Oerol Festival Announces First Names for Oerol 2026

Forty-five years ago, Oerol began as an experimental street theatre festival. Today, it has grown into Europe’s largest site-specific arts festival, where disciplines intersect and blend freely. Its idiosyncratic and experimental spirit has always remained: Oerol pushes boundaries, asks questions, and invites audiences to see differently within the unique setting of the Terschelling landscape.

For this 45th edition, Oerol explores how we can redefine our relationship to the world around us: to one another, to nature, to the structures that shape us, and to the changes that challenge us. The makers, performances, and visual art projects coming to Terschelling move between personal stories and major social issues: identity, community, loss, imagining the future, and the tension between freedom and expectation.

Island Stories

Cabaret performer Dolf Jansen makes his debut at Oerol: “I am more than proud that after 45 years of Oerol I am finally becoming *keunstner-yn-residensje*!” For the festival, he will create a unique series of six-month conferences — a daily evolving performance that can appear anywhere: in dune hollows, cafés, barns, and at the playing locations of other performances. Each day brings a fresh mix of island stories, encounters, the climate crisis, and the absurdity of the news.

Collectief Blauwdruk gives sharp expression to the times we live in with the all-encompassing Privilege Trilogy. Blauwdruk completely dismantled the repertoire of Vondel and rebuilt the remains into a “blissfully linguistic” site-specific theatre evening about both the rise and the fall of humanity.

Mathieu Wijdeven also returns to the past with Theater Rotterdam in order to better understand the present. In Helstone & The Mansion of the Gods, he explores the many meanings of the first Surinamese opera, Het Pand der Goden (1906) by Johannes Helstone, for which Wijdeven’s great-great-grandfather designed the scenography. After its premiere, the opera disappeared into an archive drawer and was not performed again until one hundred and eighteen years later — an event that stirred much discussion.

Zoek de verschillen (Spot the Differences) is a musical and humorous game show by BonteHond. In the game, a white mother and a Black daughter stand opposite each other to prove their friendship. They are evenly matched, closely connected, and know each other better than anyone. But what happens when they must answer difficult questions? And when others insist on showing them how different they are?

Created exclusively for Oerol, George Tobal presents AZC the Musical — a musical comedy about a society desperately fighting for its own righteousness. On Terschelling, where a former asylum seekers’ centre made way for luxury apartments, five theatre makers explore in this social satire whether tolerance can be traded for a merciless “own people first” rhetoric.

In a raw, humorous, and poetic mix of text, song — featuring singers from Terschelling — and music, North Side Story by YoungGangsters lays bare, with sharp irony and empathy, the cultural and social tensions between old and new residents, between pride and transition, between meat and vegan, between beer and kombucha. Together with maker Romke Gabe Draaijer, Tryater portrays in De Oare Kant (The Other Side) how a love story tilts and transforms. What happens when the present changes — and what does that mean for the past you share?

Composer, harpist, and maker Remy van Kesteren explores in Threads how his most recent album can be translated into a solo form in which harp, loops, samples, and vocal material merge into a cohesive structure. In collaboration with video artist Jurjen Alkema, a real-time audiovisual system emerges in which image and sound respond directly to one another.