Oerol Festival 2025
Claudia Woolgar in the Netherlands
27 June 2025
The island that keeps you guessing
Surprises abound at this ten-day multi arts festival. Named after the local practice of putting livestock out to graze in the spring, Oerol means ‘everywhere’ in the local dialect of Terschelling, an island off the north coast of The Netherlands. And yes, the festival’s events take place everywhere – on the beaches, in the dunes, forests, streets, farmyard barns, churches and maritime warehouses of this small island.
Festival director Mikey Martins.
Photo credit: Nichon Glerum.
Founded in 1981 by Joop Mulder, the then owner of a cafe on the island, the festival has grown and grown and now attracts around 45,000 people – quite an invasion for an island that is 674 square kilometers.
Oerol declares itself to be “more than just a festival; it is a breeding ground for site-specific theatre, with the nature and culture of Terschelling as its main protagonist.” In my 30-plus years of seeing drama, I have moved from marveling at building-based theatre to fully embracing location and site-specific work as a way to reach broader audiences and create work that resonates in its specific context. So, I stepped off the ferry and onto my (non-electric!) bicycle – the best way to get from show to show – with immense anticipation.
In four days I saw 14 shows, attended a conference on land art and a visual art and meal installation, and cycled more than 130 kms. I had a wonderful time, but I also left wondering if Oerol 2025 had lived up to its own founding aims.
My first stop was SONGOFSONGS from Boogaerdt/VanderSchoot. Billed as an “ecological orgy” and staged in a large barn on a farm, I saw it as a fitting start to my Oerol adventure …
Boogaerdt van der Schoot, one of the artist-duo Suzan Boogaerdt and Bianca van der Schoot, collaborated with composer, spoken word artist and choreographer OTION and was inspired by the biblical Song of Songs. What I witnessed was a stream of images, some paint-like pixels and computer-generated visuals, with, at other moments, screens opening up to reveal real people, distorted shapes, creatures and undefinable incarnations.
It was at times freaky, at times hypnotic. It was Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” mixed with Play-Doh, slinky metal spring toys , Van Gogh and Dali. Projected text spoke of access to walled gardens, spoken text of having “sex before I was born and had you”. Was it speaking of love? A union with nature? Corporeal metamorphosis? I felt I was watching organic matter in a heightened state of (some sort of) arousal. “I am the coming together and the falling-apart”. I left bemused – as was the audience around me, given what I heard in conversations on the way out. And I felt that I had been shut out. The barn not dark enough to make it truly hypnotic. The narrative not clear enough, the poetry lost, the images too often unfathomable. As I cycled back to my hotel, I delighted in the sun setting over the fields, enjoying my own ecological union with the island, free from the pixels and blobs in the barn.
Song of Songs.
Photo credit: Willem Popelier.
Next stop was the beach and Tall Tales’ show, Square Two. Essentially a juggling promenade, it started with one ball and ended with, I think, eight, spiraling in complexity. It spoke of codes, patterns and who decides them. That to know the rules means knowing how to break them. Of how we are just numbers – our date of birth, our social security number, our house or flat number. Interesting, with some impressive juggling, but I could not fit the show to the beach route or hotel underpasses where it was staged. The surroundings made the juggling more interesting (a questionable plus), but there was no link between the two and I left, slightly irritated, to see Frames.
Frames performed in a forest is a physical project by Alexander Vantournhout and three fellow performers, Chia-Hung Chung, Axel Guérin, Emmi Väisänen. It also spoke of patterns and framed the performers in the opening of a tent roof and in a square truss structure. The control of the four performers was remarkable and in the third and final section I could hardly watch as they stood on a raised pedestal with barely enough space for two feet, counter-balancing each other at ever more alarming angles. Another work impressive in its execution. And another work not linked to its location.
Frames.
Photographer not known. Attribution pending.
I moved on, hoping to find some of the spirit of Oerol’s site-specific aims in Dans op de Vulkaan in the Forest Theatre. With musical quartet Matangi, Sven Ratzke (a Rod Stewart look alike in high heels) sang to the music of Kurt Weill, taking us to the opening night of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. In his hilarious ad hoc comments about the audience looking like hikers and marveling at our sitting on the roots and sand of the forest floor, Ratzke was clearly an Oerol novice … and thoroughly enjoying himself. But after he spoke of rehearsals in a four-walled room, and the full scale show he is developing for “comfortable seats” in Dutch theatres this autumn (for which this was a teaser), I brushed the sand off my trousers, extracted a few embedded pine needles from my bottom and escaped on my bicycle.
Julie and Cecilie Solberg in Waterlogged
Photo credit: Nichon Glerum.
