Speech Minister Gouke Moes
17 November 2025
[the spoken word applies]
Good evening to each and every one of you who loves art, dance and, of course, who loves you , Marco Gerris.
It is a true honour and a great privilege for me to present the Johannes Vermeer Award here tonight. It is, in a way, the Dutch Nobel Award dedicated to art and culture.
In a country brimming with artistic talent, there are always those who stand out even more, due to their exceptional gifts, but more so, because of how they choose to use them.
Dear Marco Gerris, the members of the Johannes Vermeer Award jury have unanimously recognised you as such an outstanding individual. It is particularly special that this year, for the very first time, the Johannes Vermeer Award is being presented to someone who not only impressively masters the artistic language of dance, but enriches it even more with every new production.
Through art and culture, we express who we are, as a nation, as a community, as individuals. Dance is one of the many forms of expression humankind has developed. It is a language with many dialects and nuances. Sometimes dance expresses what we fail to bring across in words.
The Dutch poet Jan Jacob Slauerhoff knew this much only too well. From 1930 to 1935 he was married, unhappily though, to the dancer Darja Collin. During their marriage she run a dance school opposite the Malieveld, as seen from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.
Darja Collin became one of the pioneers of modern dance in the Netherlands. The biography published last month, written by Arend Hulshof, inclides a delightful anecdote.
After the Second World War, Collin led the ballet of the Dutch Opera. She rehearsed in Amsterdam’s Stadsschouwburg (City Theater). There was often a slight, skinny boy peering through a hole in the wall, watching how she drilled her dancers. That boy was Hans van Manen, now 93 years old and himself such a great innovator of dance.
The poet Slauerhoff saw how his dancing wife, Darja Collin, surpassed him in expressing emotions. With a single gesture she could achieve what he could not manage in a hundred words. He wrote a poem about it:
[poem]
If only once I could set down your dance
In a poem freed at last from words so tight,
And drift for one brief moment with the chance
To move as loose and lithe as you in air and light
Your body doing what mine never can
Not quite unbound from earth, as what I write
Still drags itself up slowly from the ground
Heavier than my mind, yet somehow able to rise
With one quick turn, a gesture of your hand,
You throw out rage, or sorrow, or delight,
Where I spend a hundred words and fail again.
Thought should be lightest, yet grows grim and grand,
While dance can give the body tired or slight
A soul, a kind of grace, and never end.
Dear Marco,
You stand in a tradition of innovators of dance in the Netherlands. And you are unique in the way you proceed. You have brought contemporary art forms such as hip-hop dance, freestyle and urban sports into the theatre. In doing so, you have persuaded ever new groups of people of the expressive power of dance.
Marco, I recognise a teacher in you. Let me explain. As an English teacher, I tried to help my pupils develop both their passive and active language skills. Passive skills involve listening and reading. Active skills are about speaking and writing, expressing yourself, in other words.
Passive skills are usually easier to acquire than active ones. Older people who learned English at school can usually read very well, and in general they can listen quite well too. However, ask them to speak English, and they will often sound like Louis van Gaal’ Dunglish, delivered hesitantly and with embarrassment. Expressing yourself is more challenging than simply seeing, hearing or reading how someone else does it.
As an English teacher, I focused on lowering, and ideally removing, the threshold of embarrassment when speaking your mind in English. Teachers have all sorts of tricks for this. Making a bit of a fool of yourself, for example, always works. You then go through a process together with your pupils. And in doing so, you normalise what was previously new, daunting and unfamiliar.
You do something similar with dance, Marco. You bring people into the theatre and teach them to understand your language. They watch dancers perform movements they could never achieve themselves.
And in the end, there are always some who begin to enjoy standing on stage themselves and expressing dance in their own way. That, too, requires crossing a threshold. It certainly does for me.
The jury report says: “Dance has no language barrier.” Indeed, on stage, it makes no difference whether a dancer speaks Dutch, English, Chinese or Swahili.
But dance as a cultural means of expression, as a language, in my view, does have quite a high barrier.
Football, for instance, is quite different. Even if you’re not very good at it, it’s completely normal to give it a go, to simply join in. Other sports, too, are increasingly accessible. Like fitness or yoga. In some circles, it has almost become the norm, the culture, to take part.
Marco Gerris, as a pioneer and inspirer of dance theatre in the Netherlands, you lower barriers. You make dance accessible to ever new groups of people. You connect to the living movement language of the streets. And in doing so, you shift the norm, you make dance normal. In essence you say: if you want to come and watch, you’re welcome. And you can also, though you don’t have to, join in, and you needn’t be ashamed of doing so.
You extend that invitation to established creators and companies in the worlds of classical music and ballet as well. You, that freestyle skater from Amsterdam’s Vondelpark, have lowered their threshold too, opening the door for them to hip-hop and skate culture.
I wish for you that you may continue, together with others, to break through conventional codes. To keep reinventing yourself, to expand the expressive power of dance. And to lower barriers. As an ambassador, an inspirer and a teacher of your dance.
Thank you.