical transitional ritual. After all, adults gradually stopped at the end of the 1960s to mark out a clear moment around it. Young people tend to mark the start of this transition at the point their parents are no longer welcome at their parties.
We fear about our children not being able to make it in the world we have created. Those who do not get along will receive increasingly less understanding in our meritocracy. Whereas we ‘adults’ with all our imperfections, have actually all been there.
In Party Dialogues teenagers turn roles around when taking us to their secret place. A place were they learn, discover and experiment things sacred and crucial to their development. We are allowed to experience the big differences between both worlds. By means of a kind of rebirthing or reenactment of their party behaviour they mark a boundary. We adults get to speak their language, while they speak the enigmatic texts from 90’s dance songs. All wisdoms and high-flown terms form a masquerade. As they still need to figure everything out with each other and the music they listen to as their main guide. In the end, we realise that what remains is to cherish and trust the young to succeed in their escape, sooner or later, just like we all did. I believe that this is the consolation that unites us.”
Liesbet Swings
Bente van Arkel
Johanna Trudzinski
Marijn Brussaard
Sem Jonkers
Irene Geurts (internship)
15 June 2019
Actors Joris Buizer, Sayo Cadmus, Matthijs Daams, Tim Gerrits, Myrthe Kooijman, Luuk Matthijssen, Bente Oppenhuis, Lisa van de Wiel e.a. Technicians Dik Beets, Marianne van Andel
Actors Joris Buizer, Sayo Cadmus, Matthijs Daams, Tim Gerrits, Luuk Matthijssen, Josefien de Smid, Lisa van de Wiel en Misstique de Winter
Technicians Dik Beets, Pim Pernet