Experience the magic of the brand-new theater season

Full of enthusiasm, De Lieve Vrouw and Flint are throwing open their doors again. The new theater season is here! We spoke with Ingrid Melman (programmer at De Lieve Vrouw) and Maaike Boersma (of the Programming Department at Flint) about emerging names, raunchy stories and the themes that inspire today's theater makers.

Which performance are you most looking forward to?

INGRID: "To that of the Amersfoort actress and theater maker Jip Smit. With her performance Motherland ¹, she has created a whole new genre . It is a fantasy story full of humor, but at the same time it chafes at topicality with themes such as the male-female relationship and gender. And Jip plays insanely well! For her role in Motherland she was nominated for the Theo d'Or, an important theater award."

MAAIKE: "I think circus is an incredibly fun genre, especially in theater. It's really magical! Things happen that make you think: how is this possible? Everything comes together: dance, music and the wonder of what acrobats can do with their bodies. At Flint you see family shows that are still fun when you are 99 years old, but we also have circus theater especially for babies. Be Kind ² by Emilie Weisse is suitable for little ones as young as six months old. I saw that one myself with my child and it was super fun!"

^{Ingrid Melman (left) and Maaike Boersma (right) @ De Lieve Vrouw}

At which shows are ticket sales running fast?

MAAIKE: "Cabaret often runs itself well. Certainly the big names like Youp van 't Hek, Arjen Lubach and Claudia de Breij sell themselves out. We do try to combine that with up-and-coming names. Thjum Arts, an Amersfoort cabaret artist, played his premiere of Timeless Pleasure ³ with us last year. This year he is coming to play the same show again, but as the conclusion of his tour. We like to give Amersfoort creators a place too."

INGRID: "If you look at the offerings at De Lieve Vrouw, you see a lot of new creators in the fields of dance, drama, musical theater and more. A lot of performances are really rock solid, but still quite unknown. It's a challenge then to get the theaters full, but it's always worth being a pioneer!"

What themes can we see reflected in huIdIng theater offerings?

INGRID: "For a few years now, we have been working from three core themes, climate change; diversity and inclusion; and democracy, freedom and human rights. A quarter of our program is related to one of these themes. One example is the dance performance This is not a dance ^{4 by} Nastaran Razawi Khorasani. Nastaran is in contact with choreographers and dancers in Iran, where dance is banned. Her performance is an ode to the body that wants to move."

MAAIKE: "At Flint we pay attention to the Remembrance Year Slavery Past, for example with the performance De plantage van onze voorouders ⁵. In the podcast of the same name, Maartje Duin goes in search of the past of her family who had a share in a Surinamese plantation. During this search, she comes into contact with a descendant of enslaved people who worked on this plantation. About this shared past, the theater company Orkater is now creating a musical theater performance."