Via Berlin
Violinist Rosa Arnold and actress Dagmar Slagmolen are the two founders of Via Berlin. Via Berlin is a young, Dutch music theatre group. It was founded in 2008, when it started off as ‘Nieuwkomer’ (newcomer) at the Dutch music theatre company Orkater. Although it’s been just a couple of years since its beginning, Via Berlin has already produced two very successful plays (15.000 people have come to see us perform), and is currently developing its 3rd play. Dagmar and Rosa have come from different performing art disciplines, but share the same goal: to develop music theatre plays in which self-written text and classical music encounter one another as close as possible. Director Ria Marks and musical coach Sytze Pruiksma have joined their team to help realize this goal.
To Via Berlin, text and music, as well as the actor and the musician, are two completely equal means to convey the storyline. A continuous (classical) musical line exists throughout its pieces, and often the music even gets the leading part. The text merely gives the outlines of the story, location and characters; the images and music fill in the rest.
All of the performers on stage are both actors as musicians. This way of working creates a tight unity and an organic fusion between the two disciplines, bearing in mind that the individual qualities of the performers are preserved. Making music theatre about a topical subject using classical music as the main storyteller in combination with self-written text, is unique in the Netherlands and abroad.
The musictheatrepieces of Via Berlin are performed both on outside-locations as well as in theatres. We regularly play reruns of all of the pieces.
With ‘war’ as the underlying theme, the plays of Via Berlin are about intimate, personal stories, which symbolize universal happenings. During wartime, everybody and everything is on edge. Relationships and liaisons are intensified and tested on strength, perseverance and sincerity. In the three plays, the makers of Via Berlin focus on different aspects of war. Home Sweet Home is set after the war, and is about how to continue your life when the war is over, but when nothing feels the same. From now on your name is Pjotr takes place in the middle of wartime, in a sewing workshop where six women are working for the army. Our first play Een mond vol zand (A mouth full of sand), is set during the beginning of the war.
A mouth full of sand is about a Dutch pregnant woman who seeks her lost husband, a war photographer, in Afghanistan. She finds him back in the middle of the desert, but he is almost unrecognizable: emaciated/gaunt (uitgemergeld), dehydrated, traumatized, impossible to talk to. Moreover, he lives together with an Afghan woman. The Afghan woman is the only one allowed to take care of the man, to come close to him and touch him. The Dutch woman desperately tries to find out what has happened to them, and to convince her husband to come home with her, but she neither can get through to him or to the Afghan woman. Will she be better off with or without her unrecognisable husband? Sometimes love means to let go. A mouth full of sand is played by 3 performers: Dagmar Slagmolen, David Lucieer and Rosa Arnold.
From now on your name is Pjotr. In a country where men are fighting the war and women are on the sidelines, a small group of women is surviving in a sewing-workshop. Every day, uniforms from fallen soldiers are being repaired to be sent back to the frontline. But when nightmares and terrors enter the workshop, the women no longer accept the meaninglessness of their lives.
Home Sweet Home But what happens after the war, when reunited families have to cope with the terrors the individual members have experienced? In our third and newest play, Home Sweet Home, we go into the fact that the war never ends, although it is peace outside. A reunited couple tries to pick up the pieces, but their traumatic experiences are too strong to handle. A bizarre situation appears, which can only lead to a fatal ending. Home Sweet Home is performed by actress Dagmar Slagmolen, actor Stephen Liebmann, the Ragazze string quartet (which is the string quartet of Rosa Arnold) and a percussion quartet from Slagwerk Den Haag. With ten performers on stage, it is our biggest production so far, and musically both a challenge and an inspiration to combine the feminine strings with the masculine percussion. The premiere of Home sweet home will be at the Oerol festival on Terschelling, one of the Dutch islands, in June 2013, and it will also be performed on the Over het IJ festival in Amsterdam in July 2013 and in theatres across the Netherlands in the winter of 2013.
War will –unfortunately- always be a topical theme. And because of their strong universal eloquence, it is possible for us to keep playing our pieces. We’ve already played several reruns of our first two plays on a wide variety of locations. For example: From now on your name is Pjotr was performed in an outside forest on Terschelling, in an old shippingdock and in theatres, as well in the jungle of Rio de Janeiro.
