Archive
Islands
Of
Empathy
An intercultural exploration of empathy, in collaboration with Club Guy & Roni and Senegalese musician Pape Seck.
Islands of Empathy (in a sea of chaos)
In ISLANDS of EMPATHY, we place the concept of empathy at the heart of the performance and explore how it can be a driving force in the way we live together.
Dutch culture continuously teaches us to be the best version of ourselves—individual and independent. In contrast, many other cultures emphasize the collective and focus far less on personal development. But what happens when a group becomes so close-knit that the gap with those outside it only grows wider?
DETECTIVE
CONVENTION
The existence of queer love remains a blind spot, discovered Annika Socolofsky (winner of the Gaudeamus Award 2021) when a group of professional detectives, during a night out, kept trying to flirt with her girlfriend—ironically without realizing that she was clearly not straight. It became the starting point for her new piece, DETECTIVE CONVENTION, which will have its world premiere at Gaudeamus 2024.
Also on the program: K-ourante by Jinwook Jung, a work that builds a bridge between gender representation in K-pop culture and 17th- and 18th-century France.
Annika Socolofsky (1990) is an American composer and avant-folk vocalist. Her music grows from the power and nuances of the human voice and ranges from orchestral works and operas to a cappella folk ballads. Annika frequently writes for her own voice with chamber ensemble, including a growing repertoire of “feminist rage lullabies” titled Don’t Say A Word, aimed at challenging centuries of harmful lessons taught to young children by reworking old lullabies for a new, queer era.
Geweld
&
Vibrato
An operatic performance for singing actor and soprano,
3 percussionists, 3 strings, live electronics, radio and insect sounds.
Composer Huba de Graaff found in her parents’ estate letters and photographs of her maternal uncle who fought in Indonesia for the Dutch army. In sharp contrast are all the documents she found from her paternal Indo grandfather. He appeared to have been friends with members of the Indonesian anti-colonial resistance. She is the living product of two families, embodying the two sides of this colonial war.
A Dutch soldier conducts a small orchestra in the interior of Indonesia. The music-making “natives” don’t really cooperate, and gradually, more and more annoying insects appear. Whipped up by the historic speeches of General Spoor and Prime Minister Beel, the whole thing escalates into an outburst of transgressive vibrato and theatrical violence.
An unorthodox opera, in which the phenomenon of “vibrato” is used as a metaphor for the violence of Western expansionism: overwhelming and forced transgressive vibrato.