Twin Peaks meets Astro-TV, but gay. June leads an invisible existence in a log cabin in the deep south of the US. Surrounded by forests, she spends her days in front of the television – until the signal starts to falter. With static on our heels, we flash through an American dreamscape of television mediums, takeaway burritos, foggy motel rooms and ghosts from the past.

Junebug is a cinematic and tactile performance about the things within ourselves that we would rather not look at. About escapism, loneliness and the meaninglessness of existence. In a light-hearted and mystical way, Anna Verkouteren Jansen shows how we all deal with the great nothingness in our own way. As you are transported to the Paris, Texas-like inner world of lonely butch June, a weird, sensitive and darkly comical story unfolds. 

Reality and imagination flow seamlessly into each other in this hallucinatory sound film. Through surround sound (designed by Ard Kok) and a touch of Efteling, you find yourself in the middle of June's world of escapism, mourning, Mariah Carey and empty rooms. Junebug pushes reality aside and shows what moves behind the curtains: a place that is not visible, but all the more palpable.

Anna Verkouteren Jansen voices all the characters herself and worked closely with composer Ard Kok.

Anna: "When I was confronted with death as a child, I took refuge in fantasy as a response to the emptiness. Gradually, escapism became second nature to me. In Junebug, we see June escaping into television, her new-age mother Barb calls TV medium Magic Tina every week, who in turn believes mainly in transactions. I find it moving how people create stories to get a grip on the randomness of existence."

About Anna Verkouteren Jansen:
Anna Verkouteren Jansen (1992) is a director, theatre maker, writer and voice actor. She graduated from the directing programme at the Maastricht Theatre Academy in 2017 and has worked with Frascati Productions, Monty Kultuurfaktorij, Over het IJ Festival and Bloos / PLAN Brabant, among others.

Anna's work is cinematic and darkly comical. It is about the power of our imagination. Anna loves small people with big dreams: she creates hallucinatory portraits of these loners and underdogs, exploring different layers of consciousness.

In this sultry, musical journey, Anne-Laure Vandeputte transforms her traumas into a fiery celebration. To the driving beats of percussionist Andrew Van Ostade, she takes you on a journey through the cracks in her soul. The stakes are her body. What happened to it, what she allowed to happen, and what she will never allow to happen again.

She meets a director who wants to talk about strong women. She meets a man who wonders if he will appear in the show. She meets a sex worker in Berlin and proclaims her to be her personal Jesus. My Body as a Commodity is a monologue-on-beats that questions and challenges the narrative of physical trauma.

trigger warning: there may be sexual violence
trigger warning: where there’s pain there’s a party

In this sultry, musical journey, Anne-Laure Vandeputte transforms her traumas into a fiery celebration. To the driving beats of percussionist Andrew Van Ostade, she takes you on a journey through the cracks in her soul. The stakes are her body. What happened to it, what she allowed to happen, and what she will never allow to happen again.

She meets a director who wants to talk about strong women. She meets a man who wonders if he will appear in the show. She meets a sex worker in Berlin and proclaims her to be her personal Jesus. My Body as a Commodity is a monologue-on-beats that questions and challenges the narrative of physical trauma.

trigger warning: there may be sexual violence
trigger warning: where there’s pain there’s a party

About Anne-Laure Vandeputte
Anne-Laure Vandeputte graduated with the highest honours from the Antwerp Conservatory in 2016. Since then, she has been performing with companies and creating her own work. She explores the stories projected onto female bodies and plays with the boundaries between fact and fiction in order to challenge them.

Anne-Laure Vandeputte graduated with the highest honours from the Antwerp Conservatory in 2016. Since then, she has been performing with companies and creating her own work. She explores the stories projected onto female bodies and plays with the boundaries between fact and fiction in order to challenge them. 

Fariborz and Mona are good friends. Fariborz lives in Amsterdam, Mona in Tehran. Because of the distance between them, they send each other messages and letters. These form the starting point for Whispered Dreams, in which they take the audience on a live journey through their friendship and connection.

With Fariborz on stage and Mona live from Iran, the performance explores friendship and self-censorship. Distance plays an essential role in the performance and forms an obstacle in interacting with the audience. How does a friendship survive despite great distance and different political situations?

“We are walking on a footbridge in Tehran. From this bridge you can see mountains. It's winter, so the mountains are full of snow. I remember a dream where we were singing a song. The song of the walk."

About Fariborz Karimi
Fariborz Karimi (1990, Iran) is a theatre maker, performer and writer. After obtaining his bachelor's degree in Directing and Acting at Tehran University, he continued his studies for a master's degree at DAS Theatre at the Amsterdam University of the Arts.

