Wessel De Vries
Wessel De Vries is a playwright and director working for the Frisian theatre company Tryater in the Netherlands. Since 2017 he has been writing plays in Frisian, a minority language in the Netherlands with around 400.000 native speakers. Since 2022 he participated in PHONE, a project funded by the European Union to stimulate cooperation between minority language theatres all around Europe. In 2025 he was the director of Sallika Lasten Minun Tykö by Kväänniteatteri in Norway. He directed the first play ever staged entirely in Kven which is a minority endangered language from Norway. As of today, there are only around 1000 Kven language speakers left.
Wessel de Vries lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He teaches playwrighting.
During the festival Wessel will facilitate the worksho How far do you go (to make theatre in a minority language)?
To direct the first play in the endangered Kven language, playwright and director Wessel de Vries traveled far away from home. Far above the polar circle (where it was cold an dark) rehearsals started at Kvääniteatteri, and a lot of big challenges had to be faced. What do you do if your actors don’t speak the minority language the play is in (because there are no living actors that can speak it)? How will you connect with the audience when the majority does not speak the language as well? How will you cope with the community that speaks the language (of for whom the language is vital) and has opinions about your play? How do you find the freedom to make a piece of art instead of only a piece of language emancipation?
All these questions will be discussed in this workshop: the obstacles, solutions, despair and hope. There might be a lot of challenges when you make theatre in a minority language. You have to go far. But most of the time it’s worth it. Because after the challenges we faced in Northern Norway, the artistic product was fulfilling: emancipatory, filled with language, and art at the same time.