Another recommendation of Arjan Braaksma was to meet Rotterdam based Powerboat, a creative endeavor that combines social concerns with theater. Arjan knew Bas Kortmann from Design Academy in Eindhoven, the Dutch design school, currently the epicenter for social design. Much of Dutch Design Week is centered on DAE and the host city of Eindhoven.
Visiting Powerboat was part of a sunny trip to Rotterdam. Their studio space is along a canal with some beautiful older boats, where I soaked in some vitamin D as I had arrived early for our appointment.
Fokka and Bas were welcoming and told me about their theater group and its mission over tea in a room full of books showing their inspirations. Glancing over the books I could see that many of them intersect with my Mapping Meaning work, and examine the intersection of social justice and space, and how to be a better citizen of the planet. Their reading list and influences range from Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, and books by Mary Jane Jacobs. They are two favorites of mine also and hint at PowerBoat’s mission to engage with the public in the public sphere.
From Powerboat’s website (slightly edited in an attempt to be more brief, please go to website for full statement):
Powerboat was founded by theater maker and actress Fokka Deelen and designer Bas Kortmann. …As a theater maker, Fokka wanted to make people think and get them moving. But how can that ever work if you put your audience in a dark room and you yourself proclaim your story from a high stage, into the dark. How can you change people's minds? Fokka did not believe in this and looked for dialogue, interaction, participation. She met Bas in 1998…He too was engaged in interaction, not in theater but through design. How can spaces and objects be used to get to know each other better? They decided to work together and founded theater group Powerboat in 2001. Powerboat has since grown from a theater group, initiator and artistic producer to an expert and advisor in the field of interactive processes and community building. All activities and expertise come from the same source: stimulating and inspiring interaction.
As it says above, Fokka found the one-way relationship theater in traditional theater limiting. She wanted to learn the stories of others and explore the “power of imagination”. Bas was interested in challenging traditional Bauhaus methods, and to integrate concepts. He wanted to challenge modernism and what it brought to us. (Modernism is colonialism’s child, and there is importance in working to address what we inherit). Bauhaus theories (which I have a love-meh relationship with) are just starting to loosen their grip on arts foundation programs, but have been an integral part of it for years. It was largely part of my own art education. While I do love parts of it, it is certainly limiting in today’s context. It came from a specific time and place, and while it easy to argue it transcends that, it is equally easy to argue new methodologies are worth undertaking.
Bas and Fokke say much of what they value came despite their education.
They live in Rotterdam, a city that includes roughly 50% recent immigrants (newcomers), and more of a working-class city than Amsterdam. As we saw with Hanna Piksen education coordinator at Rotterdam’s Het Nieuwe Instituut, old methods are often Eurocentric, and based on the idea of an authority, one authority. It is a dynamic that does not encourage conversation and int
eraction with a diverse community (I dare to say it works in very few settings). Powerboat is interested in collaborating with their neighbors, and exploring a neighborhoods identity, values, and ideas. This means their projects are most often in the neighborhoods and parks, in the public sphere.
An important idea to Powerboat, is the idea of leading from behind. It is related to Cecelia Raspanti’s (TextileLab) desire to set up a learning situation and then to get out of the way. It is about letting go of authority and the idea of a controlled outcome. It allows them to be more vulnerable, and they have learned to see the importance in even a “failed” collaboration. Bas and Fokka value being the observers of what is around them. The actors become the audience, the roles reversed, or maybe more accurately, eliminated. They see their collaborators as producers as well as actors. This is part of Fokka’s initial vision.
An example of a project is their current Powerlab Circulair:
On September 23, we started the first Powerlab Circular* series. The central question for this first edition was: what can we grow in Rotterdam North? At Stadscamping Rotterdam we presented a special soup lab lunch where the participants both made a soup for another participant and were given a soup. Afterwards, all participants shared their ideas on chalkboard tables and offered suggestions on what could be grown where. This immediately sparked a conversation about circles and chains.
An important element of their practice is finding ways to get an audience to join in, to act in a role that challenges the traditional passive stance of the viewer. My experience in getting people to interact with art is if you want them to, they won’t, if you don’t want them to, they often will.
Powerboat employs what they call “universal triggers” such as food, lights, soccer, and even walking or marching to break down the wall between actor and audience. In the Powerlab Circular event, they involved soup projects, a method they have used before. Two people are paired up and, with raw supplies provided, make soup for each other. You produce for a person, they produce for you; it is an intimate act of care. It begins a dialogue of a shared experience, and negotiation. Food has strong ties to culture and family as well and is an easy way to transcend politics and divides. It instigates a conversation and an action. They also see the soup making as a way of equalizing everyone with the goal that all roles are meaningful. It is an elegant and powerful action.
We then talked about the themes for their performances, how they discover them, and how they work to discover “the right question”. Water has been a big theme (how can it not in the Netherlands?). They had taught a class in spatial design at Willem DeKoonig Academy in Rotterdam. In the assignment, students needed to do some measuring. Bas and Fokka started with the question “how do we measure?” They questioned the basic question! While there is a rote answer to that, they pushed the students question the standards, and to measure in new ways. In short, it set up the students to discover and to approach a known task in a new way.
In their class, and in their theater practice, they say it’s not about getting right answer and a clear ending point but finding the question that will lead to new ideas, paths, inquiries. It’s about moving forward with the conversation or exploration. As with Twente’s DesignLab and many others, they find that these collaborations make the best questions and ultimately, outcomes.
When I asked Powerboat about challenges in their practice, Fokka mentioned the difficulties of working with umbrella organizations who often want quantifiable results before they fund a project. One colleague asked them if they worried about “lowering standards” by relinquishing control. This need for answers before you even begin reveals the need for a correct answer, for a known, for coming from a position of authority. It also shows idea that notion of the “proper” aesthetics being more important to some, than creating an inclusive atmosphere that might look unfamiliar. Accessibility is important to Powerboat, and Bas sees inclusion as a way to challenge the exclusivity of art that ties into modernity. Exclusion inhibits the development of new ideas and collaborations. Knowing the endpoint would exclude going into unchartered waters, which is where the discovery happens.
*“Circular” refers to the economic idea that you use everything in an economy in a circular fashion vs. a linear fashion. Quick wiki definitions is: "a model of production and consumption, which involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing and recycling existing materials and products as long as possible". It is a discussion and action very much underway in the Netherlands and starting to be talked about in the US more.
Spatial thinkers, about cities and relationships more than theater tradition
How does theater fit in the city? Neighborhood? Community?
Questions this leaves me with:
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