Birds is an honest, raw performance about a youth in youth care ★★★★☆

A subscription to loneliness. This is how choreographer Dalton Jansen (28) describes his fifteen-year stay in youth care. At the age of 11 he ends up in an institution of the Rotterdam Pameijer Foundation. His mother has to go into hiding from her abusive boyfriend. He does not know his father. Only a decade later does he get the feeling that he is seen for who he is, what he can (dance) and what he wants: freedom, control over choices, his own nest. In his partly autobiographical depiction birds Jansen goes back to those claustrophobic years of emotional stagnation. Actor Leandro Ceder performs the honest, raw, poetic text in a penetrating way. For this, Jansen also drew from the surprise about his file and conversations with young people who are now staying where he felt locked up for years. In addition to his successful steps as a choreographer – Jansen won the BNG Bank Dance Prize and the Prize of the Dutch Dance Days Maastricht last year – he now also works as a sleep watchman at Pameier.

In a gray box with black feathers – a dark but own nest – Jefta Tanate and Rubén Garçia Arabit interpret everything that happens in and around the main character. With bird locomotion they depict flying crows that keep returning to the lamppost in front of his window. These are the ‘birds’ to whom he tells his story, who mirror his turbulent inner world with spins and flips and who contrast with his broken wings and caged soul. Just as well they play accompanists who don’t give a home. In the discussion it became clear how many emotions birds evokes, through the clear language from within: recognition, pain, anger, lack. As well as a counter voice from a twenty-something who found himself thanks to closed youth care. “Loneliness is a good place to visit, a bad place to stay.” so sum birds all this together powerfully.