Violinist Rosa Arnold and actress Dagmar Slagmolen are the two founders of Via Berlin. Via Berlin is a young, Dutch music theatre group. It was founded in 2008, when it started off as ‘Nieuwkomer’ (newcomer) at the Dutch music theatre company Orkater. Although it’s been just a couple of years since its beginning, Via Berlin has already produced two very successful plays (15.000 people have come to see us perform), and is currently developing its 3rd play. Dagmar and Rosa have come from different performing art disciplines, but share the same goal: to develop music theatre plays in which self-written text and classical music encounter one another as close as possible. Director Ria Marks and musical coach Sytze Pruiksma have joined their team to help realize this goal.
To Via Berlin, text and music, as well as the actor and the musician, are two completely equal means to convey the storyline. A continuous (classical) musical line exists throughout its pieces, and often the music even gets the leading part. The text merely gives the outlines of the story, location and characters; the images and music fill in the rest.
All of the performers on stage are both actors as musicians. This way of working creates a tight unity and an organic fusion between the two disciplines, bearing in mind that the individual qualities of the performers are preserved. Making music theatre about a topical subject using classical music as the main storyteller in combination with self-written text, is unique in the Netherlands and abroad.
The musictheatrepieces of Via Berlin are performed both on outside-locations as well as in theatres. We regularly play reruns of all of the pieces.
With ‘war’ as the underlying theme, the plays of Via Berlin are about intimate, personal stories, which symbolize universal happenings. During wartime, everybody and everything is on edge. Relationships and liaisons are intensified and tested on strength, perseverance and sincerity. In the three plays, the makers of Via Berlin focus on different aspects of war. Home Sweet Home is set after the war, and is about how to continue your life when the war is over, but when nothing feels the same. From now on your name is Pjotr takes place in the middle of wartime, in a sewing workshop where six women are working for the army. Our first play Een mond vol zand (A mouth full of sand), is set during the beginning of the war.
A mouth full of sand is about a Dutch pregnant woman who seeks her lost husband, a war photographer, in Afghanistan. She finds him back in the middle of the desert, but he is almost unrecognizable: emaciated/gaunt (uitgemergeld), dehydrated, traumatized, impossible to talk to. Moreover, he lives together with an Afghan woman. The Afghan woman is the only one allowed to take care of the man, to come close to him and touch him. The Dutch woman desperately tries to find out what has happened to them, and to convince her husband to come home with her, but she neither can get through to him or to the Afghan woman. Will she be better off with or without her unrecognisable husband? Sometimes love means to let go. A mouth full of sand is played by 3 performers: Dagmar Slagmolen, David Lucieer and Rosa Arnold.
From now on your name is Pjotr. In a country where men are fighting the war and women are on the sidelines, a small group of women is surviving in a sewing-workshop. Every day, uniforms from fallen soldiers are being repaired to be sent back to the frontline. But when nightmares and terrors enter the workshop, the women no longer accept the meaninglessness of their lives.
Home Sweet Home But what happens after the war, when reunited families have to cope with the terrors the individual members have experienced? In our third and newest play, Home Sweet Home, we go into the fact that the war never ends, although it is peace outside. A reunited couple tries to pick up the pieces, but their traumatic experiences are too strong to handle. A bizarre situation appears, which can only lead to a fatal ending. Home Sweet Home is performed by actress Dagmar Slagmolen, actor Stephen Liebmann, the Ragazze string quartet (which is the string quartet of Rosa Arnold) and a percussion quartet from Slagwerk Den Haag. With ten performers on stage, it is our biggest production so far, and musically both a challenge and an inspiration to combine the feminine strings with the masculine percussion. The premiere of Home sweet home will be at the Oerol festival on Terschelling, one of the Dutch islands, in June 2013, and it will also be performed on the Over het IJ festival in Amsterdam in July 2013 and in theatres across the Netherlands in the winter of 2013.
War will –unfortunately- always be a topical theme. And because of their strong universal eloquence, it is possible for us to keep playing our pieces. We’ve already played several reruns of our first two plays on a wide variety of locations. For example: From now on your name is Pjotr was performed in an outside forest on Terschelling, in an old shippingdock and in theatres, as well in the jungle of Rio de Janeiro.