dogtroep


Dogtroep was an international site specific theatre company, creating shows at extreme locations. For every project a more or less regular team of freelance actors, designers, musicians, inventors and technicians joined the core group. The artists worked in an interdisciplinary collaboration. Their fantasies and reactions about the location formed the basic material for the performance.

I was a core member from 1985 until 1999; from 1990 till 1999 I was the artistic director and writer/director for the shows, in which period I was responsible as well for the day to day management of the group.

For Dogtroep I wrote and directed over 50 shows. Amongst those were performances on the remains of the Berlin Wall, during the war in Belgrade and just after the first elections in South Africa, as well as in the snow during the Winter Olympics in France, on an artificial lake at the World Expo in Seville and by way of opening the Skyline Theatre in Chicago. We performed 5 weeks in the totally sold out Royal Carré Theatre in Amsterdam. It was a wide variety of shows, from huge outdoor spectacles with over 4 000 spectators to intimate indoor performances.

I made archaic stories about fight, fear and survival. To get the audience more intensively emotionally involved in the physical battles of archetypes, the shows got bigger and more spectacular; overwhelming visual impressions alternated with moments of vulnerable poetry.

Nowadays Dogtroep has changed in many respects.

Dutch