Tweetakt

I'm just back from the Tweetakt international children's theatre festival in Utrecht, Holland. It was a really rewarding experience as the quality of work was very high. I was there for the first two and a half days and managed to fit in twelve performances.

On day one we saw two very contrasting performances by the always-exciting Theatergroep Max. First up was Help, a fantastic play about the formation of the Beatles. It was a really fast-paced story with some superb live music and excellent acting from all the performers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHC5L55hcMg
We then had to rush off to see another performance by TG Max called Toneel. This show, set in a school gym hall, was in stark contrast to Help. It was a thoroughly original and bizarre piece of physical/music theatre in which five performers carry out a boring movement sequence before it all starts to go wrong. Amidst the madness of this show there was a moment of real beauty where all the lights went down and 20-30 mobile phones, stuck on the walls of the hall, all lit up one after the other and played a lovely twinkly tune!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60STE66hGIA

Another great show was Under The Influence by the Belgian company Ontoerend Goed. Again, I'm a fan of their work but I knew how controversial and dangerous they could be so was slightly apprehesive about attending a show set at a flat party where people are 'under the influence' of drugs. It's a high-octane assault on the senses - you're physically there with the performers as they dance, pass round beer and joints (not lit!), stripp off, vomit and, at one particularly harrowing moment, have seizures... At the end of the party the audience are led off to different places by the cast; I ended up in a dressing room listening to a girl chat in Dutch for 20 minutes - very surreal!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AV1nvUBKPs

On the second day we saw two shows which explored gender issues. Gentlemen was a piece performed by two androgynous female performers set in a clothes shop. The perfomers tackled the notion that men/boys don't have to wear only male clothing and that girls/women don't only have to wear female clothing. At the centre of this interesting subject area were two astounding performances. A performance in the evening was You Can Have None, a piece performed by a solo female student. She was dressed as a man and taunted the audience with her drill! It was a funny, clever piece of live art for a teenage/adult audience.

Strange Days, Indeed was my favourite piece of dance from the weekend. The young Basel company performed a piece which explored friendship, independence and unity. The four female dancers and one male dancer performed a highly physical piece involving phones hanging from the ceiling, lots of clothes swapping, and excerpts of real-life stories from a Basel newspaper. It was fun and many moments from the show have really resonated with me. The piece was choreographed by Ives Thuwis who was co-creator of Rennen, the great dance piece I saw in Nuremberg.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBXkao-iej4

I think my favourite show of the festival though was another student piece called Krampig (Crampy). This short little show was a real treat. It was about a very tall man living in a very small house. He struggles to even turn around. Things become even more cramped when his girlfriend comes to visit. It was a very warm and romantic piece that had adults and children laughing out loud.