The miracle happened right at the first location. On a bare piece of dune in front of beach café Oscars there are rocking benches. From one of those benches I looked, swaying, over a slope of marram grass, then a couple of terraces and beyond that the sea. As it was a weekday, but summer warm, some bathers had already settled into beach chairs. Crowded it was not. Down by the dune, two tall blonde, slightly voluptuous and mostly naked women were busy with a child, hunting for ice creams.
On my ears: another time. Coincidentally there, a pleasant male voice told of an Alien who came across two fisherwomen on a walk by the sea. He told about their clothes, their shapes, his alienation. What sounded in my ears changed what I saw with my eyes in that 1836 scene. To make matters worse, a gentleman dressed in neat beige summer costume walked by. Welcome to the 19th century. Fiction and reality blended together in perfect harmony.
Transcendence
That's what sound can do. For transcendence, you don't always need LSD or magic mushrooms. Headphones and a good montage are often enough. You can go and experience it for yourself, this summer in Scheveningen. The event is called 'Love Cures' and it is an audio walk along three locations in the seaside resort that is getting better at becoming a bit internationally mundane again, instead of dingy concrete wasteland I remember from my youth.
The audio walk was devised by radio play creator Ingrid van Frankenhuyzen, designed by her husband Pink Steenvoorden and written by Marente de Moor. It is about the days composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy spent in Scheveningen in 1863. Back then, it was still a health resort and a daily splash in the waves, combined with a glass of seawater, was enough to get rid of a lung condition (dead or alive). Mendelssohn also had to get rid of a cough, but the story - loosely based on reality - is of course about more things, such as a writer's block and jealousy de métier.
One and a half hours
I walked about an hour and a half between locations, which is no problem at all in fine weather. A colleague in a hurry did it in half the time, and that too resulted in an enthusiastic review. I myself experienced the same with an earlier work by van Frankenhuyzen, the radio play Oh, that Sea, based on Homer's Odyssey. I experienced that on a drizzly day at Scheveningen harbour, and it worked perfectly there too. Audio is the new video. Believe me. And if you don't believe it, go experience it. And tell me about it.
Good to knowLove cures. Still to be experienced until 9 September. There is also a version for children. Start and ticket sales at Scheveningen Pier. Information and booking: www.ohdiezee.nl/liefdeskuren.
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