“Rehearsing Institution” — Margot Van den Eeckhout

“Theatre Seating” by DeaPeaJay

What stayed with me most from the session with Anne Breure was her way of thinking institutions as something that can be rehearsed. Breure described her graduation project as a proposal for a new institution. A reflection on what the world might look like in fifteen years and how a theatre could be organized differently in response. That temporal shift of thinking forward but acting now, feels central to the conversation. The institution is not a finished structure, it is something in motion, something that can be tried out, tested, and reshaped over time. One of the early examples she mentioned was Flat 34. A one-evening exhibition in a student dorm, where she transformed her own living space into a gallery using works by fellow residents. It was small, temporary, and informal, but it contained a crucial gesture, the institution as an event rather than a building. The gallery existed only because people agreed to treat it as one for a few hours. It was a social contract, not an architectural fact.

Shifting towards her current position as the Creative Director of Theater Utrecht, it is clear that she is still concerned with the ways institutions work. She mentioned the tension between internal and external logics. Inside the company, questions revolve around values, working methods, and artistic visions. Outside, institutions are measured through spectator numbers, funding criteria, and policy expectations. Referring to her dramaturge, Vincent Wijlhuizen, who is not in charge of the individual performance’s dramaturgies, but of Theater Utrecht’s dramaturgy, as an institution. The work of “institutional dramaturgy” seems to take place at this friction point between internal and external values. Negotiating between what is expected and what is possible, between the system’s metrics and the organization’s values. It does not necessarily revolve about inventing a completely new structure, but about occupying multiple perspectives at once. According to Breure, every institution needs dramaturgical thinking, to analyze where the organization is stuck and how it might move forward. Dramaturgy here becomes a systemic practice of reading the institutional, identifying its tensions, and imagining alternative plots. Yet the conversation also acknowledged limits. Every institution is shaped by its conditions. Not every sense or intention can be addressed or communicated. Perhaps that is why the metaphor of rehearsal feels so in place here. A rehearsal is a space of testing and uncertainty, where structures are tried out but never fully fixed. It accepts mistakes as part of the process. If we think of institutions in this way, the question is no longer how to design the perfect structure, but how to keep it in motion. How to build organizations that can adapt, reflect, and rehearse themselves continuously.