Rural dramaturgies: thinking alternative stories of rural place in Haren and the former Limburg mining area

This text was written as part of the 'Dorpsdramaturgie" project that took place in Limburg, Haren and Aalst. It was presented during the New Ruralities symposium in Brussels and was made possible with support by the Flemish government. 

1. Village dramaturgy as a new practice

The idea of the village dramaturg came about when working as Kunstenplatform PLAN B in different rural contexts in Belgium. Collaborating with many different artists, residents, experts, landscapes and environments, we couldn’t help but wonder: Who are we in this ecosystem? The term became a way to describe a role that we already assumed in our practice but for which we had no terminology. To further deepen (our understanding of) that practice, we set up camp in two Belgian places: the Limburg mining area and in Haren, a Brussels district. These became our testing grounds to find out what it could mean to be a village dramaturge. This research was performed in collaboration with Martha Balthazar in Limburg, and Aulona Fetahaj in Haren.

In her text Thinking No-One's Thought (2015), dramaturg Maaike Bleeker describes dramaturgy as a process that takes place between elements. Making a parallel with Deleuze and Guattari's definition of thinking in What is Philosophy (1991), Bleeker describes dramaturgy as a thought process that takes place between human and more than human elements. For her, dramaturgy is similar. It is the practice of thinking ‘no one's thought’. The dramaturg takes care of the thoughts that develop in the theater studio as a result of the relationships between workers, choreography, texts, and scenographic objects. The dramaturg tends to the thoughts that emerge from the relations between the different elements and to the process of formulating, shaping, (dis)assembling these thoughts together with the team, the environment and possible audiences.

This role of city dramaturg has become increasingly popular in the Belgian and Dutch performing arts over the last decade. Early adopters can be found e.g. in the Brussels city theatre KVS, where a team of city dramaturgs is active. The practice has its origins in the observation that the rapidly changing urban reality is not reflected in the theater, and that, in turn, the theater does not explore this new urban context. From our perspective, this pertinent observation is not limited to urban reality, nor to the discipline of theater. Rural reality, with its specific dynamics, remains underrepresented in contemporary art as a whole. The arts become entrenched in the city. 

While Bleeker talks about processes of theater making and the city dramaturg is a job in a theatre, this practice does not have to be strictly limited to the theater studio. A place or area also has its ‘thoughts’. In our two years of research, we wanted to co-think the thoughts of the amorphous constellations called Haren and the former Limburg mining area. 

A village dramaturg tries to imagine the village as a confluence of ruralities consisting of a set of ever shifting relationships. In this way, village dramaturgs seek to embody themes, dynamics, and perspectives from the countryside in their artistic projects, which the arts currently lack. In classical interpretations of the role of the dramaturg in theatre, the artist and the dramaturg have very distinct roles. Bleeker claims that the dramaturgical is a perspective that can be enacted by everyone involved in the matter. In this project, everyone was a village dramaturg. After PLAN B had initiated the project, inhabitants, organisers, experts and other artists joined them in the project of taking on and working with that perspective. Rather than taking on a defined function within a project, village dramaturgy is a principle of being with, but even more so: being within.

But then why village dramaturgy and not rural dramaturgy? As the city is the focal point of  ‘urbanity’, the village comes to represent the rural. Even if the village is no longer unambiguously rural, especially in the densely populated context of the Belgian countryside, it remains a productive topos to think rurality from and through. Not despite, but rather because of its ambiguous rural status. The village of the 19th century, an isolated, relatively autonomous and small community organised around a church tower, is disappearing in Flanders and Brussels, instead making way for urban sprawl. That means the playing field of the village dramaturg becomes less clearly delimitated, but all the more connected to translocal and global issues and topics. 

In the following lines we convey the results that PLAN B obtained while adopting the role of the 'village dramaturge' in Haren and Limburg. We describe the dynamics we experienced as (temporary) parts of the set of relationships constituting these places and the artistic forms we devised to co-shape these elements, relationships and dynamics. Firstly, we discuss how Haren can be interpreted as a site of rural resistance. Afterwards, we discuss interpreting and giving shape to the cultural memory of the Limburg mining area. Lastly, we open some perspectives on the future of village dramaturgy. 

