Wandering through the dunes with literature @Oerol Festival

Literature is starting to conquer its place at Oerol, which makes sense because poetry and prose are everywhere. The landscape inspires writers and poets to write beautiful texts and at the same time, through literature, visitors take in the environment in a poetic way. What forms of literature can you encounter on Terschelling? 

Jibbe Willems does not care whether you call him a writer, poet or playwright, he is all of them. And he thinks the boundaries between theatre and literature should be broken down a bit more. At the Summer Library, he and writer Dennis Gaens present a programme bringing together literary and theatre writers. "We want to spread the gospel of literature widely. People who love reading and go to theatre are often the same; all lovers of stories."

Under the name The New Harvest, theatre and dance production house Generale Oost and literary production house Wintertuin work together on this fusion of disciplines. According to Willems, literature and theatre can learn a lot from each other: "For literature, for instance, the dynamics and dialogue of theatre can be interesting. And more visual prose can be used within theatre. Novels and theatre in turn can learn from poetry that the boundaries of language can be stretched much further. We already have realism in everyday life, so let's seek poetry in art in particular." Willems effortlessly spoons out a line from his previous show To the Heavens Pointing which can indeed hardly be called realistic: "The birth of human maggots has always fascinated me."

Nursery

"Besides all the visual things, texts are a separate focus point within the Oerol programme," says artistic director Kees Lesuis. "And we want to be a nursery for texts just like for theatre so we also want to help with the whole process. So we have a future vision of a writers' residence where we invite a writer to be inspired by the landscape. What we are already doing is letting writers try out their texts for audiences in the summer library. Two years ago, for instance, writer Tjeerd Bisschof read his text about Sicco Mansholt, now an Oerol performance. This year, Wilhelmer van Efferink will read his new concept Motive tussle wedding still unknown tests in which the same situation is approached by five different writers from the point of view of five characters. On Tuesday at 1pm, it will be recited at the Kinnum shed. Next year, this will then become a performance." 

Wandering through desperate heather

You can already find the result of a writer inspired by the landscape in the Hoorn forest. Here you see people wandering through the dunes with headphones and iPads and being surprised by poetic texts, horny phrases and the occasional dog barking. Via GPS coordinates, 300 sound fragments are placed in the landscape like pinpricks. As soon as you step into the circle of range, a fragment starts playing and you walk through the landscape with audio. A crazy contradiction now takes place; the poetry in your ear makes you experience the landscape around you intensely, while at the same time the gaze becomes inward thanks to headphones on your head.

Creators of this three-dimensional sound experience Strijbos & Van Rijswijk have made soundwalks before but never used lyrics created especially for the landscape. Jeroen Strijbos: "Music is fast and directly emotional but text works on the ratio. The combination of the two on a soundwalk ensures that you are continually gripped. You have to be because how else will you keep a listener engaged for an hour with sound alone." Jibbe Willems spent six months working on the lyrics and visited the island five times. "With the knowledge that the landscape is changing. Only a tip of the church tower that was clearly visible above the trees in December is now visible and many of the paths are now overgrown."

Willems has made up routes that run through "the sinister forest" or "the heath of wandering despair". "Because visitors wander around by themselves, you can't make a chronological narrative. So I had to let go of all structure and still create a narrative. I chose a recognisable theme; a man who has lost his lover." Depending on the route you choose, you will all hear chunks of the story but by a clever move, the same path you walk along at both the beginning and the end, it can still be made into a round story. "In making it, I kept the motto 'Keep it stupid, simple' by Ray Croc, the man who made McDonalds great. It has become a musing voice that meanders along; perhaps it is almost like a libretto."

An hour and a half of focus

Another combination of literature and theatre is adapting a book into a performance. Joeri Vos, with Buzz Aldrin where have you gone? Norwegian writer Johan Harstad's book on stage. Making a theatre production from a book is not the easy solution, according to Vos. "You choose a book you really like and then have to edit 400 very beautiful pages into a script of about 50 pages. That still feels a bit like mutilation; you want to convey the beauty of the book but have to delete so much. Besides, you can put a book away and continue reading it later, it doesn't mind. In the theatre, you have to keep your audience focused for an hour and a half. On the other hand, in a book you need a number of pages to sketch a landscape and now you can create the same atmosphere in one go by using the existing landscape in combination with music. This is why I have been working with the composer on the show from day one instead of calling him in halfway through. That way you can mix art forms well." 

Book nerd

Tanya Zabarylo and Michael Vergauwen wrote the book On Chesil Beach precisely almost unedited for their stage production of the same name: "We play eighty per cent of the text in full and try to stick as much as possible to Rien Verhoef's beautiful translation. This is because the book is dramaturgically well put together: it deals with the evening before a wedding night and thus has a unity of time and place with only a few flashbacks. However, we don't read the book aloud, we retell it. That works perfectly just as it is sometimes more fun to hear someone passionately retell a film than to see the film."

Zabarylo is already a book freak by nature and drew Vergauwen into it: "Ian McEwan is one of my favourite writers and I read this book to Michael all the way through in two days. I found out that you read much more thoroughly that way; if you read silently you often skip over some things. Only then did I discover the humour in the book. It is very wittily written, but we only found that out when we started reading aloud. And so there are so many super wonderful stories and characters in books waiting for us."

 

To be seen at Oerol festival until 22 June:

Tanya and Vergauwen - On Chesil Beach

Literary production house Wintertuin and Strijbos & Van Rijswijk 

Jan Vos - Mansholt Foundation