She has 14 first names because her father was keen to name his entire family and she was an only child. She is an in-demand actress, but Gonny Gaakeer has also been a girl with a grandmother. A beautiful grandma, who in the last years of her 95-year-old life fell over more and more often and bore the ugly wounds of it. Gonny tells her story, and shows a video she made of her life with that grandmother. Now, in Michael Laub's Portrait Series Rotterdam, her story is one of many highlights in a performance that is a paean to the multiformity of the big city.
Portrait Series Rotterdam premiered at The International Choice of The Rotterdam Schouwburg after more than a year of preparations. Auditions were held back in 2009, and tapes of some of them can still be seen today. There is the sociology student who changed from an opponent to an admirer of Pim Fortuyn through a study project in 2002. She interviewed him, took a photo with him and had to hear a few hours later that he had been murdered. Seven years later, emotions still run high and she shares with us the memory of the soft fabric of the controversial politician's suit. With such a detail, she touches everyone's heart.
As also Fouad Mourigh hits us, the Moroccan street urchin who, after a criminal youth, was able to start an acting career via Theo van Gogh, until he succumbed to the pressure of fame and ended up in petty crime again: he wants to get back on the floor, and with his looks he just might, if only he could convince himself.
It could be Idols, but Portrait Series Rotterdam did not become that. It is too honest and colourful for that. And the contestants are too good for that, too. After all: Denvis (Grotenhuis) joins in, and who is already a modest star, as is McGregor Spalburg, who could have been, had the tapes of his breakthrough album not been nicked by neighbours. Although he is still not sure about that.
The setting of Portrait Series is simple: a simple photography set, and the 16 actors tell their story, or have that story projected, behind them in that setting, as actor and theatre-maker Fabian Holle does, because that story is too unimaginable to be voiced. The 16 portraits introduce you to a city that, in all its multicolour, deserves more than the aggressive and harsh image that has become attached to it in recent years.
Portrait Series Rotterdam can still be seen on 16, 17 and 19 September.
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