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Foto Lonneke van der Palen
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Foto Astrid & Roel
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Foto Thomas Dhanens

Festival Cement

Every year, Festival Cement treats you to a nine-day festival full of exciting performances. About 20 young makers from the Netherlands and Flanders show their work to a curious audience. Only in 2025 the festival will take place from May 26 to June 1, and not in March as usual.

In various places in ’s-Hertogenbosch, the public and professionals are looking at a new generation of performing artists. You can discover young makers and their themes, new forms and alternative proposals for the future.

In addition to a program full of performances, there is plenty of room for the public, makers and professionals to meet and enter into dialogue and to delve into the extensive context program.

Festival Cement takes place from May 26 to June 1

Please find Cements Language no Problem or English Spoken program below. If you have any questions or you want to visit the festival by group, please email us at info@festivalcement.nl

Good to know

Good to know

Festival Info

All you need to know before visiting Festival Cement
Good to know

June 1 = Pay What You Can

To make our festival accessible to as many people as possible, we choose to make one day's performances “Pay What You Can. On Sunday, June 1, you as a Cement visitor decide what you pay for a performance.
Bekijk het hele programma Voorstellingen Contextprogramma
Toon per dag
Datum
Arjuna Vermeulen
Dance / Language no Problem
28-05

Arjuna Vermeulen

Paradigm

What if love and hate aren’t opposites, but manifestations of the same force? What if one is merely the shadow of the other? That is what Paradigm explores in a deeply physical way. Dancers Shailesh Bahoran, Patrick Karijowidjojo and Keshaw Manna move their bodies in an endless exchange of pushing and pulling, breaking and repairing. Using hip-hop and breakin’ as their language—raw, rhythmic, and expressive—they engage in a conversation where words are unnecessary.

A paradigm is a framework through which we understand the world. But what happens when that framework begins to shift? Perception tilts in the glow of moving lines and the pulsating sounds of breath, rhythm, and silence. Hate and love are no longer opposites but shades within a single fluid motion. Isn’t this the essence of being human? The constant struggle between attraction and repulsion, fear and surrender? Where we expect contradiction, symbiosis emerges. Where we search for boundaries, we find space. Paradigm offers no conclusion—only an invitation: to look, recognize, and shift along with it.
Ezra Veldhuis & Bosse Provoost
Multidisciplinair / English Spoken
27-05

Ezra Veldhuis & Bosse Provoost

a pulse with no body a sun with no sky

What does a rat dream of? Does a sponge know the difference between itself and the world? Lie down and let go of your usual way of seeing and thinking. Can you experience the world, just for a moment, beyond your own body?

Beneath an arch of light in the center of the room, you are invited to open yourself to unexpected connections between spots of light, fragments of sound, bodies, and machines. A voice speculates about ways in which other life forms experience the world. Because despite our differences, our bodies resonate with one another.
Frederico Araujo
Performance / Dutch premiere / English Spoken

Frederico Araujo

SHARK

For an hour, two players keep a volleyball in the air. As a metaphor for life and theater. Rallying in a match, they explore questions about societal boundaries, such as immigration, identity, and otherness.

How much do you adapt to be part of "a new team"? Is their effort enough to achieve their goal? To what extent does performativity in theater and sports overlap? Are they players or performers? As time passes, their bodies grow more exhausted from the effort of keeping the ball in the air. SHARK is an exploration at the intersection of sports, performance, and theater.
Gerben Vaillant en Fleur van den Berg
Festival / English Spoken
26-05 t/m 27-05

Gerben Vaillant en Fleur van den Berg

on smoke and airconditioning

Maybe that’s the thing about character A and character B: they don’t have a lot to say. I met character A by accident at a party—quite a boring guy. For B, it’s different. A couple of deep breaths, and he was there—restless and alive. Now they’re here, keeping me awake at night with all their details. I keep wondering where they are going. And where they got their sense of life.

on smoke and airconditioning is a shaky story—a fiction that comes to life trembling and then dies again. A story told by narrators who can’t let go of their characters-without-a-purpose. It’s a performance that dances with the urgency of creating fiction. A performance that values vivid details so much that the makers can’t be bothered to question their role in the narrative. But mostly, on smoke and airconditioning is a study on a sense of life.
Heintz & Kop
Performance / Language no Problem

Heintz & Kop

Lift Off

Since the dawn of time, we have gazed at the stars, searching for meaning, perspective, and our place in the universe. But what if you don’t have to look up to experience that sense of infinity?

