Eight granola bars? Wilfried de Jong thinks that’s a lot of sense. “You can get there with two,” he says to Caro Derkx. But he is determined to tackle the Col du Galibier – one of the most infamous climbs a cyclist can make in the French Alps – in his own way. It’s fine that De Jong wants to give her tips, but ultimately she decides how many muesli bars she wants to chew. “I cycle it up,” Derkx emphasizes. “You drive after it in your big Mercedes.”
The two actors met about seven years ago when they were in King Lear played, in the performance of Toneelgroep Maastricht. De Jong once put his young fellow player on a racing bike, which she then refused to get off of. Since then, the pair have regularly cycled together. To share their love for the sport with a larger audience, they created the performance Hair in the windin which Derkx’s ascent of the Galibier (and the support she receives from cycling veteran De Jong) runs as a common thread through the story.
That story has become a fairly eclectic combination of different narrative forms. Cinematic images that the players made of Derkx’s route up to the top of the Galibier are alternated with pieces of dialogue, the reading of diary fragments, short cycling lectures and intermezzos of physical theater. A creative, but also quite messy change: the individual pieces do not quite click together. Just when you are enjoying a diary fragment, you abruptly switch to the next section, which in turn lasts too long to sustain your attention.
Butter and old cheese
Especially during the dialogues, it is noticeable that the texts (which the actors wrote themselves) could have been tighter. When the two show each other a number of photos of famous cyclists, for example, they talk over each other several times, use safe words and repeat themselves. This makes the conversation feel very natural and would be extremely suitable for a talk show about cycling, but in a theater performance it feels less out of place.
The performance also suffers from repetition at a somewhat higher level: the recurring (friendly) bickering that can be classified under the category ‘generation gap’ soon becomes boring. Derkx is a young woman who spreads her sandwiches with hummus, De Jong a man who lasts a little longer and prefers butter and old cheese: that joke wears off after two times. Only towards the end do these differences gain more meaning and feeling, when it becomes increasingly clear that Derkx is in many ways fulfilled by climbing a mountain that De Jong is already descending.
For the true cycling fanatic, the long run-up will certainly be less of a problem. He is mainly given a lot of recognition points in the passion for cycling Hair in the wind is filled with. And even as a non-cyclist, during the denouement you hope with the players that Derkx will reach the top. With eight muesli bars behind her teeth if necessary.