I am putting this in a hard-to-find corner of my site, because for many reasons this needs to stay obscure. But I love this. I know I am not promoting myself to most with this noise crap, but i love this. 1998. Dancers are Marleen and Leendert in nurse uniforms.

This is a videoclip of a performance by the Comic Sexy Ambassadorettes at De Nieuwe Anita. Comic Sexy was invited by Amsterdam Beat Club and I asked people filming with their phones to send me their footage so I could edit this clip.

This is a 10 minutes impression of the show ‘septacost’ i made with Amsterdam Klezmer Band.

Amsterdam Klezmer Band is seen as a ‘party’ band’ but they are so much more. They combine styles, take the idea of Klezmer to the next level and invite guests tp make their music unique and very recognisable as theirs.

So when the band asked me to write a script and direct a show for them, I wanted to put emphasis on their ‘other side’. It is a theatre show about loneliness. They have quite some lyrics about loneliness so i worked from the starting point; is ‘to party’ a distraction so you won’t have to feel lonely or is it a cure? I combined the story telling trick of James Bond films (who always operates alone)  with the idea of existential loneliness and Pentacost masses. I used the fact that they were 20 years on the road together, that the people in the band would not have been the men they were had they not been in this band all the time. I used the contradicting characters of Job (party, everybody together on the dancefloor) and Alec (i wish i was in my hotel room with a bottle of Vodka) to create an underlying ‘conflict’ i could work with.

In the show the band members had to operate parts of the decor by hand I designed a thing with curtains and moving projection sheets that was built by Frank Hietbrink. During the show we see them as kids, as the young adults they were before the Amsterdam Klezmer Band, we see their kids and feel that we all are part of a stream of consciousness.

In the end, a quire of Russian singing ladies is singing the song Alec song on his own in the beginning. They were projected on a screen that had been behind a curtain for most of the show. The material is sped up, it goes forward and backward, at times the image would be frozen. Of course, this made the song pitched differently at moments, and the speed of the music would change. The band played live with this, as if to say: we are born into specific parameters, into a reality we did not chose for but we can work with that if we work hard enough and improvise. We have to be excellent together as well as individual. And that sums up the Amsterdam Klezmer Band.