Meet the Makers: Maarten Bos

For this Meet the Makers event, we will be joined by freelance dramaturg Maarten Bos. Bos collaborates with a variety of companies such as Werkplaats van de Woestijne, De Jonge Honden and Troupe Courage en Tryater. He teaches dramaturgy at Amsterdam Theater and Kleinkunst Academy and is also a writer of short stories which have been presented on stage throughout the Netherlands. In 2019 he created the podcast “Talking about Depression” where he speaks to professionals and experts about mental health.

In this session, we will mainly focus on his projects with Troupe Courage and Werkplaats van de Woestijne to show how varied the work of a dramaturg can be. Troupe Courage is an international theatre collective, with actors from Holland, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Ghana and USA, who produce performances and hold workshops worldwide. The collective uses elements of commedia dell’arte in community art projects, but not in a traditional manner. Instead, they draw commedia straight into the 21^th century and use it as a means to investigate strategies of survival at the rawest edges of life. Here, dramaturgy involves a process that closely resembles play in how it co-designs the conditions for play to occur.

Secondly we will address the work by Bart van de Woestijne, known for his remarkable site-specific performances. We will discuss a project that takes place in a fitness centre which critically investigates the contemporary obsession with health and self-control, with a specific focus on the dramaturgical ties and knots of this creative process. Maarten’s work as a dramaturg also informs his approach to the topic and medium of his podcast series on depression. We will show some brief excerpts of works discussed and there will be ample space for conversation and mutual exchange. The session will be moderated by Dr Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink.

Please RSVP via tim@uu.nl or online registration.

This session is a part of Meet the Makers, a series by Transmission in Motion which aims to facilitate conversations between researchers, students and makers – such as artists, curators, dramaturges, designers, or other creative practitioners within the wider field of arts and culture.