Delightfully, I am composer in residence at Dag in de Branding festival for the seasons September 2025 – May 2027!
I will be creating a music theatre piece or opera, for six musicians, an opera singer (Antje Lohse), a dancer (Xolani Mdluli), and an actor (Lucia Zemene). The piece revolves around themes I care about: gender- and cultural identity and equality.
In essence, it’s a piece about different forms of communication: learning to understand each other even if you express yourself in different ways. There is a split in disciplines: initially one character expresses themself only in dance (dancer), one only in music/vocals (singer), one only in text (actor). The build-up is that the characters don’t understand each other at first, learn to understand each other, and find out that they are saying the same thing. Or perhaps not exactly the same, but with strong common ground.
The story is a kind of fairy tale, newly written for the project by Maaike Haneveld. I won’t write the music on a pre-existing libretto, as is the conventional approach; instead we will start by creating the characters together, also based on input from the performers. The characters all have their own characteristic musical style.
Although I want to address social inequalities with this piece, I won’t do so by naming them, but rather by showing a positive example of how things can be different, in a story with interactions that are not defined by conventional gender roles and ideas about skin colour.
It is a story in which a wise woman (singer Antje Lohse), a non-binary/queer character (actor Lucia Zemene) and a black character (danser Xolani Mdluli) have equal roles and achieve something good together. The story is set against a backdrop of disillusionment and a sense that the world is falling apart, but is nevertheless optimistic.
To explore this, I will start by writing one shorter piece per character, featuring only this character and two instruments. These will be presented on 30 May 2026 in Splendor, Amsterdam.
In ‘tutti’ sections later on, interactions between the different characters and their art forms can emerge.