Introduction

Vooruit invites you to engage in the discussion, debate, experience, look and listen during the inaugural edition of the Women and Children First focus programme. We will be addressing privilege, acquired rights and (fair) care in the broad meaning of these term and from different angles – through discussions, workshops, dance, theatre, music, lunch, and much more. This very diverse programme intends to make the invisible visible and discussible.

Vooruit is weaving a new common thread through the entire operation and programming of the house with Women and Children First. We are going further than the podiums of our Theatre, Ballroom and the bar of our Café. As an art institution, Vooruit is a place for thinking and working together, where the society of tomorrow is being conceived, discussed and made. We do that with artists and the public, with our staff and with all those who find it interesting and want to take part.

This programme was developed collaboratively; initially by the trio of Marieke de Munck, Róise Goan and Camilla Carè, and as our exercises in awareness developed, with an extended and ever-growing redactie that currently comprises Kopano Maroga, Jamila Johnson Small, Bieke Purnelle and Tine Theunissen. Exercises in awareness -- where practice makes art. Come right in. Welcome to our and your house and home!

“Women and children first!" - someone shouts. When a ship sinks, the first lifeboats are already occupied and the lives to be saved are organized on a scale of privilege. Procedures become repeated habits that change and evolve over time and language bends to create new rules; to modify the stable architecture of tradition with the circulation of stories, testimonies, imagination ... During WACF we would like to give these evolutions more space, reconfigure their shape, add other stories and collect them in this blog; to share the reflections that surround and cross this focus program. So that the words do not remain only in Vooruit but have the possibility to go and, together with others, maybe modify the procedures that we repeat by habit. Or even just giving light to other points of view for a moment. 

Over the coming days, original and non-original texts will be collected, work notes, articles shared both in our temporary library in the Balzaal of vooruit and here on our website and we invite you to read and share with us!

- Marieke De Munck, Róise Goan, Camilla Carè