This week the MC Theater is still open for the Afrovibes festival, after which it will close its doors. This was the headline in the Volkskrant last Friday: 'Death blow for black theater'. The Amsterdam Collective of Urban Performing Arts organization RIGHTABOUTNOWINC took offense to this article and wrote the following response.
Deathblow. If there was ever a 'deathblow for black theatre', it happened 2 years ago with the introduction of a new arts plan in which diversity disappeared from the subsidy policy. It would be outdated and unnecessary. In large cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam, more than half of the population has non-Western roots. There is almost no trace of this in the subsidised performing arts - not in the people, not in the subjects, not in the repertoire. It is not only 'they don't participate' but also 'we are not going to talk about it'.
With the relaunch of the production house as a stage, an attempt was made to maintain a place for Amsterdam where diversity was self-evident, where the sources were not only Western European, where new voices could develop and present themselves. We knew that there was no room or support for this in the cultural policy at that time. We did not want to passively watch as what so many people had worked so hard for was dismantled. That is why we opted for entrepreneurship and in 2012 MC opted as a stage for the exit scheme of the municipality of Amsterdam. The MC stage was not only for theatre, it was also there for music, it was there for club culture, it was there for dance, it was there for film. That was and is our vision. MC sold off the production, the theatre making, in 2013. There was no more money for that in the new form. The new independent foundation RIGHTABOUTNOW INC. took over that torch and started developing and releasing national and international theatre projects. 'The death blow' therefore hits the stage MC on the Westergas terrain, not the theater producer-ship, and certainly not the 'black theater'. The performance The Revivalists by RIGHTABOUTNOW INC. in collaboration with Afrovibes will have its premiere tonight, yesterday Oogst by Alida Dors' Backbone premiered, this week Raymi Sambo's VIG opened with Aan Niets Overleden, next week Ella by Jörgen Tjon a Fong's Urban Myth will go on tour. All theater by black makers. So very much alive.
That Annette Embrechts of the Volkskrant chooses such a headline is very telling. That there is a photo of Maarten van Hinte with the caption 'actor and writer' also: Maarten van Hinte is a director, and has not acted in 15 years, and is co-founder of MC but has not been employed by the stage since 2013. And so the article was full of mistakes, assumptions, anonymous statements and incorrect quotes. If Annette Embrechts had done her homework for even a moment, she would have known that. If she had been to one of the MC's own productions even once in the past 6 years, she would have known. But no. She comes to sniff around the last performance in MC Theater as a disaster tourist in order to be able to write about the death blow for the black theater.
If there is a death blow, it is this: the consistent segregation, trivialization and ignoring of makers and work because it is supposedly black or multicultural. The article suggests that MC is a product of Rick van der Ploeg's cultural policy: it is not. MC stems from a rich history of theater makers, musicians, artists and creatives, most of whom do not appear in history books or overviews of Dutch theater. MC is the product of 40 years of pioneering work that once started with people like Rufus Collins, Felix de Rooy, Henk Tjon, Norman Van Geerke de Palm, I can keep naming names. This is why we fought to keep the stage open, a stage that is completely different in content than other theater stages in the city, with theater and music and street culture. From our own sources and our own metropolitan frame of reference.
And now Annette Embrechts declares 'black theatre' dead. How does she come to that conclusion? This is about Dutch theatre that is made from and about Dutch reality, a reality that has long since ceased to be 'white'. Sooner or later we will all have to say goodbye to 'white theatre'. I wonder who will then deliver 'the death blow'.
The MC stage was a nursery for the culture and voices of the metropolitan Netherlands, black and white, not only in theatre and dance, but also in music and club culture. A place with a long tradition and a different perspective where all sources, including black sources, were taken seriously. The need for such a nursery has not disappeared with the commercial bankruptcy of that stage. On the contrary. Unfortunately, the sloppy story of Annette Embrechts only underlines this. But perhaps the clearest plea is simply a list of names who have found a stage in MC in the past few years and a place to develop into the vanguard of the new Netherlands. In the meantime, we continue. Rufus Collins already said it at the time: “at the end of the day, it's about the work, nothing but the work'.
Maarten van Hinte & Marjorie Boston
RIGHTABOUTNOWINC. and co-founders of the production company MC
For tickets and information: http://afrovibes.nl/2014/en/festival/agenda