Jongen, Je Moeder

Davey’s mother is a proud beautician, his father a fireman of few words. Together they ran full speed into a wall of misery after the diagnosis. Jongen, Je Moeder… shows the unwillingness of the Boy to accept an incomprehensible reality. In an absurd microcosm, the banal becomes revealing and certainties unreliable. Actions and movements break loose of his thoughts, the naturalness slips away from life. The Boy tries, moving and thinking, to get a grip on the incomprehensible change of reality. To take a distance, to keep hope, and seek levity, but especially to discuss the unmentionable. Jongen, Je Moeder… makes the finiteness of life discussable for those who find it difficult.

Zuhause is the platform and house around makers Davey Bakker and Élénie Wagner. The two met in 2016 as performers with Club Guy & Roni/NNT in Groningen. A year later, Zuhause opened its doors for the first time, then still in the form of an interdisciplinary breeding ground in the hart of Groningen. From this artist’s house, the duo developed multidisciplinary performances on the intersection of contemporary dance and popmusic. Zuhause 2.0 (2017) was a film concert about the meaning of ‘home’ for newcomers in the Netherlands. The multidisciplinary location performance Don’t Forget to Die (2018) was about the search for happiness under the poverty line. In the music project Eliën (2019), about a search for humanity within Europe, society was an artistic point of departure.  In 2021 Davey Bakker and Élénie Wagner concluded their development project with Station Nord with the short film and EP Naar het Blauw. Then followed the multidisciplinary location theatre performance Run, Forest, Run (2022), an ode to the earth.

Stichting Zuhause makes location theatre about nature and the impact of man on his surroundings. Singer and theatre maker Élénie Wagner and choreographer Davey Bakker immerse the audience in new grand worlds filled with movement, image, pop-music, and spoken word. The productions illuminate the outsiders in society, if that be people, other animals, nature, or artists who work outside of the conventional disciplines. With regard to content, the performances are about adventure, decisiveness, and dreams, and remaining or leaving against one’s better judgement. Questions arise about what the makers and their contemporaries  wrestle with. What is our impact on the earth? Is our existence still justifiable? And in how far is the future we are heading toward still avoidable?