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NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 61st episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” This episode will be available starting 20 January 2026. You can find it and all episodes at iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net‘s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Podbean and find links to accompany the podcasts.
Next month, François and I will visit Rotterdam for the International Community Arts Festival (ICAF) a gathering of community arts folks, mostly but not all working in some type of performance. This is the 10th ICAF since its founding in 2001. We’ll be presenting a couple of sessions and recording interviews for the podcast, and we’d love to see you there. You can see the program here and register here.
In the run-up to ICAF, our guest is Eugene van Erven, a former Artistic Director of ICAF, and a prolific researcher and writer who retired a few years ago as a Professor of Media, Performance and the City at Utrecht University. François and Eugene have known each other for 20 years or so. You will be as excited as I was to hear Eugene’s story.
Eugene spoke to us from Bilthoven, a village outside of Utrecht (the Netherlands’ fourth largest city), where Eugene began working at the University in 1988.
François asked Eugene to tell us how he came to be involved in community-based arts work, and he started at the very beginning.
“I was born five kilometers from the Belgian border. Half of my ancestors actually hail from Flanders, so I’m like a quarter Belgian. It was a rural community. My parents grew up in the Second World War and met in 1949 at a community play, of all things. That was kind of interesting when I found that out. The play was entitled Youth Resists, about their experiences during the Second World War in the small village where they lived and grew up. I was born in 1955, when my parents were still struggling to find work and everything else. So in terms of social class, it would be lower, lower middle class. My father was just emerging to get a job in an office, and followed that path. When I was nine, we moved as part of his search for another job to Utrecht, where we ended up living in a in a working-class neighborhood. I was the first in the family to go to university, which sort of tells you a little bit about my background, where I came from, also in terms of cultural capital.”
François noted that people tend to think of making community plays as rooted in the 60s, “but actually it has very old roots, the telling of stories that are meaningful and that are alternative to the dominant stories.”
“Yes,” said Eugene, “my Uncle Harry, my father’s older brother, wrote it. My father was the only one in the village with a typewriter, so he typed it up. My mother’s sister played a role in this play, so my mother went to see her sister, and my father was tearing the tickets at the door, and that’s how they met.”
“When I graduated from high school, I was still trying to play it safe, influenced, I suppose, by the experience of my father. So I opted for a course in English literature and linguistics, which would entitle me to what in the Netherlands we call a first degree license to teach, which would allow you to teach in the upper echelons of high school. But I obviously was more interested in literature already than in linguistics. The only thing that really interested me was social linguistics, rather than generative grammar by Chomsky and people like that. After the third year of university, I applied to go on an exchange program abroad, and that changed everything for me.
“I originally applied to go to Exeter, but that was full. The only other option was the University of Florida in Gainesville. So I went there, and I ended up falling in love with a Spanish woman from Bilbao, the Basque Country, who had actually moved to the US to escape Franco’s Spain. I learned about that reality through her. At the University of Florida, I discovered political theater. There were some really, really good professors who introduced me to people like Bertholt Brecht, and that opened a whole new world for me. My then-girlfriend and I decided to stay in the US and to pursue a PhD. So I applied to about 20 universities for a scholarship because I couldn’t afford it otherwise. Lo and behold, I was given a scholarship by Vanderbilt University. So after a year and a half, I finished my master’s degree in the Netherlands and we both moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and ended up in graduate school, studying American literature.”
“Vanderbilt is quite a conservative place…. After about two or three years of coursework I had to opt for a dissertation topic. I had already become interested in political theater, but the chairman of the English department didn’t want to let me write a dissertation on what he considered kind of a left-wing topic.” Eugene connected with a professor in comparative literature and was able to transfer his scholarship and write his dissertation on what was called people’s or popular theater.
“I ended up writing, doing research first, moving to Europe, doing research on in the United States on groups like the Bread and Puppet Theater. I went there to meet them, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Teatro Campesino, and in Europe, the 7:84 Theater Company, people like that. There were groups like that in regional, rural France, often creating original plays in dialect to promote regional languages and cultures. In Germany, there was children’s and youth theater, which was very progressive. That became my dissertation, which became a book, and that is really the beginning, beginning of this all.”
That work gave rise to Eugene’s ambition to document political theater on every continent. He received a postdoc fellowship from Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, to write a book on Asian political theater. “So I took my backpack and a Pentax camera, and one of those Sony world radio receivers that you could record with, and I went on my way” for three years, ending up in the Philippines in 1986 in the midst of the civil war. That book came out in 1992.
Eugene returned to the Netherlands in 1988 and began teaching in the American Studies program at Utrecht University, when a friend reached out from the Philippines. He had the idea of bringing progressive Asian performing artists to Europe via Cry of Asia, a traveling festival that had human rights and human rights abuses in various Asian dictatorships as its main theme. Eugene was persuaded to become European producer. Be sure to listen to the great stories in the episode!
The roots of ICAF come next, as Eugene got involved in neighborhood-based theater in Rotterdam, coinciding with that city being named by the EU a European Capital of Culture in 2001. François offers an interesting back story on European Capitals of Culture on the podcast. The Rotterdam Neighborhood Theater was invited to create a program for the occasion, and it was so successful, the city provided funds to continue it as a biennial festival. That’s where François’ story intersects Eugene’s, because he came to Utrecht to talk about community arts.
All these adventures led to Eugene become first a programmer and then Artistic Director of ICAF, and there were parallel developments that provided support for the festival and other community-based work, such as the creation in 2000 of the Netherlands Fund for Cultural Participation. This blog offers just a peek at the beginning. There’s lots more to learn from the episode about the evolution of community arts in the Netherlands.
I loved a story Eugene told about the impact of ICAF.
“I’m reminded of one of the artists from Citizens Theater in Glasgow who has been coming to the festival. Elly Goodman told me once that for her coming to the festival—and I think this goes for many of the of the practitioners that come and participants also, but practitioners particularly, that in their day-to-day work, they’re working so hard and they’re so full of responsibilities that they don’t really have time to really take a step back and reflect on what they’re doing. So for them, once every three years to come to Rotterdam, it’s joyful, as you say, but it’s also the chance for them to step out of their day-to-day, regular, hard-working routine, and touch base with with colleagues from totally different parts of the world that give them a different perspective on their own practice.”
Hoping to see you there!
Grateful Dead, “Eyes of the World.”