2. Dynamics of rural resistance in Haren 

Haren and the Limburg mining area are peripheral areas of Belgium in transition. Different actors want to ‘develop’ these areas, each with their own goals. During our research, we noticed that the associated protests and counterculture reveal something about the village, the thoughts emerging there and the role that the village dramaturg can play in this.

Haren: a city disguised as a village

In the 19th century, Haren was a typical Flemish agricultural village north of Brussels. During industrialization, Brussels Capital annexed the village of 4,000 inhabitants in 1921 to expand the capital's port (Geens 1981). 

The once agricultural village was gradually consumed by large-scale infrastructure projects, including the railway platform and the NATO headquarters, all justified under the banner of the ‘public interest’ (Geens, 1981). While other annexed areas have seen strong population growth, Haren lags far behind. In 2023 it counted only 7,231 inhabitants. By comparison, Neder-Over-Heembeek, also annexed in 1921, grew from 4,000 to 22,347 inhabitants in 2023 (AlleCijfers.be 2025; Van Der Elst 2021). Indeed, although Haren is definitely part of the city, with its hyperdiversity, space to roam and sharp edges, Haren is often called ‘the last Brussels village’. The streets are not as busy as in the surrounding communities, there is a culture of keeping vegetable gardens (see Figure 1), and the older residents still have vivid memories of the days when chicory was farmed in the fields. This rural image is celebrated by the Brussels government, making ‘the last Brussels village’ part of their city marketing. This feels a bit cynical though, knowing that these rural echoes mainly stem from decades of neglect and imposed isolation from the city. 

Figure 1: Photo of Haren, the cranes for the construction of a prison looming over the horizon. Photo by the authors in 2020. 

In her thesis Local communities and the policy apparatus (1981), Geens argues that these top-down decisions by the government stem from so-called ‘silent plans’: policies that are already implicitly implemented before they are formally decided. These are plans that are drawn up by policy makers during private meetings and discussions but have not yet been ratified. Even when plans are drafted and quietly reach decision-makers, the absence of official documents or public communication leaves residents poorly equipped to contest them (Geens, personal communication, March 4, 2025). 

In Haren, this meant decades of neglect, with large infrastructure projects and mega stores being given space (as depicted in Figure 2, Claes 2014), while community services and infrastructure such as a sports hall, sewerage, or administrative service center were long overdue. The fact that policymakers did not learn from this history is evidenced by the latest major construction project in Haren: a prison ‘village’ for 1,200 inmates, which opened in 2022.

Figure 2: A poster created by artist Axel Claes in collaboration with local residents during a protest workshop in response to the planned prison (2014). Source: chez rosi 2025.

Haren is no longer a village, yet the city also feels far away. Its village character still resonates in the streetscape and in the minds of its inhabitants. Its relative isolation and long-standing neglect may, paradoxically, have strengthened and enriched community life —turning its back to the city while sustaining traditions such as the weekly fair and the village ball (Geens, 1981).

Instead of lamenting what has disappeared or fallen into disrepair, it is more interesting to scrutinize what Haren has gained from this rather unique urbanization process. In the book Terres des villes by Cahn et al. (2018:234) it is for example argued that due to the lack of interest from government and bourgeoisie, gentrification did not take place in Haren:

The residents who arrived after the annexation do not settle on a tabula rasa that would have been the dignified urbanized village. Rather, they become the bearers of a partial and uncertain continuity. When they commit themselves to local life or describe their neighborhood, they activate fragments of the past. [...] Folk culture has not disappeared.

A history of protest: As long as it’s a vegetable garden

The unofficial start of PLAN B’s project in Haren already took place in 2019, during a film school assignment of one of our members. The connections made during these few months, fuelled the ambition for a more long-term involvement in Haren. In 2023, Kunstenplatform PLAN B received two years of funding from the Flemish government to develop the village dramaturgy project in Haren and the Limburg mining area. Quite soon we decided to dive into the decades long history of resistance and protest in Haren against the annexation and against the imposed infrastructures. Within our framework we see these residents and activists also as village dramaturgs. Although PLAN B was not yet involved in the events described below, we think it’s interesting to discuss it nevertheless, as it tells us something about the role a village dramaturge can play - be it an artist, a resident, or activist. Next to that, the nature of these protests also reveals something about how Haren tries to protect its hybrid form. 

