From an old factory in Maastricht, Gable Roelofsen (1982) brings into practice what he thinks cultural policy needs: undogmatic thinking. Roelofsen is an actor, singer, writer, director, producer and currently chairman of the Council for Culture’s advisory committee on the future of opera and music theatre. He leads Het Geluid, a music theatre collective that produces performances that shift between different genres, using both traditional and modern methods, and addressing local questions as well as global problems. Striking examples of their work are the virtual-reality opera Weltatem (2016), the pool performance about ‘otherness’ entitled Contested Waters (2015) and the artistic food truck Cultuur Frituur (2011).

While Het Geluid creates art in unorthodox ways, it does so in a cultural sector in which all too often traditional, dogmatic lines of thinking prevail, Roelofsen says. One example of this is the assumptions about the artistic quality of genres, as a result of which non-commercial musicals, for instance, are unlikely to receive much subsidy. Another example is the stereotypes associated with artistic innovation: much of people's view on innovation is coloured by a ‘counterculture’ form of romanticism that values Bob Dylan-like enfants terribles. This makes them potentially blind to innovative practices that do not fit this rhetoric.

Roelofsen also sees another dogma in the relation between the megalopolis (linking Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht) and other regions in the Netherlands. While money, institutions and resources seem to be distributed rather fairly across the country, Amsterdam is still perceived to be the place to go for arts and culture. Yet in reality, a lot of artistic content originates from the provinces, and Amsterdam is just one of many reference points. Take the case of the home base of Het Geluid: while there are few places in the Netherlands further removed from Amsterdam than Maastricht, the latter city is central in the axes between Amsterdam, Brussels and the German Ruhr area.

For Roelofsen, the biggest challenge in cultural policy for the coming decades is overcoming these types of old-fashioned ideologies. While this will not be achieved from one day to the next, several practical steps can and must be taken.