The child sings and is perfectly happy. He has a good voice and the dream of a life devoted to music seems achievable. But then it loses that voice: the voice breaks and the child realizes that it is a girl in a boy’s body. In #uncut, the new music theater work by Renske Vrolijk, the adult trans woman Vivian looks back on her transition and on the child and adolescent she was. Vrolijk wrote the work for the Nederlands Kamerkoor, saxophone quartet Bl!ndman and crossover ensemble ORBI. #uncut will premiere on 24 May at the O. Festival in Rotterdam and then go on tour.
For composer Renske Vrolijk (1965) the work has a special meaning, she says in a video conversation: it tells its own story. Her transition took place when she was eighteen. At the same time, she wants to broach a more universal theme: “The work of art must be bigger than myself. It happens to many people that they lose their dream and wonder how they will fill their lives.”
As a child, Vrolijk sang at a high level in the Koorschool Haarlem. The first production she worked on was Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in the Concertgebouw: “Most people start small and work their way up, I started on the highest stage,” she says with a laugh. After her broken voice she stopped singing: the new baritone was not her voice. The music kept pulling, she studied composition, but it also remained a struggle. After graduating, she did not write music for a long time and found work in the IT sector. Later she picked up composing again, with success, but only when she got a job with the Concertgebouw Orchestra twelve years ago, her history played out again: “I entered that hall where I had sung as a child and thought: I still have something here. lie.”
The artwork must be bigger than myself. It happens to many people that they lose their dream and wonder how they will fill their life then
Cheerfully approached the Nederlands Kamerkoor with the concept of the three versions of Vivian, because as a child she herself dreamed of singing in the NKK. The three roles are performed by mezzo Eline Welle (Vivian as an adolescent), tenor William Knight (Vivian as an adult) and a varying young singer from the soloist class of the National Choirs.
Carousel of scenes
The choir represents Vivian’s environment, but each time it changes color: it is her father, her mother, the people, the bullying children in the schoolyard. The music also changes color and atmosphere. Gradually, she started to ‘cuddle’ the three ensembles more and more, says Vrolijk: “If I have this enormous palette of possibilities, I think I should also use it to the fullest.”
#uncut is not a chronological story, but a carousel of scenes surrounding the transition. For example, Vivian-the-adolescent may accuse Vivian-the-adult of keeping him silent: “You too have been part of me – that’s the truth Vivian has to face as an adult.” The battle between the struggling adolescent and the adult reaches a apotheosis at the end, in which the chorus “goes wild”: “All prejudices will come along. It is the child that ultimately reconciles them.”
I have also never broken so many harmony teaching rules, as far as I stick to traditional harmony rules
In advance, Vrolijk gave himself complete freedom for this work. “I once learned from Louis Andriessen that you don’t have to look for your own voice, it can still be heard. That was a wise lesson. It was liberating to own the whole cookie jar of music history, it felt like a playground. Nor have I ever broken so many harmony teaching rules, as far as I adhere to traditional harmony rules.” For example, there is a passage with parallel-shifting block chords that represent the monolithic power of the collective, to which the individual sings a solitary melody. At another time’A whiter shade of pale‘ by Procol Harum is the source of inspiration or Vrolijk creates pure coral beauty.
The subject may be heavy, but Vrolijk has #uncut composed with great pleasure. “I had taken a sabbatical with the Concertgebouw Orchestra and was in my bubble for months during the lockdown, which was a wonderful period for me. Only when I had finished the piece and went through the score did I think: jemig de pemig, this is intense.”
Also read the interview with Renske Vrolijk from 2007