I was determined to remain optimistic so at ten o’clock I sat, covered in mosquito repellent, on the sandy bank of a lake as the sun set. Norwegian twin sisters, Julie and Cecilie Solberg, had created Waterlogged as a show for in the water – indeed some members of the audience even received waders to watch from within the lake itself. This had to be Oerol at its best! Water, the sounds and movements of this almost mystical compound, the source of life itself. It had promise … As the sisters waded out, moving through the water, away from the bank, the resistance of the water was clear. And as they lay down on their backs, the water seemed almost to embrace them for … 10, 15 minutes? Nothing happened. Then, in turn, the sisters soundlessly disappeared under the water. It was a silent, dramatic moment but when they re-emerged, just their heads above the surface, gazing away from us, the show went into repeat.
Repeat. No text. Repeat. Just, at a certain moment, a few logs pushed out from the rushes, lit from beneath. So, we had water and we had logs. And the audience members in the waders were truly waterlogged. But it struck me not as calming or enlightening but as sinister, full of futility, trapped in a circularity of nothingness. It was indulgent. It was interminable. Many audience members left, except for those poor people in the lake who were unable to escape the slow, repetitive non-action of the piece. As a reviewer you cannot leave a show, so I stayed and longed for the sisters to wade out of the lake and away. And so to set me free. Thankfully even interminable shows come to an end, and I cycled through the dark night and the pitch-black forests hoping, hoping, tomorrow would be a better day.
Joop Mulder said, “If your dreams don’t scare you, they’re not big enough.” The next day, on a football field by the main city, West Terschelling, I saw the dangers of dreams being too big with Belofte maakt schuld (Promise causes debt). Theatre-maker Greg Nottrot and writer/performer Martin Rombouts, winner of the Dutch TV quiz De Slimste Mens (The Smartest Person), explored the unexpected consequences of asking the public (at Oerol in 2023) for money. Nottrot wanted €250.000 from people’s “surplus capital”, seeking venture capitalists willing to invest in his ideas. He promised to return to Oerol with a huge floating dome, in which, together with thinkers and artists, he would reinvent capitalism; a new morality in exchange for our financial input. He promised that the world would never be the same again. He promised a revolution.
He did not deliver on his promise. He did not deliver on his dreams. He “only” raised €123.500 and the show was his public apology.
It was very funny. As were Rombouts’ musings on the fame he got from winning the quiz show, the chances offered to him of great fortune by participating in the Dutch reality TV programme, Expedition Robinson, an opportunity that he declined. Nottrot spoke about his desire to fulfil his promises and how the more money he raised, the more he believed in his own dream.
In the audience were people who had given him money – as had Rombouts himself. But Nottrot’s humility was so total, his apology so sincere and fierce, that there was no audience backlash. Instead, he told them what he had done with their money – financing two other shows at Oerol exploring the future of money, building the (non-floating) dome in which he performed, and, as part of the performance, presenting The Gift Shop, a museum shop where art was for sale to help pay off someone else’s debts. It was a delightful and hilarious performance. Site-specific in a fresh way as he returned to Oerol to explain himself to the audience he had “duped” with his dream: “I want to say one word. Sorry!”
NAU, 2e jaring
Photo credit: Nichon Glerum.
Touched and tickled by the show, I cycled through the nearby forest into a totally different scene – a bus shelter in Hoogvliet, a tough Rotterdam district, displaced to a clearing in the forest. Runner, by theatre company Orkater/De Nieuwkomers (a wonderful initiative which supports artists to realize their artistic vision and create their own show) is about sexual violence from the unusual perspective of the perpetrator. Questioning whether you can escape your past, Patrick Ribeiro’s moving performance is a love story gone wrong.
Using the setting of the high-rise blocks of Hoogvliet, Runner tells the story of a lost young man, out on the streets with a new “family” around him who fight for each other. But when love strikes, the pressure of the street family’s code wins. The girl is dismissed as “just a girl” and the peer pressure of the group demands his loyalty to them – and he finds himself participating in a violent sexual attack against the girl he loves. What struck me forcibly as I walked away, past a metal shipping container with Hoogvliet’s sign on it, was the painful juxtaposition of the beauty of the forested surroundings and the tough, often brutal landscape of our big cities. Of course, rape is not confined to urban settings, but the forest was a silent witness to a city crime, the trees tall and noble in contrast to tower block dehumanization. Runner was not at one with its surroundings, but it was made more poignant by its woodland setting.
My final show of the day was Drifting by Touki Delphine. As I waited by a lake to be led into the forest, I coated myself in mosquito repellent again, giving some to a rather desperate lady next to me. The walk to the location was 250 metres down a narrow forest path which took me to a raised mound with tree trunks scattered around for the audience to sit on. Between the trees hung white plastic water tanks of varying sizes – recycled car parts for which this Amsterdam-based collective of musicians, performers, and visual artists are known. And in the middle of them, the Dutch cellist, Ernst Reijseger.
