The debut novel was published in 2016 pussy album by writer and opinion maker Stella Bergsma (51). The self-destruction of the main character Eva, a 37-year-old teacher with an alcohol problem and a dark and sensual character, made tongues go away. The book was well received in literary circles, but many people were also angry with Bergsma. ‘Women especially thought Eva was a bitch’, says the author. “I got aggressive reviews from people saying they threw the book away.”
Six years later, feminist theater collective Collectiet sees Eva as ‘a female anti-hero’. Pip Lucas (24), Damaris de Jong (24) and Shelley Bos (27) adapted Eva’s ‘word cost’ for the stage. From Friday 19 August their performance is la misanthrope can be seen (again) at the itinerant theater festival De Parade, which has landed in Amsterdam.
The meeting between author and theater makers on the festival site is their first, but feels like a long-awaited reunion with friends. On the tropical afternoon, sheltered under a climbing tree, Damaris explains why she pussy album so inspiring: ‘I really like being over-simplified, showing everything, including the caverns of your brain. And I have the idea that we don’t see that much of women.’
Bergsma: ‘That was a reason for me to write it. I thought: I want to liberate women, make them more human. We are used to this kind of anger from men, whether it is the writer Charles Bukowski or Johan Derksen. We think it’s cool when they hate people. I think women are oppressed in showing their misanthropic side. As long as it is our moral obligation as women to be sweet and charming and to maintain harmony, we will never be ourselves.’
According to the four, there is also a lack of such ‘depraved’ female characters in literature and theater. Damaris: ‘Everyone always comes up with Medea.’ Bergsma: ‘Because she’s pretty much the only one.’ So when Lucas during her graduation year at the Amsterdam Theater and Kleinkunstacademie pussy album she knew immediately that she wanted to do something with it. “As I read, I marked all the words I would like to say out loud in front of an audience because it was such a contrast to all the other female roles I was offered. I asked Stella if I could use the text and turned it into a stage adaptation. I left the plot out, our play really only revolves around a woman’s thoughts. The three of us play the voices in her head.’
Damaris: ‘Who sometimes contradict each other and sometimes agree.’
In the performance this happens at lightning speed; the three actors are well attuned to each other and there is a certain rhythm to their scolding at the world. Lucas emphasizes the musicality of the text, according to Damaris reads pussy album almost like a score. Bergsma, surprised: ‘I also meant it as a score. During the writing process I had the structure of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in my head, with a heavy part in the middle that then goes out like a kind of night candle.’
The women of Collectiet love to perform Bergsma’s merciless text. From an intimate theater on the Parade, where they stand arm in arm in a barrel of water, it can be heard without hesitation that women are ‘cunt whores’, ‘with their jealousy, their emotions, their eternal shit about their ass and especially about the ass of someone else. bitch’, men assholes – ‘they say so themselves’ – and children ‘pocket hitlers’ and ‘parasites on rain boots’.
Not everyone in the audience sees the humor in it. Bos: ‘At the Parade in Utrecht we had many people who said after the performance: ‘Are you really happy? Are you okay?” Bergsma: “I find that insulting.”
Bergsma herself also likes to read from her book, such as this coming weekend during the literature program at the Lowlands music festival. On another work of her hand, Nouveau fuck, is the eponymous ’18+ pop art performance’ based on theater makers Cat Smits and Meike van den Akker, which will premiere on 26 August at Het Limburg Festival. 2020. In Bergsma’s manifesto, women are called upon to be dangerous, radically free and insolent. Bergsma herself can be admired in the theater show from February 2023 Undescribed weiblichin which, under the direction of Margot Rôs, she will read from literary work with fellow writer Saskia Noort and discuss the question of what it means to be a woman with other makers.
‘I used to want to be an actress, but that didn’t work out. I was a director and drama teacher for a long time and as I taught I became more and more interested in writing. So I started writing a book and left the theater world behind. But now Cat Smits has asked me if I want to write her next play. That’s how I end up where I once started.’
la misanthrope by Collectiet, 19 to 23/8, Parade, Amsterdam.
Stella Bergsma
Stella Bergsma (Amsterdam, 1970) is a writer, poet and frontwoman of the band Einsteinbarbie. She grew up in Naarden, studied film and television sciences and was a director and drama teacher for a long time. In 2014 she published her poetry collection Cupcakes. A year later Earth’s Last Night, with poems she translated by the American writer Charles Bukowski. After her debut novel Pussy Album (2016) Bergsma wrote the feminist manifesto Nouveau Fuck (2020). She writes opinion pieces de Volkskrant and Linda. She made the documentary for Net5 Sorry about the tits (2022), in which she explores the taboo surrounding bare breasts.