When Theater Festival Boulevard comes to the city center of Bossche, the Bossche Rosalie Fleuren (29) will also return to the city from her current residence in Uithoorn. When she was little, her mother took her every year. Now she goes with some friends and her father. “The festival is a kind of candy stall where you can enjoy different performances,” says de Bossche.
From Thursday 4 to Sunday 14 August, Den Bosch will be dominated by theatre, dance, music and art forms that do not fit into a box. De Bossche Rosalie looks forward to this all year round. “I grew up in Rosmalen, but now I live in the north of the Netherlands. I come back to Den Bosch especially for Boulevard. That feels like coming home.”
Rosalie’s mother had taken her to the festival from the age of eight. “Every year we went at least one day. Then we went to all the tents where you could see small, funny performances. We always had a very nice mother-daughter moment,” she says.
“Some years we were on holiday during the festival. It couldn’t be any other way then, but I still remember that I was always so disappointed.”
“My mother used to take me with her. But now I’m taking my father with me.”
Today, Rosalie doesn’t go to Boulevard with her mother very often. But not going is not an option for the Bossche. “If you want to enjoy theatre, you can often do that once a day, because performances in a theater are always in the evening. Here you can enjoy all kinds of theater performances all day long,” she explains. “My mother used to take me along. But now I’m taking my father with me.”
One of the performances Rosalie goes to with her father is that of acrobat and choreographer Piet van Dycke. “I once saw a performance by him about ALS. There is so much feeling in his pieces. The actors tell a story in few words. I like that. When I saw that he was also on Boulevard, I immediately knew: I want to see that.”
Rosalie enjoys such mime performances the most. A theater form in which actors only portray a story with body language, gestures and facial expressions. “Such a performance does tell a story, but because there is little spoken, you can interpret what you hear and see. I think that’s fantastic.”
“The festival feels like a little holiday to me.”
Rosalie’s love for theater was born at the festival. That is why, when she was 22, she applied for the theater sciences course in Amsterdam. There they asked if she had a link with the theater world. “At first I thought: shit, I don’t have that. But then I remembered that I would of course go to Theater Festival Boulevard every year.”
She has now graduated for a few years and works as a reviewer and business manager at a studio in Amsterdam. For her work she once wrote a review about a performance on Boulevard, but that is not in it this year.
“The festival feels like a little vacation and I don’t want to work. I much prefer to go as a visitor, so that I can enjoy it without necessarily having to think about it,” says Rosalie. “And afterwards I want to be able to make it nice and late and enjoy a beer with my father.”