What followed was magical. Light in the car tanks flickered from warm white to cold white to orange, and little drumsticks beat out notes on them. Each was a different tone according to the tank’s size. The music from Reijseger was as mesmerizing as his performance, lost as he was in the moment. In an age when everyone films everything, it is hard to find words to describe the magic of the whole. At times a duet with car parts, at others Reijseger seemed to be teasing them, daring them to play with him, to out-play him. It was true brilliance when the cello and the car tanks coincided, played together, reflected, refracted and enhanced each other. And I marveled at how car parts could be so beautiful. As the music faded and died away, and the wind in the trees rose up into the silence left behind, I smiled. This other-worldly concert was a forest-anchored gem.
Drifting.
Photo credit Nichon Glerum.
It was after midnight when I reached my hotel. I had cycled along unlit bike paths through the forests and along the towering dunes of the island. I lost my way, but not my smile. And it was with a smile that I woke up early the next morning to go and see Collectief Walden, a company I have reviewed at Oerol in 2016 (with their brilliant Windstillleven), for their show NAU, 2e jaring at the Beach Theatre.
A remount of their show NAU, 1e jaring from last year, it was a dance party that started at 9.30 in the morning. This brilliant theatre company has had all their subsidy cut for reasons that are beyond me, and this was both their goodbye and their search for someone to take over their long-term thinking – ideally for the next 998 years. I am no dancer, so my husband was astonished when I told him I had danced with no inhibition on a beach that morning.
There was joy and sadness. The intellectual exploration that I remember from Windstillleven was absent, as was the deep textual attachment to place. A reprieve in the dancing saw me in “the nerd” group with a member of the company who is also a marine biologist, who talked to us about hydra, fresh-water animals with amazing tentacle structure and the ability to live more than a thousand years due to their continuous cell renewal. But with the salt water of the sea behind me, no-one could claim the hydra we saw under the microscope was in its natural habitat. Nor that it, despite its long life, could take over the artistic vision of the Collectief Walden. So, while this was not site specific in content, it was site specific in context – a brilliant theatre company’s farewell to the island.
When Did You Leave?
Photo credit: Nichon Glerum.
I then cycled back to West Terschelling for Dans Dans Revolutie from artist duo Brother Till, adapted by Lisa Weeda from her novel of the same name. Set in the fictional land of Besulia, the narrative shows a young vlogger, Anna, making videos with her grandmother, Baba Yara, when war breaks out. Local folklore states that dancing in the costume of a mythical being, the notsjnik, can ward off evil, but as the bombs fall and Anna and Baba Yara hide in their cellar, the only result of her grandmother’s call for Anna’s followers to dance is her increasing number of followers thanks to the war, their “live” reactions shown on phones given to each member of the audience at the start.
We sat in a warehouse by the harbour, inside of which Anna’s village had been built – four skeleton wooden structures imagining houses, each holding five audience members. I was pulled into the phone, into Anna’s “live stream”, but took time to look around me. At the simple but evocative grey wooden structures. At the electricity post in the middle, which reached up to a canvas sky where day turned to night and back to day. And what started as a young woman’s joy quickly turned sinister, light squares in the house walls sizzling to the sound of bombs falling. “Hope is the first thing which breaks” says Anna, and suddenly enemy soldiers are at the door of the cellar, the online feed showing more and more frantic posts from her followers including some declaring that everything Anna was posting was fake news.
The weight of sadness at the end was tangible. And the absolute silence of the exiting audience heartbreaking. Social media dominates our lives today. Gentle faith in myths and traditions drowned out. I emerged into the blazing sun, into the sounds of the harbour and the seagulls, and that very shock of the real sent shudders through me as I thought of those in war zones today. Besulia is Ukraine. It is Gaza. It is the next war and the next, and the devastation of countless Annas and Baba Yaras.
But I had to go on. I had three more shows to see before my ferry home. When did you leave? from Via Berlin was my next stop. A dance-narrative piece in a clearing in a forest. White tables, white costumes and soaring temperatures. And my temperature soared too as I found myself in a failing experiment. Created in collaboration with researchers from Amsterdam University, the piece explored the different political views of a family during the grandfather’s eightieth birthday party. Interaction with the audience varied – I was given an iPad and had to fill in a questionnaire which led me to Paul’s perspective of the gathering.
And yet, I never heard Paul’s voice and I could not connect with him. The script was narrated by one family member. One person being all the voices, all the differing views which unfolded during the family gathering, undermining the differences and flattening the conflict. I was asked three times to fill in the same questionnaire, at the end being told by someone from the university that understanding different perspectives can be assisted by live experience – hence the experiment, to see if my responses had changed having witnessed the show. But my views did not shift. The experiment left me cold, disconnected, unmoved. I love seeing work in unusual locations, but for this experiment to work it needed a staging that pulled you in. It needed the family’s voices to speak their own socio-political views to bring authenticity to the different perspectives around the table. It needed a theatre with that dark intimacy that an auditorium creates. The forest was completely the wrong setting.
