Het Zuidelijk Toneel creates theatre. Artistic director Piet Menu and a diverse group of theater makers from the Netherlands and Flanders (Belgium) have built an open, engaging and multifaceted theater company. The best creators under one roof. Het Zuidelijk Toneel and its makers are bound by an inherent drive to enter into dialogue with the audience. Challenging, evocative. Our work takes place in the real world, and the real world is part of our art making process. Our central theme: connection to The Other and how we see ourselves within that reflection. Het Zuidelijk Toneel has been based in Tilburg since 2010. Het Zuidelijk Toneel is a national theatre company with a focus on the Brabant Region of the Netherlands.
Finding Willard
Travel along with Tom Struyf in Finding Willard. A filmic travel story about caring for one another. An intimate performance in which the audience sits on three stands around a scale model of Willard, drawing you in as a viewer, making you more closely involved with the place - as if you were walking around there yourself.
Is there room in our society for people who deviate from the norm?
What does it mean to take care of each other in these ever-changing times?
The video elements in Finding Willard are all English spoken with subtitles. Tom tells his story in Dutch. If you have basic understanding in Dutch this performance can be well understood.
Winter 2018. On a trip to the US, theater maker Tom Struyf arrives, by luck or coincidence, in a small town near the Canadian border. Willard is found on the banks of an outstretched lake, in the shadows of the ruins of a former psychiatric hospital. Fascinated by the landscape, the stories of the people who live there and a tiny church community, Tom discovers a link with his own country (Belgium) and its well-known psychiatric hospital in the city of Geel. An accidental encounter with a special place turns into a compelling trip in which Tom finds his personal life suddenly entangled with the town and the people of Willard.
Between 1869 and 1996, thousands of clients were admitted to the psychiatric hospital in Willard. The entire region was economically dependent on the institution. In Finding Willard, Tom Struyf takes you back to the Willard of the past and that of today - where the last standing residents try to take care of each other. Immerse yourself in the moving story of Peggy, Alta, Lesley, and Tom, in his search for the ideal community to build a life together.
Finding Willard is a travel story, a personal quest dealing with decay and reconstruction, care and community.
Finding Willard is a transmedia, filmic theater piece, much like Tom's earlier pieces Act to Forget and The Tatiana Aarons Experience. In his earlier work, Tom also connected his fascination for a specific place and a few people to events and occurrences in his personal life, constructing a new story.
A Masterpiece
In the performance A Masterpiece, Dennis Vanderbroeck tries to make a masterpiece. Based on performances by his heroes, ranging from Yves Klein and Bruce Nauman to Tina Turner, Dennis attempts to find his genius through theirs. The voice of his father, 61 years and with Alzheimer's disease, is his instruction manual. His father's process of progressive forgetfulness is like a race against the clock. A race to not being forgotten as a person.
Dennis and his father narrate the instructions and re-enactments of his heroes. A father who is trying to help his son by making his own masterpiece. A dialogue about art, memories and their disappearance. 'A Masterpiece' is an exercise in letting go, growing up an getting older. A performance that teaches us how art can save our life and vice versa.
With his Studio, Dennis Vanderbroeck (1990) works on an international scale on spatial projects in various disciplines and contexts. A physical encounter in a physically designed space always forms the core of his work. He studied the Performance degree programme in Maastricht but for a long time, he had no desire to stand on the stage himself. Until now.
Artistic leader Piet Menu about this performance
'How personal can art be?'
Credits
Concept: Dennis Vanderbroeck
Performance: Dennis Vanderbroeck & Marco Vanderbroeck
Co-creation: Suze Milius
Set: Studio Dennis Vanderbroeck
Lighting: Varja Klosse
Sound: Roman Hiele
Wardrobe: Rebekka Wormann
Shut Up and Play with Me
Playing, everyone can do it, but few people actually do. Do we still recognize the potential for play? Is it a proof of maturity to suppress our need to play or because there is not a penny to be made from it? What if we take off the brakes and plunge into selfless play?
Two players enter the floor: Joep van der Geest and Louis van der Waal. They survey the playing field and get ready for the game. Passionately, they plunge into one game after another. They challenge each other and are competitive as hell. There will be laughing, dying and crying. The logic of the game is only intuitively imitable and a riddle you want to solve as an audience.
"We don't stop playing because we get old, we get old because we stop playing." - George Bernard Shaw.
Shut Up and Play with Me is an ode to the playing man, for anyone who has ever played, now or long ago. Inspired by Homo Ludens by cultural historian Johan Huizinga.