I am in Het
Hoge Heem, a house for the elderly in Uithoorn. It’s a semi state run place,
one of 27 in the region. An older lady has just gone behind a sheet rigged up
on some pole to make a shadow puppet theatre screen. She is holding an elephant
shadow puppet, which presumably she made in one of the two earlier workshops
held here. She is accompanied by a primary age child from a local school who
also has an elephant. It’s national puppetry day here in the Netherlands. And
also Volunteers Day. There were some folk back at base, where Franz – puppeteer
in chief - lives and where we had lunch,
from the pharmaceutical company Bayer, who were putting in their four hours of
voluntary service a year in return for a certificate and a 20% off voucher at
some department store or another. Some of the puppets they helped with, based,
I think, on designs from some of the older people, are being used in this workshop
where the young and the old are practising using the puppets behind a large
screen for the first time.
Joanne Oussoren,
from Droomtheater reads The Carnival of Animals while Saint Saens plays. A
local politician is also holding an elephant but hasn’t had a go yet. She may
have lost her post in the regional(?) government on Wednesday but deals are
being made as we speak and she may be welcomed back in. The state is in retreat
she tells me. It’s the same in the U.K. I tell her. Probably worse. (Definitely
worse). And there doesn’t seem to be much heard in the way of protest. The same
here, she says; it’s strange. Where’s the revolution? Hope she gets back in.
The house
where Franz, who is running this project, Carnaval der Dieren, lives is part of a
Central Housing project; one of around one hundred in the country. Franz moved
here 24 years ago, about a year after it was opened. He got lucky. First in a
one bed apartment and then moving to a two bed apartment. There are fifteen in
all; of various sizes. And there is – most importantly – a large communal room.
When he was first here people ate together twice a week; now it’s once a month.
There’s a rota for looking after the chickens, for clearing up the communal
room; which is used mainly now for the birthday parties of those that live here,
full of relatives rather than housemates (or whatever the collective term for
such a thing is). If you ever earn over thirty three thousand euros you have to
leave. Many haven’t. When a space becomes free they have a meal and invite people
to be communal and sociable and make their case. Some struggle.
Het Hoge Heem
has a waiting list. The communal room is large and airy and light and Eric, the
activities organiser, is overseeing today’s activity. There are around 130
rooms here. But many of the activities are not well attended. Today there are
really only a handful of older people joining in, more women than men, (one
looks frighteningly like Ann Widdecombe; another has wonderful shoes). By the
time people arrive here, Eric tells me, they have spent five or six years
retreating into themselves, learning isolation and loneliness; like many
(most?) older people do.
Next Friday
there will be one more workshop and then, on the Sunday a performance complete
with a six piece brass band. The ‘political woman’ as she’s called, will help
to rewrite the story to make it more topical. There is talk about the swans of
Uithoorn but nobody is quite sure what to do with the elephants. This project
has been crowd funded.
Twenty years
ago, when Joanne set up Droomtheater, she was writing plays about Freudian
cases; now she’s interested in the notion of the social dream. She works in the
Feyenoord area of Rotterdam, a very multicultural area (unlike here). She has
discovered that puppetry is a readily accepted artistic form that has many
connections with other cultures. Droomtheater have taken work to schools and
mosques. They blend live music, story-telling and puppetry. When she went to
Iran she couldn’t believe how many puppet companies there were.
And, as she
explains, she’s getting older and so is thinking about the kind of community
that she wants to live in. A shared space; like the project that Franz is in,
this ‘special place’; rather than being alone. It is lovely. There’s a river
outside. The rain has stopped and the sun is coming out.
Andy