The Last Chapters
Photo credit: Geert Snoeijer.
My spirits were lifted by returning to the Beach Theatre where I had danced in the morning. I was now there for Houthakken by Comp. Marius. This was a two-handed monologue based on the life and writings of Thomas Bernhard. The performers Kris Van Trier and Vincent van den Berg gave an utterly engaging and hilarious performance, verbally sparring with each other, sometimes echoing each other word for word, forgetting their lines, eating potato soup and bemoaning the inhabitants of the Austrian village where they were for a funeral. The text was sharp and witty, the performances truly realistic in their genuineness. While it had absolutely nothing to do with the location – indeed I was distracted by the technical crew sitting in a tent behind the stage – it was a glorious play on words and memories which sent me, upbeat, for a drink in the festival music hub before my final show.
Houthakken.
Photographer not known. Attribution pending.
And so, at a quarter to ten, I arrived in another forest clearing for my last show, aptly named The Last Chapters from Urland. I had seen this talented duo before with their hilarious show Reboot. Thomas Dudkiewicz is a brilliant storyteller and, working with the sound genius, Tomas Loos, they created a fairytale world of over-grown cats and dragons, a Fish King, a sea journey and a man in a coma. All narrated by Dudkiewicz with the sounds mixed live by Loos, using 360-degree microphones that wrapped sound around my head through headphones. It was Tolkien and C.S. Lewis combined. And technically brilliant. Regardless of what I saw, my ears told me something different. I was in that bar with billiard balls hitting each other. I was hearing footsteps wading through water and mud. I was in a world populated by English-speaking cats. I was not in that forest clearing – and yet I was.
As the writer of the tale reasserted himself and took control and I heard the clanking of typewriter keys, as the illusion created by the sounds and Dudkiewicz’s voice was destroyed in a ‘now’ (writer’s note to secretary, ‘Look that up. Comma. Period’) that did not exist in the ‘there’ (the beautifully lit forest clearing), and words from the fictional story tumbled out of the author’s mouth, it was a writer’s playground.
And that was where it went wrong. Dudkiewicz/the writer turned to the audience and seemed unable to stop talking. He rambled. His seemingly unending pleas to the man in the coma – “Stay and die or go back into your body and live”/ “It’s in your hands, always has been” / “I became your oppressor” – culminating in a metaphor about accepting the dragon and how the last chapters show you who people really are. And, as requested by the writer, our applause ended “this universe” bringing The Tempest and Macbeth to mind. Dudkiewicz is no “walking shadow”, no “poor player”. He is a talented storyteller. And Loos’ sound genius was not “full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” But if ever there was a writer who needs an editor or a dramaturg, this was the case in point. Was he fictional? Was he Dudkiewicz himself? I wanted to cry out “Stop!” as the words continued to tumble out. And as the illusionary world destroyed itself and I left the forest, I wondered if it, too, was part of the illusion.
This was a journey round the island of huge proportions. It took me up and down dunes, to baking beaches and deep into the heart of forests, to football fields and farm barns, to marine warehouses and hotel underpasses. There is no doubt that Terschelling is the festival’s main protagonist. But I had too often failed to find it a breeding ground for site-specific theatre. Theatre producer Joop Mulder used to say, “Understand where you are!” and this is the very essence of site-specific work. And yet it seemed too many had not listened to his wisdom.
Joop died unexpectedly in 2021 by which time he had already handed the festival’s leadership on. Different directions are therefore inevitable, and this is also to be expected of the new director, Mikey Martins, ex-CEO and artistic director of Freedom Festival Arts Trust who are based in Hull, UK. Martins took over last year. Audiences at Oerol are tenacious, inquisitive. They brave incredibly uncomfortable “seats”. They are diehard. And weekends see a flood of younger people – a quarter of the audience is 35 or younger – which is promising for Oerol’s future. But with 45% of the festival income made up of ticket sales, what Oerol presents is undeniably why people go. If they are seeking Joop’s vision for the festival, then the festival feels a little lost. The programming certainly keeps you guessing every time you turn up to a new location. When it meets its original aim, it hits gold and creates magic. When it misses you either go with the flow, or wail inwardly with disappointment.
Site-specific theatre is expensive. With over 1,000 individual acts this year, I wonder if less could be more. An investment in work that is truly site specific may reduce the quantity of events in the programme but might speak better to what audiences seek as they get on the ferry for some Oerol magic. When I struck gold, I could not stop smiling. But I also wailed.
