Inez Wolters creates family performance with Strawinsky circus: 'I believe ten-year-olds can handle a lot' #festivalcircolo

Tilburg-based chamber orchestra Kamerata Zuid, with dancer and choreographer Inez Wolters, performs Igor Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat as a family performance. The performance will premiere this week at Festival Circolo, Holland's largest circus festival, also in Tilburg.

Wolters is an all-rounder. With Swarmers she stages dance on location, with audience participation. She also leads with her wild and imaginative costumes, subtle lyrics and a clear spoken-word voice the Tilburg band La Piratesse. With a changing line-up of up to eight musicians, the band performs songs in Dutch and English, impressively blending Wolters' existential lyrics with live music, costume and overall staging. La Piratesse is both direct and poetic.

The performance impressed Frank Adams, the conductor and artistic director of Kamerata. He invited her to collaborate. Wolters will perform all the roles in Stravinsky's wonderful story, with her costume designs playing an important role, of course. She also rewrote the texts of the fable about a soldier returning from war and being seduced by the devil.

"L'Histoire du Soldat is a weird and difficult story. Some aspects are really old-fashioned, that it's about a man and the devil, that the woman has no voice. With me, she is a princess. But I also find that difficulty very intriguing. I am in love with a number of musical pieces and I immediately saw the match with my practice of costume and character changes with La Piratesse. We call La Piratesse a performance band. It's not about me playing the diva. The costumes are a way of expressing something. Just like the transformations, which I do on stage. So that you can make everyone see what's happening."

Besides the famous, impressive but also whimsical music of Stravinsky and the full string orchestra along on stage, Wolters has invited a third partner, the circus artist Julia Campistany.

"For me, it's about all kinds of temptations, not just money and wealth. All people struggle with that, find a balance and then fall back. That's why I also invited Julia Campistany as a circus woman. With her mouth-balancing act (that makes you balance things on a piece of metal sticking out of your mouth), she is a counterforce, a physical counterplay for me. She is about seeking balance. Her work is full of risk and vulnerability."

"In my L'Histoire du Soldat, there is much less text. The costumes and movement also tell the story. I edited the texts myself. Made them shorter and more pointed, more abstract too, making them less dated and more recognisable to more people. Because I play all four characters, it also becomes more abstract. The devil and the soldier don't exchange money either, but something like the soul maybe. There is also no castle, no village, no book, no violin. But it still remains a fairy tale.

"We don't solve the struggle with temptations. You cannot be continuously happy for a while. We are tempted again and again. We plunge into unhappiness again and again. It's a repetition of moves. I become a kind of narrator of the constantly retold, never-ending story."

"With me, all characters emerge from the narrator. I can be human and devil, but also human and prinss-ess. For me, L'Histoire is mainly about inner conflict, even if the temptations come from outside. That's why I also designed half-costumes, so you always see the player next to the character. Designer Bart Hess helped me tremendously with that."

Have you factored in an audience of 10-plus?

"No, not really. There is a lot of variety, a lot to see, from discipline to discipline, from spoken word to movement, to costume to balancing act. I believe 10-year-olds can handle a lot and this has become a universal story."