As a creator, he focuses on layered storytelling in relation to social and political contexts. His works are collective and arise from collaborations. Fariborz consciously uses digital devices as a means of connection and accessibility of relationships. Using a mix of autobiographical and fictional stories, Fariborz Karimi addresses socio-political issues, blurring the boundaries between dreams and reality.

In 2024, Fariborz Karimi also appeared at Festival Cement with the performance Oh, Wild Gazelle, Where Are You?

An ode to something we usually don't pay attention to: fluorescent lighting. By playing with the voltage on the tubes, Finn Borath & Boris de Klerk transform not only the light, but also the sound. The soft clicking and humming normally indicates a faulty fixture, but in Roomtone it is the basis for an electro-acoustic composition. The purely functional lamps are now the creators of a constantly shifting landscape of light and resonance.

Roomtone is not a spectacle, but a whisper; an installation that haunts the space with the sound of its own infrastructure. The work moves on the edge of perception, sometimes emphatically present, sometimes almost gone. In this way, it invites the visitor to listen differently, to look differently and to pay attention to what we normally do not notice. With Roomtone, the duo reveals the silent architecture of a place – empty, seemingly simple, but full of unknown potential. An installation that lets the space itself speak.

About Finn Borath & Boris de Klerk
Finn Borath & Boris de Klerk have been working together since 2019 on the borderline between
sound art, performance and light installation. Often starting from the idea of “empty” space, their work is an enlargement of the senses and the world around us.

Previously, they created a piece of music for the grid in an empty theatre hall, gave improvised concerts using only fluorescent tubes as instruments, and composed a piece for an abandoned car garage using those same fluorescent tubes. Constantly searching for new ways to listen and look at what already exists, they continue to create work for spaces that are initially inconspicuous and taken for granted. In their work, they use various techniques, including media art, musique concrète, theatre, performance, electro-acoustic and improvised music. In addition to their work as a duo, they are also active as artists both solo and in various collaborations.

The gears turn and you zoom out. The light changes and you zoom out. A scale model is assembled and you zoom out. Further and further, from the table in the hall, to the theatre where you sit, to the Netherlands, Europe and beyond. Further still, until confusion gives way to wonder: because that pale blue dot… that is home.

The Pale Blue Dot is a space journey guided by a live-operated, theatrical planetarium. With ingenious mechanics and a play of light and shadow, Heintz & Kop create order in the chaos and deliver an existential knock-out. In this way, looking upward becomes an invitation to stillness, contemplation and learning to look again.

About Heintz & Kop

The duo Heintz & Kop consists of Tom Heintz (1992) and Jolein Kop (1995). They work as lighting designers, scenographers and theatre makers. In their work, light functions as an animated and independent performer. By playing with perspective and focus, they search for a precise balance that directs and shifts attention.

They previously appeared at Festival Cement with the performance Pascalerf 48 and Lift Off, a preliminary study for The Pale Blue Dot.

Sometimes all you can do is laugh when someone crosses a line. That’s exactly what HA investigates through vocal extremities: laughter as an escape mechanism.

Through grunts, fry screams and sounds made on inhalations Jana Jacuka turns the voice into an extension of the body. Using the voice as an extra limb to create choreographies, Jacuka communicates beyond words. She comes empty handed. It’s just the space, her and you… and suddenly: HA.

“A friend of a friend put a hand around me, ha
I’m feeling insecure but I just went hahahaha”

About Jana Jacuka

Choreographer and performer Jana Jacuka (1995, Latvia) creates performances almost out of nothing. She uses her body, voice, and text as departure points. Over the past two years, Jana has focused on exploring the voice and the letters H and A. She investigates how the voice can become an extension of the body, like an extra limb with which she creates choreography.

Her work has been presented at various venues, including Frascati (NL), Amsterdam Carré (NL), DansBrabant (NL), the AUAwirleben Festival (CH), Kanuti Gildi Saal and SAAL Biennaal (EE), and the Homo Novus festival (LV). Jacuka has previously collaborated with, among others, Marina Abramović, Dries Verhoeven, Arno Schuitemaker, and more. HA won the International Bursary Award (Amsterdam Fringe Festival).

What if, when it really matters, you were as quick-witted as you had hoped? In DEAR FRAIL MALE, Just van Bommel recounts a personal anecdote about an unexpected “encounter” with a group of boys.

Just reimagines this memory in a textual, rhythmic performance about the (quite literal) weight of the male norm. Performed by two men, Just delves into the struggles of boys and men in their search for identity within a society that sees aggression as strength and vulnerability as weakness.

