BEST RELATED SECRET #1: Susanne Marx, Karin Spaink and Girl Loos in Eastern Bloc

Susanne Marx is at Oostblok, the former Muiderpoort theatre in Amsterdam, for two days with the performance 'Girl Loos'. You could call 'Meisje Loos' a critical family performance: for young and old, about growing up and playing with obligatory roles, male-female, white-black, dancer-rapper, harp or beatbox. Genderbending as a theme for the whole family, with a fringe programme featuring Karin Spaink, Linda Duits, Machteld Zee, Rickie Edens and Alex Bakker perform and engage in conversation. 

The cast of Girl Loos is impressive: Rapper Rosa Ana -what is man, what is woman, I am a woman and yet I am the man, do you find it hard that a woman can rap? -, music by Gary Shepherd aka DJ Alec Smart, baroque harpist Maximilian Ehrhardt, costumes by Wojciech Dziedzic and dancers Junadry Leocaria and Thomas Falk. Dancer and TV phenomenon Caggie Gulum has been replaced by yet another young talent: Jefta Tanate.

Clip Girl Loos, when Caggie Gulum was still participating.

Susanne Marx's work cannot really be placed in programme boxes, dance or drama, fiction or documentary. Marx deftly assembles different worlds, while leaving her protagonists to their own devices. As a result, the different modes of play, whether cultural identity or art discipline, run into holes. Contradictions and dilemmas intrude. It chafes a little, asking rather than triumphant and hip.

Susanne Marx previously stood out with the documentary dance performance Chicks, Kicks & Glory, about kickboxing women. The combination of documentary film and dance was poignant and poetic. Recently, Marx also superbly edited Rocito, a youth project by ICKamsterdam, based on Greco and Scholten's dance and boxing performance ROCCO.

Asked about her motivations for making 'Girl Loos', Susanne Marx says:

"I've done a lot of dance projects in high schools, and then it strikes me that what my generation fought for in terms of emancipation, that seems to have been reversed. The boys are players and cool by scoring as many women as possible, and the girls seem to have no choice but to go for Beyonce. If girls get their way sexually, they are immediately a slut.

And 'Girl Loos' is, of course, an old song: a young woman who has to dress up as a man, a sailor, in order to go out into the wide world. To be allowed to explore and conquer herself instead of following prescribed roles. Colonialism and sexism are two sides of the same coin. It is very much part of adolescence to try out different roles. People want security, but often the existing roles don't fit. By playing with gender roles, I show that more is possible than that opposition player-slut, that the male-female division is more complex that it is often presented.

It also has to do with my own life and work. I really had to make the role of dominant or leading woman my own, as a choreographer. It's not so much about your character, but about settling into a role, embracing it. I also loved that with the kickboxing girls, in Chicks, Kicks & Glory, As different as they were, the Dutch girls, the Surinamese, the Muslim girls.  As strong as those young women are, because they have had to conquer something. Many women have low self-esteem anyway, have to overcome that, whether it's because of their religion, because of their family, the culture, the circumstances. It inspired me immensely to see how they had the strength to conquer their own place in society, in their case through boxing."

And why turn that into theatre, or dance? Susanne Marx:

“The nice thing about theatre is that, on the one hand, you can let each appear on its own, do justice to the specificity of someone or something, also in terms of music or movement, image or text. But by composing and editing, you can achieve a certain abstraction, so that apart from the sometimes irreconcilable differences, similarities emerge. As, for example, very simply in dance with a unison: when people do the same movements, their individual ways stand out the more.

And for me, theatre is a combination of knowledge and surrender to feeling. I really want to understand very well where things come from. I always do a lot of research. At 'Handcuffed', a show about marrying off, I not only read a lot but also went to language classes for times, talked to a lot of women. Then you are confronted with someone who says, "I choose to be married off". Also for 'Girl Loos', I talked to scientists and practitioners and people who have been transformed. I want that combination of knowledge about and the physical fact opposite. Surely that's the appeal of dance, that you get into an area where the irrational and contradictory has a place. You don't have to go from A to B, but can move between set points, values or role definitions, and then hopefully end up at a completely different point, than is normally thought of or customary.”