Early in our research we met Laurent, a member of Haren’s neighborhood committee and one of the leading figures of the local protest against the prison. The way he thinks about Haren, how he links it to larger dynamics, and connects various actors, perfectly suits the role of the village dramaturg. His position and ideas were further explored in an interview (personal communication, 19 February 2025):

In 2012, we founded the Haren Buiten movement, a collective that discussed autonomy for Haren. We organized sessions where people could form opinions about the prison project. This created a shared identity in our struggle. We weren't just a committee against the prison; we had been thinking about Haren’s future for some time. This led to initiatives such as the Patatistes, where we planted potatoes on the site and neighbors got to know each other.

A screenshot of the video Patatistes de Haren that depicts this action is shown in Figure 3 (Zad de Haren 2024). This ultimately led to the occupation of the area by the ZAD movement (Zone à Defendre) in 2014, a form of activism in which threatened natural or agricultural areas are permanently occupied to prevent them from being lost.

Figure 3: Screenshot of a video of the Patatistes action, when a group of activists and local residents planted potatoes on the site of the planned prison (2014). Source: Zad de Haren.

It is striking how rural iconography featured in the protest against the prison: images of chicory and carrots, slogans such as ‘Patates partout, prison nulle part’ "[Potatoes everywhere, prison nowhere]", the dream of an educational vegetable garden as an alternative to the prison (Collectif Vrije Keelbeek Libre, 2019). Local collectives that emerged during the protest later became managers of vacant lots, which they plowed into collective vegetable gardens. One resident put it this way: ‘As long as it's a vegetable garden, it won't become an apartment block’ (Vandereyken, personal communication, 20 March 2024). 

The local protest consisted of a diverse group of people, both newcomers and those born and raised in Haren, protesting against the prison, for the preservation of green space, and against the government that repeatedly steamrolled them with concrete projects. However, it is the dormant history of Haren, how it turned its back on the city, the echoes of the village—that gave the protest a shared imagination. In that imagination, the future Haren was not a copy of the uniform city, but a hybrid place—somewhere between city and countryside. 

Perhaps the protest in Haren is first and foremost a protest against metropolitization as it is all too often imposed: without consultation, with glass and concrete, without people as the measure. What role can the village dramaturg play in local dynamics of protest and resistance? As a visitor in a context of which they are only a temporary part, the danger of instrumentalization lurks around the corner. Strong statements can strengthen an artist's image, but that does not mean they resonate with the local context. In the book Terres des villes, Cahn et al. offer a meaningful description of how the village dramaturg can play a role in this as a disseminator of stories: ‘Repeating stories in these Brussels territories that have been annexed, marginalised and made invisible may help us to better cope with the current conquest, expansion and urban standardisation that are, more than ever, at work’ (2018:226).

Activation of an alternative rurality: we are all neighbours

So how can we, as village dramaturgs, contribute to telling, spreading, and (re)activating these marginalised stories in Haren? We tried to answer this question through two actions: an intervention at the entry of the prison, and various soundwalk workshops in the public spaces of Haren.

Through conversations, interviews, workshops and archival research, we quickly came to the conclusion that there is a committed undercurrent in Haren that cultivates the mental image of ‘the village’ in Haren. For example, there is the organization that manages a collective vegetable garden based on the ideal of social cohesion and as a celebration of Haren's rural history, but which nevertheless promotes one particular way of being together: monthly meetings, in French or Dutch, with certain rules that must be followed. As village dramaturgs, we found it interesting to support an initiative that opens up this idea of social cohesion to a community that is often excluded from Haren: the incarcerated and their visitors. This exclusion is a double one: there is the physical exclusion from society and the prejudices they have to face, but also the fact that the prison is built at the very edge of Brussels, in an area that is not easily reachable by public transport. 

