Could Pommelien Thijs win over French-speaking Ronquières without changing her sound?

Thijs arrived in Ronquières with unusually strong credentials on the Dutch-speaking side of Belgium. VRT NWS reported in 2025 that she sold out nine consecutive concerts at Ancienne Belgique in Brussels, breaking the venue record previously held by dEUS. The broadcaster attributed her appeal partly to personal songwriting and partly to a live sound that gives polished pop considerably more rock weight on stage.

That distinction mattered at Ronquières. A performer facing a partially unfamiliar audience cannot depend solely on the reflexive singalongs available at Pukkelpop or a Flemish arena. According to De Morgen’s assessment, Thijs compensated through pace, physical commitment and direct crowd work. The quoted French line was not a reinvention of her act; it was a compact bridge between performer and audience.

Her repertoire remained fundamentally Dutch-language. That is significant because Belgian popular culture often travels unevenly across the internal language border. Flemish television, radio and celebrity culture can produce household names who remain far less familiar in Wallonia, and the reverse is also true. Ronquières therefore offered something more revealing than a routine appearance on an already friendly festival field: it tested whether the performance itself could carry songs beyond their established media market.

Ronquières Festival takes place beside the Plan incliné de Ronquières, the monumental boat lift on the Brussels–Charleroi Canal. The Service public de Wallonie says the structure overcomes a height difference of 67.53 metres and includes a 1,432-metre incline. Its scale gives the festival a setting unlike the open fields associated with many Belgian summer events.

Ronquières is a village within Braine-le-Comte — ’s-Gravenbrakel in Dutch — in Hainaut province. Local administration is therefore conducted in French: residents deal with the Ville or commune de Braine-le-Comte, while Dutch-language visitors may instinctively look for a stad or gemeente. The festival itself provides both French and Dutch pages, an important practical accommodation that should not be confused with the language used by surrounding public services.

The municipal website identifies the Plan incliné as the festival site and directs visitors to the organiser for current parking and camping information. That division of responsibility matters when planning a visit. The festival website is the first stop for tickets, stage times, campsite rules and event-specific access; Wallonia’s regional portals and the commune are better sources for public infrastructure or local notices. Travellers should also consult SNCB/NMBS journey planning and any temporary shuttle instructions published for the relevant edition rather than relying on arrangements from a previous year.

Thijs’s appearance illustrates how Belgian culture can cross linguistic boundaries without becoming linguistically neutral. VRT NWS reported that she and her management intended to keep working in Dutch even as her audience expanded. Her visibility through the VRT and Netflix drama Knokke Off — marketed internationally as High Tides — has nevertheless given some viewers outside Flanders a route into her music.

There are two reasonable ways to read the Ronquières experiment. Fans and cultural programmers can see it as evidence that performance, streaming and subtitled television are weakening Belgium’s old media partitions. A memorable chorus, visual identity and energetic band can communicate before every word is understood. More cautious listeners may conclude that one well-received festival set does not establish a durable Walloon audience. Festival crowds are mixed, receptive and concentrated in one place; radio rotation, repeat ticket sales and sustained recognition are harder tests.

The point is not that language ceased to matter. Thijs acknowledged it by addressing the crowd in French. Rather, she treated language as part of the encounter instead of a wall requiring her to translate or replace her songs. That balance will be familiar to expatriates who build a life across Belgium’s overlapping Dutch-, French- and international-speaking worlds: a small effort in the local language often opens the door, while the substance of the exchange can remain one’s own.

Anyone attending a concert across Belgium’s language line should verify three things close to the date: the organiser’s final stage schedule, the last feasible public-transport connection or designated shuttle, and the precise rules for bags, payment and camping. Search terms also change with the region: “horaires”, “navettes” and “parking” will be more productive around Ronquières than their Dutch equivalents, although the festival offers a Dutch interface. Official regional information is available through Wallonie.be and the Service public de Wallonie; the local authority is the Ville de Braine-le-Comte.

For Thijs, the longer-term question is whether Ronquières becomes a foothold rather than an isolated crossover moment. Future Walloon bookings, French-language media exposure and evidence of an audience returning specifically for her would tell us more. What the 8 August performance established, on the available reporting, is narrower but still notable: confronted with a crowd beyond her safest linguistic market, she did not dilute the act. She worked harder to make it connect.