Tweet27-12-2010 om 12:03 by Sueli Brodin

There are two expressions which still puzzle me in the Netherlands, because they are both very common and yet contradictory. The Dutch use them in all sorts of situations and to me they are typical of their unique double approach to life:

“Doe maar gewoon, dan doe je al gek genoeg”, or simply “Doe maar gewoon”: Just act normal, and you will act crazy enough, meaning “Blend in, don’t stick out from the crowd.”


And: “Het moet kunnen”, or just “Moet kunnen”: This must be possible, in the sense of “I’m going to stick out by doing this, but what the heck.”

This second expression is actually characteristic of the Dutch entrepreneurial spirit, which thinks in terms of yet another very common saying: "Gewoon doen", or "Just do it".

A quick check on Twitter shows that both #doemaargewoon, #moetkunnen and #gewoondoen are indeed very popular hashtags among Dutch Twitterers.



Like many foreigners, my first encounter with a “Doe maar gewoon” moment was at my husband’s parents’ house when I understood that we were not meant to help ourselves to more than one biscuit from the biscuit box, because my mother in law closed the lid after serving everyone and put the box back into the kitchen cupboard.



But then, my mother in law is also the first one to smilingly give in to her grandchildren’s craving for a second piece of her delicious homemade apple pie: “Het moet kunnen,” she thinks out loud.

At the Euregio-Taalregio Language conference in earlier October, Huibert de Man, a professor at the Maastricht School of Management, illustrated the same ambivalent cultural feature of the Dutch with an experience he had in India. He had asked a mixed group of Dutch and Indian students to prepare an assignment following a set of guidelines. As it turned out, the Indian students faithfully stuck to his instructions, whereas several of the Dutch didn’t. And much to the Indian students’ protest, he had not penalised the insubordinate Dutch for disregarding the guidelines, and had even rewarded some of them high marks for the originality they had displayed in their work.

The skill, especially for a foreigner, is to sense when the situation calls for conventional behaviour, or when it is possible and even welcome to bend the system.

At PechaKucha Night however, one thing is obvious: the appeal of the fixed 20 x 20 presentation format (20 slides x 20 seconds per slide) seems to lie precisely in the fact that it provokes candidate speakers into devising creative ways to experiment and play with it.



Stijn Segers: Musical Highway

That’s how over the past editions, we’ve seen Liesbeth Schreuder perform her presentation about art for the blind entirely in the dark, Susan Schaefer integrate moving images and music into her poetry for change, two talks by Stijn Segers and Markus Bediako accompanied by a guitar and a djembe drum as well as a total improvisation on unknown images.



Odile Wolfs: The significance of Creativity in Education

New surprises were awaiting us again on our last PechaKucha Night, a special edition on Education and Creativity.

While some speakers drew their strength from the mixture of rich content and powerful visuals, such as Wim van den Bergh with his eloquent talk on Middles, Means and Mind, others decided to “trick the organisation” as Paul Iske laughingly put it when he presented his Combinatoric Innovation theory. On two occasions, Iske resorted to slides consisting of four smaller built in images which filled the screen one by one every five seconds.



Paul Iske: Combinatoric Innovation



Wim van den Bergh: Middles, Means and Mind

Cyriel Kortleven also slightly deviated from the regular format by bringing a flip board along on which he made some drawings as part of his presentation, and by engaging the audience through questions and small exercises.



Cyriel Kortleven: Develop a "Yes, and.." attitude

As for Airan Berg, the former artistic director for the performing arts at last year’s European cultural capital Linz, he outdid every performer we’ve welcomed so far at PechaKucha Maastricht, for he didn’t bring any slides at all. Or rather, he did, but they were almost entirely black, merely bearing the numbers 1 to 20.

Airan Berg: Education and Creativity. Possibility? Necessity? Dream?

Berg first showed us how to cross our fingers in a certain, quite unnatural way, and asked us to keep them like that until the end of his presentation. This slightly uncomfortable position, he explained later, was meant to help up stay alert and focused. Then he invited us to close our eyes and proceeded to describe a compelling educational pilot project he will be carrying out in 2011 in several schools across the Meuse-Rhine euroregion as part of Maastricht’s bid to become European capital culture in 2018. He started off all his sentences with the verb “Imagine” and so we imagined and visualised his dream, slide by slide, to the captivating rhythm of the 20 second sequence.



It was a very straightforward PechaKucha experience, because Berg did abide by the requested the 20 x 20 format, but undoubtedly a very creative one, since he made each one of us see a different presentation by entirely creating it ourselves.

It was also a demonstration of the point Wim van den Bergh had argued earlier in the evening, namely that creativity is generated, not by boundless freedom as often misconceived, but by rules and borders.



Considering that Airan Berg will now be joining the Maastricht artistic team for 2018, it looks like we’d better tighten our seatbelts for more “#moetkunnen” sensations and magical rides into the future.

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