In this great little space journey, we take you past Orion, the Big Dipper, and Cassiopeia—a choreography of constellations guiding you to the edge of our solar system. Lift Off explores how to evoke that overwhelming vastness within a small, everyday space like an elevator. A place you usually step into without thinking becomes a launchpad for stillness and wonder.
Hélène Vrijdag
Muzikale performance / English Spoken
30-05 t/m 31-05

Hélène Vrijdag

my sweet nasty lunacy

my sweet nasty lunacy is a musical ode to the hysterical woman. With hyperpop bangers, Woman Folly delivers a show for the girls, the gays, and the theys. In an arena of shifting lights and concert conventions, you’re getting served a soft setlist from sweet sweet hell.

Woman Folly, the alter ego of Hélène Vrijdag (STUDIO SIBLING), is a queer and feminist response to the character of Lady Folly from Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly. She flips the misogynistic notion of hysteria on its head and embodies foolishness in her own queer way. Rather than mad or weak, Woman Folly is simply done with the patriarchy: “Am I mad, or am I just angry?”
Lotte Boonstra
foto Simon Van Looveren
Multidisciplinair / Première / Cement Coproductie / Language no Problem
30-05 t/m 01-06

Lotte Boonstra

MAN MADE MASS

In this museum-like choreography, twelve people between the ages of 10 and 73 struggle through the vastness of human creations. They are trapped in chunks of concrete, fused with piles of sand, and carry fragments of the earth’s crust with them. How do our bodies relate to the mass that surrounds us?

MAN MADE MASS is a living exhibition, a continuous choreography of people and sculptures. We see humans who are stuck and searching, destroying and creating, struggling and caring. A monumental work that explores humanity’s immense impact on Earth while offering an intimate portrait of human existence.
Marius Lefever, Senne Vanderschelden en Jef Van der Burght
Objecttheater / Dutch premiere / Language no Problem
01-06

Marius Lefever, Senne Vanderschelden en Jef Van der Burght

Silly Symphonies

From crashing cars to drifting parachutists and from sinking fishermen to falling birds: Silly Symphonies creates and dissolves worlds using nothing but sound.

Three performers produce live sound effects—also known as foley—to build scenes where nothing goes as expected. Without words, using everyday objects and a generous dose of imagination, they shape unpredictable endings. Lighthearted, playful, yet unafraid of the dark, Silly Symphonies offers an experience with something to discover for all ages.
Maxime Dreesen
Theatre / English Spoken
31-05

Maxime Dreesen

PEEKABOO

What would your life look like if you could rediscover your sexuality in public space? PEEKABOO is a vision of a world transformed into a sex playground. A world in which music, hypnosis, drag text, and dance come together.

This universe depicts new ways of contact through ‘cruising’: seeking fleeting, sexual contacts in the open air. Maxime Dreesen approaches this phenomenon as getting lost in a web of experimental relationships and unexpected encounters. Curiosity and excitement are the common threads of this story, which brings together kinky comedy, campy musical songs, and intimate ASMR in a dreamy, Teletubby-esque landscape.
 
Mooni Van Tichel
foto Willem Mevis
Dance / Language no Problem
27-05 t/m 29-05

Mooni Van Tichel

STILL RADIANT ALIVE

Attack, defend, wipe the sweat away, and reload. An immortal superhero pushes on and on, building a super body and super stories - her attempts seem effortless. But slowly, small cracks begin to form in her grand gestures. Can this hero change the world? Or is she, too, trapped in a system with no way out?

In this solo, Mooni works with a stop-motion movement quality, precisely following the beat. She explores questions of violence, power, glory, pain, and vulnerability, navigating between superhuman invincibility and human fragility.
Plankton
foto Lonneke van der Palen
Beeldend theater / Première / Cement Production / Language no Problem
29-05 t/m 31-05

Plankton

Elke rots wordt ooit een kiezelsteen

From a miniature version of the theater you are sitting in, Plankton takes you on a journey through the future. what happens when man no longer exists? 

Slowly, plants crawl through the cracks in the walls. Little by little, the back wall crumbles. Giant waves flood the chairs. New life is emerging. The self-made, very precise miniature version of the theater transforms into a new world. Plankton stimulates the imagination with an intimate work of art for all ages without words. Elke rots wordt ooit een kiezelsteen is an invitation to bigger thinking, but on a microscale.
Tibau Beirnaert & Laurens Aneca
Performance / english with surtitles
30-05

Tibau Beirnaert & Laurens Aneca

Zero Feet Away

Sex is now at least as digital as it is physical; we have become interconnected algorithms. How do we break the code that traps us in restrictive patterns?

A shape-shifter, longing for intimacy, turns to hookup apps in search of sex. On their journey, this being encounters both the possibilities and the limitations of modern technology. Do these apps contribute to a new regime of desires? Can they break through heteronormative structures? And can the shape-shifter find their own form?