By Smaranda Mihăilă
Looking out of the window on this very rainy July day, it seemed the proper moment to take our readers back to sunnier SPRING days. The end of May in Utrecht was shaken by 10 days of theatre, dance, music, innovative installations, and creative workshops. For 10 days, the city came to life in SPRING. For 10 days Utrecht was a (literal) stage for makers to put out into the city the horrifying realities of war, the inequalities embedded in politics, transdisciplinary art, tributes to the audience, and the intertwined nature of different places, people, and cultures.
Everywhere I looked around the venues of the festival, I felt it impossible to get lost in the pleasure of entertainment and momentary bliss. As I got the chance to later find out during my talk with Grzegorz Reske, the artistic director of SPRING, the aim of the long-lived Utrecht festival is not only to provide a refugee of entertainment for its spectators but to make them aware of jolting contemporary social and political issues shattering the world around us.
There is one piece that, in the current international context of migration, displacement, and war, struck me as not only a beautifully creative audiovisual piece of art, but also as an intertwined journey of common histories, displacement, Eastern European trauma, and Sephardic diasporas, all united in the space of here and now, in the presence of the audience, the soundscape, and the physicality of the book. This is Ant Hampton’s Borderline Visible, a counter map reconstructing a long journey from Lausanne to Izmir with the help of only a book, the guiding incorporeal voice of the maker, and the agency of the audience. Hampton’s collective experience is a constructed and guided performance made up of puzzle pieces that have been gathered by the travelers along their journey and are now to be put together into a coherent whole by the audience.
Alongside other performances showcased during the festival, like Ontroerend Goed’s Thanks for Being Here, Borderline Visible showcases the growing focus on the essential nature of audiences as co-makers of performances and not only as passive observers. On top of that SPRING forces its audiences to look at the current social issues the installations and performances stage from a different position and shed light on their complexity that is often not covered by the mainstream mass media.
Finally, I can just hope that after 12 years of existence and bringing art, inclusivity, and awareness to the city of Utrecht, SPRING will continue to be more and more innovative and daring each year, and, most importantly, will continue to speak up for the ones whose voices are oppressed for years to come.
I invite you to watch the full interview with Grzegorz Reske, artistic director of SPRING:
Look at some short clips and follow us on instagram here!
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