Joop Mulder (67), founder of the Oerol festival on Terschelling, has passed away in Leeuwarden. He probably died of cardiac arrest. According to Oerol’s organization, he had been struggling with health problems for some time, but his death was unexpected.
In the 1970s Mulder had moved from Bolsward to Terschelling at the age of 27 to become the manager of Café De Stoep in Midsland. In 1982 he started Oerol, which for the first years was organized from the living room above his cafe.
The Oerol festival started small with theater performances on the sidewalk in front of his cafe and in small sheds and grew into one of the largest on-site outdoor theater festivals in Europe. Artists and theater groups from all over the world flock to it, and performances are held all over the island during the summer festival. In keeping with the name of the festival, because oerol means everywhere.
Click here for an impression of the 2016 Oerol Festival.
Mulder had never thought beforehand that the festival would become this big. “Absolutely not. When it started, our goal was to keep it up for five years,” he told Omroep Fryslan in 2017. “Nobody expected that things would get so out of hand, in a positive sense. But it is very nice that Oerol has developed in this way.” The festival attracts around 50,000 visitors annually.
In 2017 he stepped down as director of Oerol and founded the landscape project Sense of Place, which was part of Leeuwarden Cultural Capital 2018. He managed to bring De Reuzen from Royal de Luxe to Leeuwarden in 2018 and that was a dream come true. For years he had tried to get De Reuzen to Oerol, but that did not work because the festival was too small for them.
With Sense of Place, Mulder wanted to use his wealth of experience with location art to get the Wadden coast better on the map by starting a number of art and culture projects.
Examples are the panoramic model Dijk of a woman on the dike of Holwerd on Ameland, a photo and storytelling route along the Wadden coast called Bildtstars and Eigenheimers and photo artwork the Dobbepaarden behind the sea dike in Marrum. And there are still many projects in the pipeline.
“Joop Mulder leaves an indelible impression both within the cultural world and among culture lovers”, the Oerol organization writes on its website. “We will miss his inspiration, ideas and inexhaustible energy.”