After dinner it starts in Heeze: everywhere the sound of grinders and sawing machines sounds. Hundreds of people are building the Brabantsedag night after night, the theater parade that travel through the village for the 66th time on Sunday. There is at least one person in Heeze who was there all those times: 85-year-old Gonnie van den Hurk. What she mainly remembers of that first time in 1958 is that the parade was rather simple and that the beer flowed richly during the party afterwards.
“But it was already a lot, because there was not much to do at the time,” she says. And that is precisely why they also made that plan for the first Brabant Day in 1957. A few men at the bar in the Zwaan found that there was too little entertainment in Heeze. A year later the first procession traveled through the streets. Karren, often pulled by horses, with peasant life portrayed: people looked out of their eyes.
Gonnie van den Hurk comes from Geldrop, but she was dating a farmer’s son from Heeze with whom she later married. That is why she stood by the side there. And the Brabant Day would never let her go afterwards. In the 70s she also became a fanatic builder, with the club ‘Het Volkske’. “I said then: I don’t have to think that I’m on the side and I don’t like it, I really liked it. Now it’s the other way around, now I like to look in the stands.”
But also in the weeks prior to the last Sunday of August – on which the Brabant Day is kept traditionally – she can be found regularly in the village. “Because of course I will look at my grandchildren who are building,” she says. And then she not only encounters builders, but also acting talent.
Children rehearsing
At Bouwgroep Hopeless, last year winner, for example, a director with a handful of children is rehearsing: “It’s cold and you are scared.” The children, some of whom in a football kit – they are just coming from the football club – shaking and trying to look around anxiously. “That’s so nice,” says Gonnie. “Those children also learn something from Brabant history in this way.”
This year the theme of the Brabant Day ‘Carnival was unmasked’. The construction groups fill in that theme themselves. Bouwgroep Hopelessly chose to portray Roosendaal in 1941, where the carnival was forbidden. “But a Brabander would not be a Brabander if he didn’t find anything,” says Rens van Breugel of Hopeless.
Gonnie is experiencing her 66th Brabant Day this year and she is looking forward to it again. Nobody in the 1950s could predict that the Brabant Day would grow into the crowd puller it is today. Forty thousand people come to watch every year. The simple parade of that time is now a theater parade in which the necessary technological highlights can be seen. “It is still getting better every year,” says Gonnie. And she can know.
Brabantsedag at Omroep Brabant
The Brabantsedag in Heeze can be followed live on the various channels of Omroep Brabant: TV, website, app and via Facebook on Sunday afternoon 31 August. A summary can be seen in the evening.