How do you know each other, and what does your theatre collective stand for?
Naomi: The five of us graduated together from KASK with the production Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Both the audience and we ourselves were so enthusiastic about it that we continued making work together as a collective.
Imke: We usually start from an existing work that we find interesting: a text, a film, a book. We connect through our shared urge to play with fiction, with the audience, with each other. The form around that is very fluid.
Naomi: We all have different tastes, but share a common interest in the moments when fiction becomes "more true" than reality.
You're often praised for your ensemble playing. Where does that come from?
Naomi: Probably because we don't try to imitate each other. When everyone plays differently, you have to listen to each other more carefully and you can surprise each other more.
Imke: I also think it's because we're all involved in the making. While performing, we remain makers.
Naomi: And while making, we're already playing. We organise ourselves horizontally, together with everyone involved. For Endless Story, that means the additional actors (Lucas van der Vegt and Patricia Kargbo, ed.) and a composer are involved from the very beginning. Music and song form a major part of the production.
Imke: We think it's important to have a lot of people on stage. A group of performers dancing or singing together — that creates a real celebration on stage.
Is that why Spring Awakening resonated so strongly with young people?
Naomi: What helped with Spring Awakening is that we didn't make it for young people. We started from who we ourselves were at that age.
Imke: We didn't try to make it "cool" for them. Also important: thanks to the colourful mix of personalities on stage, the audience has a variety of people to identify with.
Naomi: We also don't want to make difficult theatre that no one understands. Our love of play expresses itself in a gut feeling that apparently speaks to different generations.
It's such a gift that during a theatre performance you're essentially kidnapped for a while. You're stuck in that hall for a bit, after all. Phones have to be off, all distractions are gone
Endless Story is made for everyone from the age of ten. Will you work differently for a young audience?
Imke: Yes and no. We chose a children's book as our source material, but the author takes children quite seriously. There are multiple layers in the book, which means adults can read different things into it than children. Besides, children have an incredible capacity for empathy and a great freedom in their thinking.
Naomi: After Spring Awakening, hetpaleis invited us to create a production together — but even without that, we probably would have started working on this idea anyway. The two of us share a brain, because independently of each other we both chose The Neverending Story from all the books we could have picked. My father introduced me to the author Michael Ende from a very young age. In the adaptation, I therefore want to start from his perspective too. He creates very interesting work — a little unsettling, even. hetpaleis was also immediately convinced by the meta-layer in the story — about losing yourself in fiction, and yet needing that fiction to escape for a while.
Why do you specifically want to tell this story?
Naomi: I sometimes genuinely worry about the technology that makes everything available, so that the world seems to revolve entirely around consumption. A production about the importance of stories is a good way to switch our imagination back on for a moment.
Imke: It's such a gift that during a theatre performance you're essentially kidnapped for a while. You're stuck in that hall for a bit, after all. Phones have to be off, all distractions are gone.
Naomi: We're taking a very free approach to the book, and working around an all-encompassing something that creeps over the world of imagination like a depression. In the book, the main character reads the story; in the production, we want to use the gaze of the audience as that of an everyday hero.
In what way does the collaboration with hetpaleis differ from your previous productions?
Imke: Simply having an entire house behind us is already a comfort.
Naomi: We're very used to doing everything ourselves. But having a communications and production team of enthusiastic people who all think along with you and place their trust in you — that's incredibly valuable.
