Every year, the Festival Tweetakt in Utrecht lets a wide audience experience how meaningful, surprising, accessible and exciting contemporary (performing) arts for young viewers and audiences can be. The festival presents theatre, dance, spoken word, performance, music, visual arts, short films, installations and everything in between. Tweetakt targets all youth age groups, from toddlers to young adults. At the same time, the festival is an invitation to adults to experience how engaging and fulfilling youth art can be. Tweetakt attracts some 35,000 visitors annually: children and their parents/carers, grandparents, primary, secondary and vocational school pupils from the Utrecht region, students, (performing) arts professionals and programmers.
Festival Tweetakt takes place at a few different venues. In the Utrecht theatres, with Theater Kikker, the city theatre Stadschouwburg and Podium Hoge Woerd as permanent presentation venues. And at Fort Ruigenhoek, a green, historic fort island just outside the city. On the fort island, which is open to the public only during Tweetakt, Tweetakt presents a visual art exhibition for children every year. And there are performances there all day, both outdoors and in mobile theatres. The 2025 festival starts on Friday 20 June and lasts until 29 June.
Tweetakt is structurally supported by a government grant. Unfortunately, the municipality of Utrecht has decided to stop subsidising the festival from 2025. That is why Tweetakt is shorter this year than in previous years. There will be no festival centre at the Neude this time, and therefore no more music performances there either. For festival information and ticket sales, there will be a smaller festival centre at Theater Kikker.
Tweetakt celebrates the quality of Dutch youth art every year, but not with a parade of highlights and audience successes from the previous season. The festival selects artistic innovation, as well as accessibility. In order to enthuse the widest and most diverse audience possible for contemporary youth art, every programme component of Tweetakt must be accessible and comprehensible without prior knowledge to (young) audiences with no experience of watching art. The festival aims to undermine the preconception that art is boring and complicated. That is why Tweetakt does not stage plays with a lot of text, but rather productions that appeal through their expressive language, musicality, energy and lively interaction with the audience.
Tweetakt is convinced that art can contribute to young people’s identity development, increase the understanding of and grip on life, and thereby can provide tools for active participation in society. The guiding principle in programming is therefore that the selected productions express a personally driven, social idealism. And that, in clear communication with the intended audience, the productions present complex themes in an accessible way.
Tweetakt considers reflecting a diverse society and telling the new stories that arise from that to be a natural part of artistic innovation. The artists selected by the festival expand the view of what is possible, with ‘empathising with another’ being an essential part. At a time when public debate is polarised and differences between cultural and other groups are being magnified, art for children and young people has an important task in showing nuances and mitigating contradictions. With programme elements that give children and young people an active role, the festival increases their creative involvement.
A special Tweetakt venue is Fort Ruigenhoek. This historic fort island, part of the Dutch Water Defence Lines and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is only open to visitors during the festival. There, Tweetakt presents a visual arts exhibition for children every year, and there is an ongoing programme of musical and other performances, outside and in mobile theatres. The terraces between the fort bunkers are spiced up with some old-fashioned children’s/family games, such as a giant Jenga game, a carousel and rideable plush animals that children can move themselves. On the enclosed fort island, children can wander around in nature. Playing freely and enjoying art go hand in hand here.
In putting together the visual art exhibition on the fort island, Tweetakt aims to involve a multitude of art forms, such as: sculptures, moving kinetic objects, illuminated artworks, installations, tapestries or actions in public spaces. They were created by young and experienced Dutch and foreign artists. At Fort Ruigenhoek, the works relate to the exciting, semi-dark bunker spaces, or to the island’s outdoor nature. They are often artworks made for an adult audience, which Tweetakt also finds interesting for a young audience. Some were created at the festival’s invitation for a specific spot on the fort island.
There are always artworks on show for the public to participate in. Last year, there was the collection of ‘twig people’ by English artist Chris Kenny, who invited children and their companions to search the fort island for twigs in which you can see a human figure. You could give them a name and stick them in a pile of sand in one of the bunkers, which filled up completely with twig people during the festival. A regular feature of the exhibition are short films made by artists. These feature very well in the semi-dark bunker rooms.
For this exhibition, Tweetakt is all about direct experience. The artworks do not have extensive information signs. Visitors receive a map showing where all the artworks can be found. In the ‘post room’, visitors can respond to what they have seen with a postcard to an artist. Children can do a treasure hunt around the island, where Tweetakt, in collaboration with nature organisations, also calls attention to the plants, animals and birds on the fort island.
Every theatre performance Tweetakt hosts offers young audiences a rich experience. Many productions are accessible to everyone because they are so visual. The festival loves theatre-makers who build a performance out of everyday stuff and materials, which they use on the spot and through their own imagination. Theatre here is an extension of how children play. A recurring guest at the festival is Flemish artist collective Hanafabuki, who tells stories with stylised figures and abstract forms. Last year, visitors could set up their own island, sitting in groups at island-shaped tables with a host of objects and materials available, and then tell each other what they saw in them.