About Just van Bommel
Just van Bommel (they/them/he) creates interdisciplinary performances about urgent contemporary issues surrounding themes such as gender, masculinity and vulnerability. Their deeply personal performances zoom out to reflect on our modern world.

Just has been a creator at Frascati Productions since 2022. DEAR FRAIL MALE was nominated for the BNG theatre prize.

A pop-up of living sculptures of humans in their natural habitat. Digging, mining, building – becoming increasingly stuck in their own human world. Lotte Boonstra presents a preview of absurd, humorous costumes that have evolved into sculptures. 

The sculptures are performed in various compositions by a colourful collection of people of all ages. Each image is a metaphor for what it means to be human. At Festival Cement, Lotte will release a number of sculptures into the real human world; on the street, in the park and in a field around the corner.  Hop on your bicycle or stroll through the city, and you may encounter one.

About Lotte Boonstra
Lotte Boonstra (1989) is a visual artist and theatre maker. She creates tranquil, sculptural performances in which bodies, materials and landscapes become intertwined. Fascinated by the relationship between humans and matter, she explores how we shape the world as biological beings and as producers of materials. Her work invites us to take a fresh look at what seems self-evident: the concrete beneath our feet, the raw materials in our bodies, the care with which we build and break.  

As a PLAN maker (2025–2027), she is developing a series of sculptural performances about crowds. MAN MADE MASS (2025) marked the beginning of this series, which she will continue to develop in the coming years under the wing of Theater Artemis.
 

In an abandoned factory hall, workers carry out monotonous rituals: one processes it, another packages it, a third removes whatever does not meet the standard. The created beings are not regarded as alive or valuable, but only as products. No wonder, no doubt, no protest—only actions, distance, and automatism.

With alienating images, a monotone computer voice, and a mix of cold beats and ecstatic trance, the performance shifts between production process and ritual, between destruction and rave. Born For Nothing exposes the cold mechanics of endless production processes alongside the fragile beauty of nascent life. What does it mean to no longer see something living as alive, but instead as something to consume?

About Marieke Heerema

Marieke Heerema creates performances that draw audiences into alternative, absurd worlds, where sweet colours collide with the sometimes grey reality. Together with mimes and artists, she builds speculative universes in which forgotten figures are given a voice and the everyday is slowed down, distorted, and reconsidered: “I want people to walk out of my performances and feel wonder about the world, to continue looking with surprise and curiosity at what they previously took for granted.”

In 2024, Marieke Heerema conducted preliminary research for Born For Nothing at the Broedplaats in ’s-Hertogenbosch.

“My grandma was a cow, my mother is a milkmaid. Now I am here with my hands in the dirt.”

Step inside a whispering chapel or a screaming vegetable garden with high chances of dirt, milk, a hairy calf and a bare breast. In this performative installation, you can find your own mythology in the mythologies the muffy girls offer you.

Move around the space and get to know the milk giver, the muzzled, the camerawoman. Here you will find cinematic images that move from a nursing breast, to a dance on a hill, to rotting processes. An incantation, a protest, a prayer.

“I was tending to my garden, then I unearthed this strange thing and now I don’t know how to hold it.”

Please note: limited seating, you will experience the work best by walking through it.

About muffy girls:

The five-member collective muffy girls consists of Jente Jonkhoff, Laura Dreyer, Carice Boelm, Valerie Ludwig, Anna Lauryssen. All of them are studying or have studied at the Toneelacademie Maastricht as performers.

Sometimes they are a mammal with 10 arms, 10 legs and 1 gut. Sometimes they are 5 girls. Sometimes they are no girls.

And after 5 days together in the mountains, everything is damp and dirty, everything becomes muffier and clearer. They comfort the instinctual and discomfort the analytical.

 (m_ountain ×d_(ance)× t_(ears)× f_(east)× g_(iggle))/(5 ×m_(uffy) g_(irl)) = 0 = ∞

The words fly across the screen and a voice floats through the room. In a strange room, a young woman types a letter to an unnamed recipient. She sings what she cannot type and types what she cannot sing, constantly searching for the right words.

The manic willpower to convey her message over an enormous distance blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction. i hope this finds you well is a correspondence between someone who is there and someone who is not. With a mix of voice, music and typed text, Sabine Pendry explores loss, delusions and how far people will go to make absence mean something.

About Sabine Pendry
Theatre maker, performer, singer and sound artist Sabine Pendry uses sound and language to construct precise, oppressive inner worlds. She strives to create an atmosphere that hovers somewhere between the supernatural and confession, with grim images and the voice at its centre. Through her work, she explores how themes such as grief, obsession, faith, death and the absurd are navigated and coded in modern culture. Musically, Pendry is inspired by electronic compositions and folk melodies, chants and experimental techniques. 

