Was it only physical, a matter of wrong voice use? Or did it also have a transferable meaning that the voice of theater maker Stephanie Louwrier gave it up? Someone asked her, when she was about to have the lump on her vocal cords removed a few years ago. Louwrier translated the question such as: “Do you say everything you want? Are you honest? ” Her new performance, Let’s Get Louderan attempt is to make her ‘real’ voice heard.
Louwrier opens with a piece of expectation management: we should not expect too much from the performance, she says, high expectations only lead to disappointments. She shares the floor with ‘De Gear’, a futuristic-looking DJ booth with equipment with which she can, among other things, walk and distort her voice. Just that you see how everything in her opposes her own intention. That ‘real voice’, which disappears during a large part of Let’s Get Louder Sound filter after the other.
The search for an honest stage presentation takes place with a lot of speed, and a quirky, sometimes barely followed (“that head that goes in all directions”), but therefore witty sequence of associations. She tells how she was not allowed to talk for a week after the vocal band surgery, and fantasizes how she bumps into her hero Ryan Gosling in that week. A vision from Arie Boomsma gets the word (“vulnerability is strength”), there is a musical plea for cellulite (“cellulite is cool”), it is being worked on Herman van Veen. The originality, the bravado and the subtle embarrassment about it make Louwrier an amiable stage personality, who immediately forgives a less successful joke.
Without adornment
What does she really want to say? After that alienating collage of ironically clad shame, Louwrier pushes the ‘Gear’ aside. “I’m just going to do it,” she says, with a small voice, she doesn’t look at the audience, it seems at all small, on the empty play floor.
Right through her resistance, she tells, without adornment, where her performance should actually pass. About her mother, she says, who is anxiously in life, and her daughter taught the world to enter suspicion. Who did not succeed in seeing her daughters fear and sorrow. About how she learned at a young age silence, pleasing, entertaining, shouting herself – as long as her vulnerability was disguised with it. About how to take a disappointment one after the other, at a young age, they did not learn to have too high expectations. And in addition, the show should be about her own possible motherhood, a theme that concerns her more than all the other in recent months, with a sad reason.
It is a big contrast, between the flamboyant entertainer and this almost vibrating confession. What Louwrier tells is so fresh, so great that it has not yet been translated into form. That means that her text, on the one hand, has not yet succeeded in transcending private individuals – a certain distance is needed for the matter that is simply not there yet – but on the other hand you witness such an overwhelming courageous act, that it is indeed because you see how much trust Louwrier is willing to meet, and. Finally, an amazing encore makes it felt what impetuous power there is also in authenticity. You leave the room after this disruptive theater experience.