Like in many other countries, government services in the Netherlands have declined over the last thirty years. In a reconstruction of this process, the journalist Coen van de Ven writes: ‘In places where services declined the most, right-wing populist parties grew in strength in every election’ (Ven, 2021, translation by authors). Without infrastructure to express something in a democratic way that does justice to plurality and equality, people might take the shortcut of expressing it in an anti-democratic way. Voter turn-out drops, populist parties grow.
While there is on the one hand a seeming overpoliticization, polarization, a continuous flood of shocking news and strong disagreements among various societal groups, on the other hand the neoliberal politics of the last decades have hollowed-out the contexts, like community centres, that enable us to address this information and these disagreements. In this context, places where connections are made between different personal lives and the structures of society are rare and important. We suggest we can understand the practice of the Rotterdam-based community theatre Het Rotterdams Wijktheater (RWT) as a democratic infrastructure that transforms personal stories and experiences into plural narratives that can be publicly shared and can have unexpected effects.
Drawing upon combined experiences between practices of community arts and theory, Jasmina Ibrahimovic and Catherine Koekoek start by giving a brief account of the core ideas behind the worldwide community arts movement, and specifically the community theatre practice of RWT. They then explore three scenes and scales corresponding to the personal, public and political meanings of this practice, and conclude by drawing out implications for starting artists more generally.