Nieuw West
Nieuw West
Takes people to unknown places
Language:
English/German
Contact:
Artistic director: Marien Jongewaard
T +31 (0)20 – 463 67 21
Nieuw West/Stichting Plotloos drama is the movement theatre company of performer-director Marien Jongewaard. Nieuw West’s performances transport their audiences to unknown and sometimes unnerving territory. The acting style is fanatical, physical, musical, theatrical and risky. The texts vary between the banal and the philosophical, the poetic and the kitsch, and the subjects can broadly be defined as ‘the modern man and his inhibitions and conventions’.
Marien Jongewaard studied dance/expression and mime (movement theatre) in Amsterdam. In 1980, along with Dik Boutkan and Rob de Graaf, he founded the Nieuw West movement theatre company.
International:
Lautsprecher Arnolt by Nieuw West and Productiehuis Rotterdam is an ‘opera for loudspeakers’ by Huba de Graaff (music) and Erik Ward Geerlings (libretto and direction). Bart Visser designed and built the various speaker installations. Marien Jongewaard portrays a human loudspeaker interpreting the provocative Austrian writer Arnolt Bronnen (1895-1959), who was friends with both Bertolt Brecht and Joseph Goebbels. The life and work of agitator Arnolt Bronnen encompassed all the political and artistic extremes of his age. Marien Jongewaard plays a neurotic man who is trying to survive in a cacophonic world filled with speakers: he is friends with speakers, falls in love with speakers, and manipulates and betrays speakers. As half a century of world history passes by, the speakers build into a frenzy of numbers and noise.
Lautsprecher Arnolt was performed at the Fadjr Festival in Iran and in Belgium. Previous to this work, Marien Jongewaard toured Europe and the United States as co-choreographer with Truus Bronkhorst.
Lautsprecher Arnolt, photo: Theater in beeld, René den Engelsman
Drama