Arnold Schalks is an independent visual artist, graphic designer, web designer, set & lighting designer, theatre maker, performer, poet, publicist, editor, publisher, curator, teacher and organizer of art events. In the period from 1997 to 2001 he made three music theatre performances under the name Bühne de BovenLucht in a former factory building on the Rotterdamse Keileweg. Since 2003 he has been involved in the design of (music) theatre productions of various calibres at home and abroad. Between 2004 and 2005 he organises six interdisciplinary events with a theatrical component in 'art space' the Vrije Schuur, a small log cabin in the backyard of his home in the Oude Noorden district of Rotterdam. His move in 2009 to a SKAR studio on the Osseweistraat in Rotterdam gives him the opportunity to start OCW (a corruption of the word 'Ossewei'), a stage for small-scale events. There he starts crimmp (= creative reduction in multimedia practice), a series of multidisciplinary performances in which reduction is seen as an added value. Seven years later the stage moves to a classroom on the ground floor of a former primary school, now SKAR property, at Drievriendenstraat 26. The words 'small scale' and 'hospitality' connect the three initiatives mentioned above, which emphatically operate on the margins of the art business.