The best way to engage young audiences in theatre are performances where their peers participate. That is why a regular part of the Tweetakt programme is theatre performances with children and/or young people as actors in their own right. The festival draws theatre-makers and companies, primarily from Belgium, who specialise in innovative performances featuring young actors or dancers. At Tweetakt 2025, for example, the dance piece The Round will be performed for audiences aged 8+: eight Flemish children aged between 9 and 13 perform an explosively energetic choreography in a round, wooden outdoor theatre at Fort Ruigenhoek. Also coming to Tweetakt is the theatrical dance performance Remember My Name (12+), which is about the desire to be famous and its downside. Nine teenagers/young adults play former child stars at a reunion who look back on their big breakthrough. What’s left of them when the audience has forgotten them?
Special at Tweetakt are the performances for the very little ones. These are created by (often foreign) theatre-makers who engage toddlers and preschoolers physically with theatre in an original way. Like the Flemish company Grensgeval (On the Boundary), which combines acrobatics with innovative sound theatre. Spectators as young as four, seated in a circle around the players, are given sound boxes in backpacks, for example, or objects with sound boxes in them to pass around so they can feel the vibrations and make the sound move around the room themselves.
Festival Tweetakt offers ample space to young performing and visual artists and new talent. Their productions are an equal part of the programme as the work of more experienced and established theatre companies and artists from the Netherlands and abroad. Every year, for instance, Tweetakt stages graduation productions by theatre and art students from Utrecht and other cities. The festival pays special attention to talented young theatre-makers who have been working for several years and are working independently. Once they outgrow the workplaces for beginning theatre-makers, they need support in making their creative practice sustainable.
Every year, Studio Tweetakt commissions theatre-makers to develop a youth performance especially for the festival. They can be beginners and recent graduates, but Tweetakt also invites experienced theatre-makers to make something for a young audience for the first time. After that, Tweetakt continues to showcase their productions. This applies, for example, to Tim Schouten with his company Dear T., and to Max Laros and Rosita Segers working together as the Non Creators Company. Last year, Momo Samwel and Merel Severs made youth productions commissioned by Tweetakt. And for the upcoming festival, Tweetakt has asked the duo Koen & Jeroen to create a new outdoor performance for Fort Ruigenhoek.
Every year, a large group of about 30 programmers from abroad comes to Utrecht to see performances at Festival Tweetakt. For them, the festival outlines a multi-day ‘international visitors’ programme, with productions suitable for abroad. Programmers are informed in advance about the makers, and if a performance contains Dutch text, they are given a translation. Programmers are enthusiastic about the festival because of its emphasis on artistic innovation and the multidisciplinary programming. After performing at Tweetakt, a lot of theatre-makers have received invitations to perform a show abroad.
Festival Tweetakt has lengthy experience in setting up and delivering educational programmes. The premise here is that art education is not there to explain performances and artworks, but to teach young and inexperienced audiences to watch and respond autonomously. Our basic package consists of two lessons in class, working towards attending a performance and/or visiting the visual art exhibition at Fort Ruigenhoek. The aim is to introduce every group of students to the different art disciplines. And watching stage art goes hand in hand with workshops at Tweetakt where the children and young people get creative themselves. It involves about 3,500 pupils from primary and secondary education each year.
To further engage young people with Tweetakt, the festival developed a programme component specifically aimed at them: the ‘Festivaldagen’ (‘Festival Days’) at Fort Ruigenhoek. On these days, secondary school students and students from vocational schools get to work with theatre, dance and music themselves. In groups, the youngsters will have workshops thematically related to performances from the festival programme. Next year’s show is Burning City, in which thirteen young dancers, rappers and actors want to show themselves completely, with all of their deviations and singularities. Following this, the young people create their own small performance on location, which they present to each other at the end of the day.
Around the theatre performances, Festival Tweetakt organises post-performance discussions and public debates between various performing artists who are at the festival with their work. This will allow audiences to get to know the makers better and learn more about the performances. With productions involving children or young people, it is always an experience to hear them say for themselves what they have experienced.
For the debates where several makers participate, Tweetakt chooses themes based on that year’s programme that recur in different performances. This could be social issues; it could be about a way of working or the design used. For instance, there have been meetings on theatre-making with children/young people on stage, on the personal struggles creators have had to or still face for their work, on freedom or the lack of freedom in expressing queer identity, and on the relationship between children and parents as a starting point for a performance. The theatre-makers who take part in these talks also appreciate that it allows them to get to know each otherֹ’s work.
