When I perform quick to bloom, I imagine a young woman who is feeling the bliss of falling in love. In the beginning of the scene I experience the feeling of pure joy. It feels like posing for someone you are deeply in love with and who is making a painting of each sculpture you create. Every time when I arrive to this scene it makes me feel blissful, I feel it is a moment of relief and pure joy. Further on I start to have a sensation of getting lost in this dangerous thread of love, it is a katharsys out of my own control, as if I am in a whirlwind which makes me spin. Quick to bloom is about transformation, starting from being completely in control with a feeling of pure joy, to slowly losing yourself in a dangerous situation, followed up by the moment of complete surrender to the force of the whirlwind.

quick to bloom

One day Joost asked me to create a phrase on the idea of manipulating your own body, as if you have a second skin that you can pull and the rest of the body reacts to that. I had the feeling of being a puppet, where I am the puppeteer of my own body. It very soon got something very sculpturous, he told me to have the feeling of creating a sculpture with each movement. He asked me not to make it too beautiful or representative but to everytime add a little detail that creates a distorted beauty. Once we had created the phrase we started to link it to the flower violet, which represents faithfulness and means ’quick to bloom but quick to die’. With this concept we set the structure of this scene; he told me to have the idea of unrooting a flower, spinning the earth and fertilizing the floor. During the scene the material gets smaller, faster, hips get more engaged, it starts to travel more and then it starts to spin, going to katharsys before the flower dies.

bitterness

remembrance 

The scene has been created from one phrase which was coming from the body of Joost and only focussed on arm movements. Well better said, in my perception as a performer it seemed to be arm movements but not much later I figured out it was actually all a work of the spine and the rest of the movements were a result of, or reaction on this. After learning the basic phrase we deconstructed it and played with the materials. He gave me different tasks; doing it touching the back wall, moving from the back of the stage to the front of the stage, performing the material sitting on the floor, he asked me to improvise with the phrase, take it into space and have the feeling of being neurotic, say text from Hamlet and to disconnect my focus of my eyes from the movements that I was doing in order to create a certain opposition. With all these tasks we created a pathway and development of the scene, giving different layers and colours to the same material which allowed a transformation to happen.

After quick to bloom we arrive to bitterness. Relatively in the beginning of the process we tried to hit the chair with the rope, but at that time it was just an image and we didn't really know yet how to use it. Joost was always very intrigued by the singing of Ophelia, Shakespeare made Ophelia sing from the moment where she is getting more mad. The very first rehearsal Joost gave me a microphone and made me sing, which he was not immediately pleased with and led to the so called 'honesty work'. Each morning we started the day with this work; we sat down in front of each other and he asked me to say everything that was going through my mind in the moment, he asked me to share how I felt and what I was thinking. This was not very easy for me, everything I said he told me he did not believe, which led to us doing this work for hours in a row, driving me a bit insane from time to time. He asked me to do it sitting, lying on the floor, standing against the back wall with my arms spread like Jesus and to do it while moving. When I was completely blocked he switched the roles, he asked me if I wanted to change roles with him and I could give him any task I like. So I did, I asked him to do the same thing. This work was very important, it was crucial for me to become more transparent and honest. It created a lot of trust on the floor from the beginning and I immediately was confronted with a deep frustration which turned out to be very fruitful for the afternoon once we started to work on physical material.

Coming back to the work on bitterness, it is a scene which arrives almost in the end of the piece, at this moment the character has already lost her mind completely. Joost asked me to sing specific lines from the play Hamlet, to take the rope and hit the chair. After we played with this we constructed the scene from there. He told me to think of this work upside down, to twist it 180 degrees. He told me when you are preparing to hit the chair, think of love, feel love for the chair and the rope, when you are screaming the song, feel joy, feel happiness. I noticed it gave me a lot of freedom to play and to embody the work, it gave another layer to what I was doing and it felt a bit surreal. Every time I do this scene, I have fun because of this, I truly enjoy it and do not associate it with pain or terror at all.