Now that the prison has been built, the neighborhood committee is coming to terms with this new reality – no longer against, but with the prison. Under the motto “we're all neighbors,” they have been organizing a gathering at the prison entrance for the past two years and are openly wondering how the prison and Haren can coexist. Figure 4 shows the authors’ photo of their latest gathering in 2025. With Kunstenplatform PLAN B, we joined this gathering and created a small intervention where visitors and residents could make signposts in response to the question ‘What can Haren do for you? What do you need here?’. Needs were specific: a taxi, a bus service, but also surprisingly personal. As depicted in Figure 5, small messages such as ‘Courages a toutes les familles des détenus’ adorned the signs. The signs became not only a collection of needs, but also messages to others: visitors with whom they felt connected, and prisoners serving sentences who will one day leave the prison disoriented. Over two days of conversations at the entrance, it became clear there was a need for communication across the walls.

Figure 4 (left): Photo of the neighborhood gathering at the prison entrance by the authors in 2025. Figure 5 (right): Photo of the signposts at the prison entrance by the authors in 2025.    

Besides the intervention at the prison, we also held several soundwalk workshops in collaboration with sound artist Némo Camus, as depicted in Figure 6 and 7. Sound proved to be a perfect carrier to (re)activate stories and memories. While walking and listening, the rustling of the leaves became an important personage, as did the planes, trains, and the distant sounds from the prison. Stories were shared about the friendships that were created during the struggle against the prison, or about the village-like character of Haren that made people decide to move to Haren.

Every workshop was different, but we always asked two questions; one before the walk: ‘what do you think you will hear?’, and one during the walk: ‘what are you actually hearing?’. In between these two questions, a space was created that said a lot about Haren. New thoughts emerged that helped us think Haren as the inbetween space that it is. It showed our preconceptions of what a village or city is and could be. The soundwalk became a dramaturgic process of listening to thoughts emerging from the space, the questions asked upfront, the participants, the plants,… These workshops crystallised in a small interactive publication with instructions, that makes the soundwalk workshop available for everyone (see Figure 8). 

Figure 6: Photo of a soundwalk workshop by Aulona Fetahaj in 2025. Figure 7: Photo of a soundwalk workshop by the authors in 2025. Figure 8: Photo of a publication by the authors and graphic designer Pia Jacques de Dixmude, with drawings from a soundwalk participant, in 2025.

3. The former Limburg mining area: a (new) culture of memory

The Flemish part of Belgium's mining history began in 1901 when coal was discovered in the Limburg village of As. Seven coal mines sprang up in a very sparsely populated region. Additional workers came from the rest of the country, later from Italy and Eastern Europe, and even later from Spain, Turkey, Morocco, and Greece. When the mines closed at the end of the 20th century, the population of Genk, now the largest city in the region, had grown from 2,000 to 60,000 inhabitants (Sociaal Economisch Instituut 2003). At that time, the Ford car factory ensured employment and the industrial character of the region. However, when Ford finally closed its doors in 2014, it marked the beginning of a transition still taking place today. 

The relationship between the present, past, and future of this place is tangible everywhere. In the landscape, marked by mine shafts and slag heaps, but also in our conversations with (former) residents and experts. Now that heavy industry appears to be a thing of the past, the question of the future looms large in the Limburg sky. Unlike in Haren, the urban authorities here have a clear vision: the mining heritage must be well preserved and made publically accessible. This idea is already having effect. The Beringen mine is now called Be-Mine and houses a mining museum, swimming pool and a shopping mall. Meanwhile, the slag heaps of Maasmechelen are now a national park with a resort where you can walk and cycle over the scars of mining. Behind these changes, there is also an economic principle: (heritage) tourism must become the driving force behind the economic transition of the region. 

the time of this place

The importance of this economic transition became clear to us after our first few days on Limburg soil. In the wake of the residents, we saw a different way of dealing with heritage. Visiting a Portuguese clubhouse named 25 Abril, after the Portuguese revolution, we became aware of the undercurrent of existing heritage practices that had little to do with the dominant narrative of cultural institutions, the things they deemed worthy of remembering and the way that remembering should be done.

