Playground

Based on a haiku poem by Katsushika Hokusai with the same name, this music piece- game engages with the themes of creativity and writing as well as nature and life. The piece starts with 8 cards facing down and the audience takes turns to turn over cards. If two cards have the same picture, then they stay open, otherwise cards turn face down again. Every opened card is also matched with a music fragment. When a card is revealed, but its pair not, the fragment is played only once by the instrumentalists or the prerecorded media and the cards get hidden again. When a pair of cards get revealed, the music fragment gets repeated by the instrumentalists and the prerecorded media for a couple of times. As more cards get revealed, more fragments keep on looping and the audience must pay more attention in order to identify the patterns and match them. When all cards are revealed they get hidden again for a new round. Some old and some new cards-fragments are added or moved in different positions. The piece ends when the audience stops revealing cards or when the revealed cards don’t get hidden for a new round.

Sophia Bardoutsou is a composer, educator, and researcher exploring composition as a social, rather than an individual practice. Her work lies at the intersection of acoustic sound, digital media and diverse disciplines. Through the use of interactive media and techniques that incorporate indeterminacy, she often empowers performers and the audience to shape the creative outcome. She holds a Master in composition from Codarts University of the Arts and her works have been performed in several venues in the Netherlands (de Doelen, TivoliVredenburg, the Dutch National Opera) and abroad.

"She Dreamt of Being Washed Away To The Coast" is a contemporary take on Baltic mythology. The performance contextualises Lithuanian folklore against the backdrop of the universal human experience. It looks at the tension between two worlds: the material one, based on logic, and the one created by imagination and faith.

Lukas Karvelis (1997) is a Lithuanian freelance dance artist currently based in Amsterdam. Upon graduating from Codarts in 2019 on a Jiri Kylian Foundation scholarship, he began collaborated with Royal Danish theatre, Münich Kammerspiele, Dansatelier’s crew and Korzo Theater.

In his artistic work, Karvelis seeks to find this crucial point at which change occurs within the body as it diverges away from trauma within society and oneself. This point leads to research within the movement as he examines these moments with a curiosity about the past. He is currently linking this movement exploration to the social phenomenon of addiction, correlating to the body and mind. Alongside his work as a performer and choreographer, Karvelis developed a movement exploration practice that examines the motion of free fall, which challenges the mover to feel the freedom from gravity in order to find weightlessness.

Delve into the physical nature of sound as it emerges from the human body through breathing. The performers carry an instrument that forms around their chest as an extension of their lungs. A portable lung to catch and hold breath as a resonating space for sound. An extension of their bodies that creates new ways of interacting with their breath and pushing the boundaries of their lungs. The instruments are inspired by the throat pouches of frogs, which amplify certain frequencies of frog sounds when they expand. What would a choral piece sound like if we could extend our lungs?

Myra-Ida works in the fields of multimedia performance, building electro-acoustic instruments and singing. She has a broad, experimental way of working and focuses mainly on the process of collaborative creation and community building. With visual atmospheres, scents and a wide variety of different media, she tries to create performative spaces where the boundaries are playful and fluid.

INNER is a choreographic work-research. It is about the connection between a human being and nature in total, as well as about searching for the inner-animal which lives in every person, but sometimes we push this animal down, thus losing the connection with the inner-self. 

Masha and Liza are twin sisters based in Amsterdam.

Both sisters have experience as performers, having worked with organizations such as Korzo Theater, Dutch National Opera, and NDT. Additionally, they are educators at institutions like Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten and Dutch National Opera, and have taught internationally at studios including Korzo Theatre and Opus Ballet.

Masha is also known for her innovative teaching method, the Exploring Movement Method (EM), which focuses on improvisation and body connection. She is pursuing a degree in music production and has worked with directors such as Peter Sellars and Kirill Serebrennikov.

Liza, alongside her dance career, is a talented photographer and fashion designer, having created her own clothing line. Together, Masha and Liza represent a dynamic duo deeply embedded in the arts and culture scene, continuously pushing boundaries in their respective fields.

On stage, a pair of shoes enter. Cloaked in papier-maché, branded with a Nike swoosh and rigged with sensors, the shoes are in control. The voice of Nike creator Phil Knight is heard speaking about sustainability, his voice manipulated by the shoes movements. The shoes are in control: their movements dis- and re-integrate a video of Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi throwing his shoes at then-US president George W. Bush. Nike - an American shoe manufacturer, Nike - the Greek goddess of victory.

For the last two decades, Carmel Freeman has been gaining a reputation as a genre-bending and innovative composer, improviser and multi-instrumentalist. A conservatory education in both jazz performance and classical composition, a passion for electronics and computer music and time on stage playing a myriad of genres have fostered a unique and distinct musical voice. Carmel Freeman graduated from York University in 2018 with an undergraduate degree in Jazz Guitar, and from Codarts Rotterdam in 2022 with a masters degree in Classical Composition.

Ruben Dingemans is a presenter, voice-over and moderator with vast experience in television, corporate and social productions. Modern dance was his first love, starting at Nederlands Dans Theater as a tourmanager and nowadays the returning presenter for the annual school programmes, but also for Holland Dance Festival and Den Haag Danst.

'The mind of an artist never ceases to amaze me. I am looking forward to meeting the artists and seeing the magic they’ve created for us to enjoy. A short message to them: enjoy the moment and soak it all up! This is where you get to experience the reaction of the audience to what was going on in that creative mind of yours.'