UvA buildings | ‘Crea used to be more of a community center’
Receptionist Godert de Wit has worked at Crea for 23 years and has seen the composition of both visitors and staff change considerably. ‘It sometimes happened that someone was sleeping it off during a shift.’ Part two of a two-part series about Crea.
It is Tuesday afternoon and the Crea cafe is packed with students, even in the alcoves. Most stare at their unfolded laptops and don't seem bothered by the noise around them. Incomprehensible, Godert de Wit thinks. ‘I couldn't study here,’ he laughs. ‘Far too noisy.’
De Wit has been a receptionist and supervisor of the front desk staff at Crea, the university's cultural center, for more than 23 years. He is someone who lived through Crea's move to its current location - a renovated diamond-cutting factory on Nieuwe Achtergracht. So his colleagues feel he is the ideal person for an interview with Folia about the changes within Crea.
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De Wit, modest as he is, downplays expectations, but gladly agrees to an interview. He suggests we conduct the interview in a quieter spot in the oldest part of the building, from 1845. He just needs to get a key from behind the desk.
His permanent workplace is right next to the steep staircase in the mezzanine. ‘Too steep, even,’ De Wit feels.
‘Especially when you are at the top, people are sometimes afraid that they will break their leg because of those stairs. Older people in particular experience that.’ It is one of the comments he often hears as a receptionist. Although it is dwarfed by the other question that is often heard - but also justified, according to De Wit: ‘Where is the bathroom here?’
After all, it is rather hidden in the building, as if there were no room for it. ‘At the back of the café would have been a more logical place,’ De Wit thinks. ‘After all, there's plenty of room there.’ Now you have to climb half a spiral staircase, only to reach the toilets through a narrow, hidden corridor on the right.
From classical ballet to salsa
The interview with De Wit takes place in a room on the third floor where courses in assembly are taught. Crea offers a variety of creative courses these days, mainly focused on the performing arts. The summer courses, where you are immersed for a week in a particular art - from photography and writing to dancing and acting – can be highly recommended, De Wit thinks. ‘Those are always really fun days that create a lot of buzz in the building.’
The type of courses in Crea has changed a lot over time, De Wit observes. Take dance courses, for example: ‘In the past, most of the courses offered were modern and classical ballet. Now we see many requests for hip-hop, breakdance, and salsa, among other things.’
All requests for spaces in the Crea building go through him or the other receptionists. With the enormous growth of the (international) student population at the UvA, the number of calls to the reception desk also increased accordingly. More and more often the phone is ringing off the hook, he says. People sometimes misjudge how busy reception can be.
Nevertheless, he really enjoys working at the cultural center of the university where he studied film and television sciences (now multimedia studies) in the 1990s. It comes as no surprise that the only course he himself attended at Crea was a film editing course.
Sleeping it off
Before Crea moved to the Nieuwe Achtergracht on the Roeterseiland campus in 2011, the UvA's cultural center was located on the Turfdraagsterpad in Amsterdam, right in the center on the Binnengasthuisterrein where the new university library is now being built. Crea not infrequently functioned then as a kind of disguised village hall, De Wit illustrates. ‘Neighbors from various walks of life came in and out to have a chat or take a course.’
The staff also consisted of different types of people back then, including alcoholics: ‘It sometimes happened that someone was sleeping it off during a shift,’ says De Wit. It was a bit freer and the employees were very culturally engaged. Crea became increasingly professionalized afterwards, he says.
De Wit still misses the old location sometimes. ‘We are a bit off the beaten path here. At the Binnengasthuisterrein, we had more contact with neighbors and there were more restaurants in the area.’ That is missing here, he feels.
‘Also, the black UvA building across the street (buildings A through D) has ensured that Crea's terrace will never see the sun again.’ For diamond cutting in the 19th century, sufficient sunlight was still indispensable, but nowadays that is no longer the case. Still, De Wit thinks the Roeter Island campus and the renovated and renewed Crea building have become a successful whole. He doesn't see himself leaving anytime soon.
