Regional television broadcasters want to broadcast drama and theater groups are looking for a greater reach. Collaboration is obvious. And this is how more and more initiatives for co-productions arose in the past year. The plans are optimistic, but the practice is sometimes unruly. “Most of all, everyone wants to be cheap.”
For Ira Judkovskaja it is a new experience: participating in treatment. Long sessions with director, screenwriter, and producers to devise, write and revise the story, character development, and setting of a new television series, and you can use such as ‘iptv subscription’ in setting up new series. Judkovskaja is a stage director and artistic director of the Frisian theater company Tryater. For the first time, the company is now collaborating with Omrop Fryslân on the development of a large-scale drama series, which should be screened at the end of 2011. “Of course there was already cooperation,” says Judkovskaya, who is originally from Russia. “Omrop Fryslân regularly records our performances and our actors participate in their productions.” The idea for a joint drama series got off the ground when the young film director Mirjam de Wit approached Omrop Fryslân with a plan. She wanted to make a film about a group of young people in a Frisian village, one of which was killed in an accident. Working title: De Keet, to the drinking, shed where the group meets.
Theater on television
After a hiatus of a few decades, registrations of theater performances are again broadcast on Dutch television in August. The project, by (television) producer and director Marc Nelissen, is eagerly awaited, but also raises questions. Because what is the best way to show theater on television? Do you have to register theater as a football match? Or do you need to adapt and create a new autonomous work of art? Are intermediate forms conceivable? Simon van den Berg asked makers who bridge the gap between theater and television for their views on how both can complement each other. In the theater world, it is often referred to nostalgically: the theater recordings from the fifties and sixties. Every Thursday evening a piece from the theater repertoire was broadcast by one of the public broadcasters. In the decades that followed, broadcasters started to produce drama themselves specifically for the medium, and theater got less and less space on television.
A new project wants to reverse the trend. Last theater season, the Theater and Television foundation of (television) producer and director Marc Nelissen registered six performances, which will be broadcast in full around the Uitmarkt at the end of August (see box). The project is a collaboration of the foundation with the NPS, AVRO, and VPRO and is supported by the Cobo Fund and actors’ interest organization Norma. But during the presentation of the first images, The Boermans stated in a speech that the story as far as he concerned was not yet finished with these registrations. He thinks it should be possible to create one performance from scratch for both the stage and the television screen. The project of Marc Nelissen is all about pure registrations – Nelissen himself likes to use the comparison with broadcasts of football matches – Boermans would actually like to make adaptations with adjustments in the performances to make them more suitable for television.
