At about three quarters of the time, Wende makes a promise to herself. In a fragile song she says goodbye to the child she doesn’t want, to the lullabies she won’t sing, the stories she won’t read, to the little hands that won’t be there. And she promises herself to be okay with that, not to regret it. Yes, it is her own choice not to have children, and she stands by it, but that doesn’t mean she has to say goodbye or mourn. “Goodbye to that story, it was never mine to tell.”
Wende Snijders made the theater concert The Promise (The Song Project) at the prestigious theater The Royal Court in her native London. There she asked five female playwrights (EV Crowe, Sabrina Mahfouz, Somalia Nonyé Seaton, Stef Smith and Debris Stevenson) to write lyrics for her. She gave them big questions, tells them at the start in a short prologue, asked for the sound of, for example, courage, loneliness or motherhood and set their lyrics to music herself (in collaboration with Isobel Waller-Bridge).
This resulted in a series of pearls of theater songs: compact stage monologues set to music, in which powerful characters break or fragile characters find strength and support. Often moving and full of fire, and here and there with a witty touch, as in ‘Lonely Bitch’ – about a woman who eagerly embraces her loneliness as part of her identity. Later, together with the audience, in a disarming sing-along, she breaks through the facade of perfect motherhood: „I’m not a good mother, I’m not a bad mother, I’m a good enough mother, and that’s good enough to me .”
Read also this interview with Wende about her previous performance De Wildernis
She is accompanied by Midori Jaegar (cello), Nils Davidse (keyboards) and Louise Anna Duggan (drums), who sometimes playfully contrast the words, or assist Wende in her energy and thus propel her to great heights. Surrounded by spectators – some of whom are also on stage, so that the large hall of International Theater Amsterdam still feels like an intimate setting – the stage becomes a arena for pain, anger, hope and strength.
Wende bowed to her great voice that darts back and forth between all registers – from warm depths to fragile heights, from groping whispers to generous boldness – and her physical energy bursting with theatrical bombast. She makes herself small and vulnerable behind the piano when she sings “I only stick my head out when it rains”, but later she throws herself over the legs of spectators or climbs on top of the grand piano.
The song cycle opens with a song about darkness, exploring the pull of the unknown. That unknown will come back later, now not as something you have to shyly dance around, but which you have to fully dive into: after all, it is the only route ahead of us: „Let’s jump into the unknown, because there’s nowhere else to go .” In this way Wende sings the audience towards the light, which eventually literally glows behind the spectators. “It’s not light yet, but it’s getting there.”