The more we zoomed in on this specific question about the role of cultural memory, the more we noticed tensions active in the area. The heritage that is being used for the economic transition of the area has little to do with the memories that are important to the community. This need to activate cultural memory is illustrated in an interview (personal communication, 27 March 2024) with Paul Boutsen, a local resident, heritage expert, and former social worker:

The most important function of heritage is to understand why society is what it is today. You cannot understand this place if you do not know its heritage. But now it is being turned into something symbolic, something distant, when it should be kept alive.

In the same interview, he also argued that social struggle should be part of heritage. That social struggle has many similarities with the history of Haren:

Many of the special and unique places and organizations in this region have emerged from activism. The region has become what it is today through stubborn pioneering work. In history, you will always read that it is thanks to mayors or aldermen, but that is of course not true.

That is why, as village dramaturgs, we wanted to propose a different approach to cultural memory. In contrast to the version that is stripped of class struggle, poverty, exploitation, and racism, we wondered what a more grassroots and living version of that cultural memory might look like. We wanted to develop a form of people's history, an explicitly politicized form of historiography, based on the idea that history is driven by conflict and struggle, and that tries to adopt a bottom-up perspective (Zinn 1995). In addition, this form must allow for change and thus allow for a living cultural memory that is focused on the future. For that we needed a method for research. Each interview in the Limburg section of this research project started with the same question: “Who or what should be remembered in this place?”

Figure 9: detail of the final publication of the calendar, by the authors 2025. 

A calendar of places

Our conversations yielded so many important moments, people and events that, when we wrote them down in our notebooks, an artistic form emerged almost by accident. Our notebooks became a calendar of memorable days –  days that matter to the people of the region because they make the place what it is. There were days remembering seemingly small things, like walks with a granddad. But there were also days about big events, like the one remembering the legal victory in a social exploitation case of truck driver Stefan Popescu against logistics giant H. Essers, the region's biggest employer. For this day we created and distributed a sticker (Figure 9.)

Figure 10: Cover and months of April and October of the final publication of the calendar, by the authors 2025. 

We wondered what a calendar of a place could be. And how does that calendar provide a framework for people to develop their own local cultural memory? Can you use a calendar, like a topographical map, to orient yourself in a place? Can a shared calendar make (alternative) no-one’s thoughts emerge? The calendar (Figure 10), a place where everyone can put something on the agenda, proved to be a powerful dramaturgical tool. It offered a technique for weaving the different stories and concerns of this place together. In addition, it enabled participation –  noting or devising a day and carrying it out together was a concrete practice that engaged a multitude of community members. Remarkably, the more we looked back at the history of this place, the more we ended up focusing on its future. After all, archiving is a future oriented practice. The question then, of course, is what future does a community want to manifest.

In this hotel, everyone is welcome 

Last year, a hotel in the Limburg village of Zutendaal was converted into a reception center for refugees. In opposition to the federal decision, Mayor Schrijvers claims that the ‘rural character’ of Zutendaal is not compatible with a reception center (De Morgen 17 June 2024). 

This anecdote is particularly important in this context. The mayor considers the village to be a place where there is no room for refugees or refugee centers. In this line of thinking, refugee centers are an urban responsibility and (cultural) diversity is a reality that should take place far away from rural areas. On June 30, 2024, the far-right organization Voorpost occupied the hotel, breaking into the building and unfurling banners with anti-immigration slogans. This situation is exemplary of the broader rural context, where a shift to the right is accelerating, both in Belgium and in other European countries (Rickardsson 2021). It also shows how this place, and specifically its rural qualities, are contested. It illustrates the necessity of collectively commemorating moments of violence and resistance. 

The practice of cultivating days of remembrance, in this case with Hotel Apollo Day, allowed us as village dramaturgs to tend to the process of emerging thoughts (in this case: memories) of the village. Hotel Apollo Day was as much inspired by the violence of June 30th, as by the solidarity movement it sparked. (Former) inhabitants raised money to buy toys for the children living in the center. In an attempt to feed the undercurrent of solidarity in the calendar, we imagined how the hotel could once again become a symbol of hospitality on this day. Therefore, Carole de Buck (2025) made a drawing of a banner, rolled out from the hotel, saying: ‘In this hotel, everyone is welcome’, reversing the discourse of the Voorpost occupiers (see Figure 11). Thus we attempted to make a painful history visible, but also to formulate an alternative future in which rural spaces could be an environment for solidarity and that are capable of welcoming difference. 