The material of wilt is probably the material which has transformed most of all the materials. It started from researching a quality where the upper body was completely stuck, as if there is a stick behind the spine, holding it straight. All the movements were initiated from the coccyx and the upper body would follow as one block, the legs were rooted in the floor, feet not coming off the floor. After improvising on this idea Joost asked me to create a phrase inspired on my name, so I took the shape of the letters and tried to draw them in space. Joost did the same, he created a phrase inspired by his name. Once we both finished we put them together and called it: What's in a name? Joost had the idea to start the solo from the point where Ophelia survives her drowning, he had the image of Ophelia coming out of the water with goggles on her eyes, swimming fins on her feet and a lifebuoy around her waist. He asked me to put goggles on and perform it to the song 'This is a Man's World', doing it in different states. The material and scene had a naive and comical atmosphere at that time. Once we arrived further in the process and started to puzzle different scenes together it was missing something. He asked me to 'break free' with the material of What's in a name? and go more and more mad, bringing the material to a high physical state, trying to make it jump in the air and allow my legs to move more. As an inspiration for this scene he showed me the trailer of the Exorcist, which was the first thing that made me understand the state better. Now after having done the premiere and several showings of the solo, we went back into the studio to repurpose the work and to get closer to the essence of all the materials. The first thing we took to strip down was the material of wilt, we took two chairs to do the material sitting, only moving from the spine to see where the true initiation of each movement is. The material is in an ongoing state of changement, figuring out many different ways in which it can be done; lying on the floor, moving through space, not moving through space, sitting on a chair, translating it into a rope.  

Wilt is the first scene where the concept of the canker gall becomes a very clear awareness for me. I have the imagination that the canker gall grows bigger, meaning that the inside of the person gets hollowed out more, leaving this person with a bigger void and more space for madness to exist. In this scene I have a sensation of being lost, a moment where a force of energy takes over and the only thing I can really do is survive by surrendering to this force that is coming from within. For me I associate this directly to madness, a person struggling with something that feels bigger and more complex than they can contain, making them surrender to these voices and forces coming from within, a place where every stimulant from the outside can be one too many.

innocence

The first scene is called innocence and it consisted of concrete actions with the rope. In the solo we used three objects: a chair, a bell and a rope. Looking at the process of becoming mad, we wanted to start with being innocent. Joost asked me to take the rope and just to play with it. In the beginning I was not very handy with the rope at all, so it did not take long before Joost stepped in and also played with it. He gave me some ideas and techniques of how to deal with a 10 metre rope on stage. We used the rope to play, as a practical object and to write. Quite soon I started to relate to the rope as the canker gall, the seed that is being planted in the beginning of the solo and puts the process of becoming mad in motion.

wilt

transparence

Joost kept the idea of overcoming madness, he wanted to let Ophelia survive. We talked a lot about stripping off, I remember he told me; somehow I want to take this canker gall out. Because of that the final scene is called transparence and based on the principle of overcoming madness by being completely honest and transparent, coming out of this spiral of indwelling by taking out everything that has been accumulated up until that point. I see it as surrendering to a side-stream of the river that has been torturing you for so long, showing all the new possibilities in this new stream of water, giving you the space and possibility to leave things behind and not drown inside the madness.

For me this scene is about the feeling of loss, the loss of love. It is an experience of trying to relive a love that once was so vivid but currently not there anymore, a person imagining the sensation of what it is like to love, be loved and make love. It comes with a physical sensation of peeling off the skin and I feel and imagine a magnetic force to my movements, creating always an opposition and relation between different body parts.

This scene is for me the beginning of the process of becoming mad, I imagine a person who is rejected in love or unable to reach her loved one and is stuck in time; holding onto the past, not being able to live in the current moment or look forwards.

Looking at the story of Ophelia; she is madly in love with Hamlet but her brother and father do not allow her to be with him and warn her for his love, she takes this very serious and tries to ignore her feelings. In the end she gets rejected by Hamlet himself, who pretends his love for Ophelia never even existed. Ophelia is in my opinion tangled up in a destructive cycle, pretending not to feel what she feels and ignoring her true state.

I believe when you are not able to be honest about your inner feelings and constantly need to pretend they do not exist, it can eat you from the inside out, possibly driving you insane.

