The great talent of Nina de la Parra also remains intact during the lesser moments of BloodBitches ★★★☆☆

Nina de la Parra is truly fragile when she sings a song about the greatest self-help cliché of our time: first find yourself, then be yourself and love yourself. What if, while searching, you come across an inner mess that must pass for ‘yourself’, angry, sad, confused, scared? Does ‘being yourself’ still count as a recommendation?

Her first cabaret solo God’s ways was overwhelmingly rich, funny, linguistic, surprising and emotionally charged, both musically and lyrically. Nina de la Parra (35) won the cabaret prize Neerlands Hoop a year ago, for the most promising theater maker. Her book was published in February make women come, ‘an autobiographical novel, freedom manifesto and failed self-help book rolled into one’. Last summer she wrote columns for this newspaper about a trip to Suriname, where she did research with saxophonist Sanne Landvreugd and director Titus Muizelaar for her new performance, BloodBitches.

It elaborates very much on the theme God’s ways: again it’s about being a woman and double blood, about what makes Suriname a first or second homeland, about sadness that stems from the past and that only wells up when you think about it extensively.

Topics from De la Parra’s book related to women’s body and limbs sometimes return literally, in a in your facefashion that has long ceased to be groundbreaking for those familiar with the work of, say, comedian Amy Schumer, or feminist icons like Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Lena Dunham, but which undoubtedly has a different effect on a more conservative or conservative segment of the public . “Do you have any idea what drips out of my cunt every day?” De la Parra herself claims that she is less and less booked in theaters, because programmers find her too rude.

It is clear what she wants to expose with her long tirade about expectations and gender roles, while at other moments in the performance it lacks some extra context. Words don’t matter, she says a few times, for example, but it is still up in the air which statement she wants to make with it. It doesn’t get any clearer when she later starts a lengthy plea that should put the word ‘cunt’ in a more positive light.

De la Parra shares the stage with her good friend Sanne Landvreugd, who, like her, has a Surinamese father and a Dutch mother, and whose compositions are fine points of rest. BloodBitches is emphatically a representation of them together, with a strict division: Landvreugd steals the show with her saxophone, De la Parra takes the floor. Here and there it feels a bit strange, especially when De la Parra also expresses Landvreugd’s feelings and thoughts in an account of a shared experience. During their trip in Suriname, they found out on which plantation Landvreugd’s ancestors were slaves, while De la Parra’s ancestors were plantation owners.

That part of the performance, with visual descriptions full of atmosphere and details, is equally impressive. The great talent of Nina de la Parra is that she can switch wonderfully between energies, with which she knows how to make her inner chaos tangible in an intense way. So when they sing such a song about being yourself, or when she tells with pain in her voice about the suicide of her brother, who lived to be her age – a source of separation anxiety and the feeling of not being good enough.

BloodBitches seems above all a way of processing shared sorrow into something healing, at least for the moment. It is intimate to witness that.