Figure 11 (left): Drawing from the calendar by Carole de Buck, depicting the hotel where, in a speculative move, the banner held up is not anti-migration but reads ‘in this hotel, everyone is welcome’ 2025. Figure 12 (right): Photo of the Sint Arbera tree/patron saint, by the authors.

A new patron 

Sometimes all we did was write a date, description and drawing in our calendar, later published. Other times, we collectively created a ritual to be carried out yearly. One was proposed by artist Gökhan Kızılbuğa: the day of Sint Arbera, a reworking of the region’s Saint Barbara celebration, patron of dangerous trades like mining. Reacting to today’s harmless nostalgia, Kızılbuğa created a new icon: Sint Arbera, one of the trees planted to shield Sledderlo’s working-class community from toxic factory fumes. Circumstances were so bad the trees died almost immediately. On the day of Sint Arbera, the dead tree was taken to the community centre, adorned by local children, then returned in a parade to its place, serving as a contemporary patron: protecting the community from harm and more importantly: denouncing the status quo (see Figure 12).

Both days use figures and moments to anchor communities in time and space. Allowing them to experience, remember and enact their history and their environment in an alternative way. Today these calendars are hanging on walls of houses, cultural and social institutions in and outside of the area. In between the days of remembrance, the birthdays of friends and family are noted. The calendars by themselves do not generate a new culture of memory. While we certainly hope and believe that many days are remembered and talked about still, not many of them will still be executed in the coming years. What remains is mostly the tool of the calendar and the discursive framework of village dramaturgy and the improbable connections created by the process. 

4. Future possibilities 

Looking back on our activities in both Haren and the former Limburg mining area, it becomes apparent how these areas are undergoing deep transformations. These are places where diverse social, economic and cultural tendencies and needs co-exist, all too often in friction with one another and characterised by a disparity in scale. We argue that the rural in these two places is not lost, but instead has become a rural undercurrent  (Rural School of Economics 2022).  

Figure 13: Drawing in the calendar by Ignace Wouters based on a scribble found on the wall of a cafeteria of a closed Renault Factory in Vilvoorde (Belgium) 2025.

The village dramaturg has a few important tools for thinking through and with these mental spaces. The most important of these is probably time. A long-term presence is necessary to gain an understanding of an environment and its dynamics. The projects described here span two years and are not considered definitive or finished. In addition to this, we see all residents and users of an environment as experts in everyday life. Through interviews or guided tours, they share that expertise and lead the explorations of place, thus helping to re-imagine the village. It is the role of the dramaturg to give shape to the thoughts that slowly emerges in this process, laying bare alternative stories of rural space.

Artistic formats like the calendar created in, with, and for the residents of former mining areas, and the workshops and intervention in Haren, embody ruralities from within and (allow us to) think a form of rurality that goes against the grain of both normative preconceptions surrounding rural environments and tendencies like rapid urbanisation and right wing populism. They are also formats that can be reproduced in other contexts. Each environment could have its own calendar, as each location could be the arena of a sound workshop diving into the sounds we expect to hear and the sounds we actually hear. 

Next to the rural dynamics of protest and the culture of memory identified in this paper, there are myriad more ways of reading rural environments. Diversifying artistic and dramaturgical means with which we think along rural space can give us tools and knowledge for a deeper understanding of these spaces. This knowledge and tools can be used by (future) village dramaturgs and other actors to develop more projects, contributing to new rural landscapes, alternative mental spaces and strengthening the communities that make them grow. The role of the village dramaturg is that of a seismograph and a megaphone: detecting what is alive and supporting what is present. With this research and paper we hope to have contributed methodologies that can be adapted for many practitioners and places. Their strength lies in being used in multiple and concrete ways, to keep monitoring processes of metropolitization and its effects on inhabitants on the one hand, and keep feeding the seedlings of rural undercurrents on the other.

5. Reference list

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