During this entire process of creation we had our rituals; every morning we would go to a café, we basically went almost always to the same one with an exception of two times. Afterwards we would go to the studio and in the night we would go out to eat and talk again. Each evening we both wrote a letter, sharing everything that was important in the moment. Sometimes we would go into the town to look around and do some shopping, we visited the store where we bought the rope about three times and had fun with the man selling the rope. Once we went for a long walk in the mountains, I wanted to show Joost a village which was completely abandoned. It was a place with old wine factories and houses that you could enter, however when we arrived after a two-hour walk we saw they had closed everything, so it was impossible to enter any building. Anyway it ended up being a very refreshing and inspirational walk. In the weekends we would go to the beach, or for a walk, completely out of the studio but still constantly discussing about everything. It was great to talk about the work outside of the studio, it was very relaxed and gave a lot of freedom and deeper insights in the work and the content. I believe most of the work happened outside of the studio, everything we did outside made it possible to create this piece.

Ophelia.   There’s rosemary, that’s for

remembrance—pray you, love, remember—and there is

pansies, that’s for thoughts

There’s fennel for you, and

columbines. There’s rue for you, and

here’s some for me, we may call it herb of grace

o’Sundays—O, you must wear your rue with a differ-

ence. There’s a daisy. I would give you some violets,

but they withered all, when my father died—they say a’

made a good end—

[IV.v.1174-185]

I experience this scene as lightness, as if there is  a heavy weight disappearing from your shoulders. There is no inner fight or struggle anymore, a feeling of complete surrender, but this time to something beautiful and constructive. When I am performing, I perform for the loved one on stage who I have been dancing for in my imagination all this time. The big difference is that this time I feel separated from, and stronger than his force; I feel fragile, vulnerable and naked but in complete control and euphoria, knowing that this external longing is not longer controlling my inner world, leaving me with nothing but complete freedom and agency.

CLICK ON THE LETTERS! 

the process

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CLICK

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dramaturgy

We noticed you can draw a 'timeline' with this information, describing a process of becoming mad. The first line looked like this: innocence →  quick to bloom → remembrance → wilt → bitterness. The canker gall is present from the beginning until the end, becoming bigger the further you get in the process.

With this information we went back into the studio to try it out. It didn't take long to realise this order didn't work, it felt strange to perform it and Joost also said that from the outside it didn't seem right. So we started to play and switch things around in order to create an order which also serves the dynamics of the piece. Once we had done that it felt like we had created a personal process of becoming mad, including all the components mentioned above.

Every morning before we went in the studio we met at a cafe to exchange the letters and brainstorm on what was going on. Usually we always spoke about Hamlet, we looked at certain parts from the play and discussed them, we talked about Ophelia and her possible feelings and states and then we talked a lot about madness; what it is, what it means, how it influences the life of the person and the people around, how society looks at it. We discussed our personal opinions on certain behaviours, actions and happenings through time. We used Ophelia and Michael Jackson a lot for our dialogues and they usually were always very dynamic. One morning we were discussing the dramaturgy of the piece, Joost told me from the beginning that he was interested in the scene where Ophelia hands out the flowers in the castle. We both went online to do a research on the flowers, the meaning and how they were used in Hamlet. When we compared our information we saw that I had a flower that was not existing in the scene, namely the canker rose. When we looked into it, it turned out to be mentioned relatively in the beginning of the play by the brother of Ophelia. Ophelia receives a warning from her brother, in which he refers to her relation with Hamlet as a canker gall, he says that if she answers her desire it will hollow out her heart before it has a chance to blossom, like a canker worm that may ''gall (break the skin) before it broke the surface''. For the work, the use of the canker gall was very important; Laertes, the brother, gave here imagery of a disease working its way from the inside out. A seed that is being planted in the beginning of the play inside Ophelia and keeps on growing during the entire play which hollows her out more and more.

After having that information Joost got very excited because the imagery of a disease working its’ way from the inside out was exactly what the work was about for him; the tension between the inside and the outside, the place where someone's actions or behavior is being led from the inner world and the outside is merely a container to give a voice or form to what the inner world wants to express.

Having found all of this, we continued looking at the dramaturgy of the piece. At that moment we had these flowers:

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