A series of strange events involving a plastic bag, a confused man and a wolf slowly challenge our perception: what is happening behind your back?

Nothing to see here is an interactive diorama that invites passers-by to immerse themselves in a kaleidoscopic experience. A visual and auditory game that questions reality: am I or do I have a body? And what is the reality that exists outside of us?

About Studio Nergens
Under the artistic direction of Celine Daemen, Studio Nergens creates performances at the intersection of music theatre, visual arts and immersive media. These are sensory experiences that place the audience at the centre and invite them to look inward in order to form personal associations in response to universal philosophical questions. Moving music and creative technology are the most important allies in this process.
 

Tabooboo tears down the stage in a whirlwind of anuses, baroque pop, camp and cabaret, somewhere between concert and performance. EDM and ballads steeped in humour and performativity play with themes such as desire, taboo and identity.

Both physical and symbolic openings, holes, crevices and spaces are portals to intimacy, pleasure and shared fantasies. Using music, voice, movement and text, Tabooboo creates a place to experiment and fail. This creates space for connection, vulnerability and the possibility to loosen our norms a little.

Maxime Dreesen, as his alter ego Tabooboo, presents new songs for the first time that are part of the longer-running project ANALBUM. ANALBUM will be released later, but at Festival Cement these songs will already have their own moment to shine.

This is not yet ANALBUM.
It is the moment before.

What if our night-time dreams are not only personal, but also have a collective meaning? What do our dreams say about the world and the spirit of the times in which we live during the day?

Based on hundreds of true dreams, Het Dromenpaleis takes you on a journey through a surreal theatrical installation. Our dreams pass by on a miniature stage where the scenery plays the leading role. Perspectives shift constantly, the story changes direction, and a shopping centre can transform into an ocean in the blink of an eye. Het Dromenpaleis  shows that everyday political reality penetrates deep into our subconscious. 

About the creators
Het Dromenpaleis  is the result of an ad hoc collective of theatre makers and artists, brought together by Zephyr Brüggen, Han Ruiz Buhrs and Niels Kuiters. They believe in the power of collective imagination and the connecting role of art, which they consider essential in today's surreal political reality. In their work, they make the audience participants and co-artists, while exploring the connections between the tangible and the magical, between reality and fiction, and between the personal and the collective.

Previously, Zephyr, Han and Niels collaborated on Woyzeck, een waanvoorstelling (the first performance ever in the world live on Zoom, in which we used Zoom as a location to kick against) and Schimmel, based on a new theatre text by Niels.

The preliminary research for Het Dromenpaleis was presented at Festival Cement in 2025. In 2023, the performance Vecht by Zephyr Brüggen and others was also shown at Festival Cement.

One-on-one reflection on programme making with researcher Ruth Benschop. Are you a programmer, festival organiser, curator or do you have a similar role? Then this is your chance to have an individual conversation about what it means to be a gatekeeper, creating legitimacy, resistance and the burning question: how do you do it right?

The second edition of Consultatiebureau De Badkuip is open from 25 to 27 March at Festival Cement. Be quick, because space is limited. Ruth Benschop (from the What Art Knows research group) will talk to you based on what she learned last time.

A consultation is free of charge and the conversation is for you. It fits in with the research tradition of the What Art Knows research group, in which we conduct research into and about generosity. In preparation for your consultation, we ask you to consider how you learned your profession and which formative experiences or inspiring examples taught you something. 

Ruth was invited to a previous edition of the Cement Festival as a viewing guest. During that festival, she studied how things happened naturally there. She became curious about the practice of programming and spoke to programmers last year to draw attention to what goes without saying. To find language together with programme makers to talk about their fall.

You can read more about the origins of Consultatiebureau De Badkuip and Ruth's analysis of her experiences as an observer in Cementgebaren, an interview between Ruth and Mina Etemad.

Consultatiebureau De Badkuip is a co-production of the What Art Knows research group (Zuyd University of Applied Sciences) and Festival Cement, created by Ruth Benschop and Leonie Clement. This consultation bureau is part of a longer process in which Festival Cement and the What Art Knows research group, together with you, curators, festival organisers, and programmers, reflect on and thus contribute to the art of programme making.

Want to grab a bite to eat before the show? Then join us for a Plate of Cement in our Festival Heart in the Verkadefabriek.

You can purchase your Plate of Cement online up to one day in advance, which will cost you €18.00. You can join us  from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM for a vegetarian or vegan meal, Served without raw building materials.

Friday 20 March - Friday 27 March 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM