A dose of hope in your emergency kit.
What happens when we don’t clean up or hide away ‘madness,’ but instead try to understand it?
This year, a brand-new performance will once again premiere at our festival, born out of De Verwonderkamer – the annual residency by Flemish-Dutch house for culture and debate deBuren and Explore the North, where Flemish and Northern Dutch makers get to know each other and create new work together.
This year, participants will use the book De laatste dagen van de dorpsgek (The Last Days of the Village Fool) by Anne Goaitske Breteler as a starting point. The village fool as outsider, mirror, barometer; someone who operates at – or beyond – the edges of what’s considered ‘normal.’ Is there something hopeful to be found in the irrational? From September 15 to 19, 2025, new makers from Flanders and the Northern Netherlands will explore these questions in Leeuwarden. The fruits of this collaboration will, as is tradition, be presented for the first time at our festival.
That this process leads to something special was proven last year by De herontdekking van Ella Wassenaer (The Rediscovery of Ella Wassenaar) by Mona Thijs, Zindzi Tillot Owusu, Charlotte Westra, and Jaimy Hindriks – a performance that traveled from De Verwonderkamer to Antwerp and will appear this summer at Oerol. The collective Drie Dagen Fris also emerged from a fruitful residency in Leeuwarden.
Language: Dutch
Francesca Birlogeanu (2002) is studying medicine and writes prose and poetry. In 2022, they participated in the CBK Poetry Slam, and in the summer of 2023, they joined DeBuren’s Writing Residency in Paris. Their poetry has been published in Kluger Hans, Deus ex Machina, Het Liegend Konijn, and on websites such as DIG and Hard//Hoofd, as well as performed at events like Dans Dichter Dans, Nijmeegse Poëzienacht, the Antwerp Queer Arts Festival, and TILT Festival. In their work, they enjoy exploring corporeality in all its forms and probing the shifting boundaries between sexuality, spirituality, the cognitive, and the sensorial. Francesca lives in Leuven, surrounded by books, half-finished artworks, and plant children.
Ellis Meeusen studied medicine for four years before enrolling in drama school. She is an actor, theatre maker, teacher, and writer. As a writer, she has published prose in Das Magazin, poetry in the climate-themed anthology Zwemlessen voor later, and theatre texts with De Nieuwe Toneelbibliotheek. She attended writing residencies in Paris with deBuren, and travelled by train through Europe for Passa Porta and Europalia. In recent seasons, she toured across Flanders with her own performances Faren, Eerst, and Vitrine, as well as the production (v) by De Nwe Tijd. With that same company, she also contributes monthly to the Monday Evenings, alongside Suzanne Grotenhuis and Freek Vielen. In the upcoming season, she will create her first performance for young audiences: confetti, in collaboration with Aline Nuyens and Sander Salden.
Hannes Schievink is a Frisian illustrator and artist who explores and communicates the theatrical, the physical, and the mystical through drawings, text, installations, and performances. Always in search of the bombastic and the true.
Sybren van der Velde (The Hague, 2001) is a British-Dutch artist who grew up in De Rottefalle, a small village in Fryslân. In 2024, he graduated as a performer from the Maastricht Academy of Dramatic Arts. The majority of his work stems from hypernostalgia, a concept rooted in a deep sentimental longing for a space, place, or moment—whether in the past or the future. He tends to amplify or even fetishize these feelings in both the everyday and his artistic practice. In doing so, he constantly questions whether such emotions are strictly personal, how flexible they are, and whether it is possible to long for a space, place, or time one has not personally experienced. Hypernostalgia neither denies nor fully accepts the largely linguistic limitations tied to nostalgia, but instead plays with a broader spectrum of emotions. Sybren seeks to channel these feelings into landscapes—to cushion the homesick and the ones lost in time.
