Theater Aside is what I still am. I work aside the great current in the stage.” Actress, writer and director Annemarie Prins (1932) founded Theater Terzijde in 1965, the first outspoken political theater group in the Netherlands. That group existed for five years, but since then its views and position have not changed significantly, she says.
She is still averse to regular theater. “I always had the feeling that the big women’s and men’s theater was out of touch with what was going on in society. And I don’t really like stage-theatre, with roles and characters. The fact that I am Kniertje then has nothing to do with me. That’s another job. I make theater using myself, my language, my voice, my body. It’s a performance. That method is also political, because you color outside the lines.”
The same method is used for Death Row, the performance in which she will play from this week, made by her with director and actor Gerardjan Rijnders, at Bellevue Lunchtheater. The title, ‘death row’, is a nod, she says, to the elderly people concerned. Together they form a living group. “For most residents, the residential group is their last home. But it is a light piece, a voice concert, thanks in part to Paul Koek, who makes music with a milk frother and a horn.”
Our residential group is not a commune. Nobody wants to be in a community kitchen
Panic
For a long time, Prins was too afraid of acting. “When I saw the hall, the wet sweat was on my back,” she once said in an interview with NRC† That only changed in 1994, when she was in her sixties and Sophie Kassies started the performance Calamity Jane wrote for her. The panic went away. “The audience was close, but I lusted after them raw. Loved it.” After that she played the self-written and award-winning solo Harmoniehof and in the TV series annie MG (2010).
The inspiration for Death Row arose from her own living situation. Prins has been part of a residential group in a large building on the IJ in Amsterdam for twenty years. Her house, where the conversation takes place, offers a view of the Spaarnedam district and the Pontsteiger. It is a legal form of living, she says. Ten individuals, each with their own home, share a corridor and a common room.
Prins: “Many people at the gate of old age think: we are going to live together. But this is not a commune. Nobody wants to be in a community kitchen. It is a quiet life, but in a context. A weekly drink evening, running an errand for someone who is ill, but no informal care. ‘Good neighborly relations’ is the term we use.”
Two Ukrainian women currently live in the common area, she says. “That is something we decide together. There is a kitchen, a shower and we have bought a sofa bed.”
Tinder
One of the duties of the residential group is to coordinate the arrival of new people, “because sometimes someone dies, or one moves thanks to Tinder.” There was a performance in it. “People who want to live here write a letter. We read it and then you are invited. This procedure arouses curiosity: such a glimpse into a closed world. It’s a secretive system and it gets tough.”
The members of the residential group in Death Row also interview people who apply for a place in the residential group. You only see and hear from the living group members of that interaction. What the prospective members say you have to conclude from the reactions. An inventive method, in which you effortlessly go along, for example when someone asks: ‘Everyone? Why do you think that everyone is basically lonely?’ In between these conversations, the residents express their own and mutual concerns.
Prins: “The form is abstract, but the tenor is generally human: the principle of inclusion and exclusion becomes visible. The community is a privileged group and the members don’t come across as the most friendly people.” And with the firm determination with which she speaks, she adds: “You have to make fun of yourself.”
Cambodia
Prins also uses the term ‘privileged’ for her own residential group. “I am not of wealthy descent, but I am white, know no poverty and belong to the part of the world that rules. See the allowance affair, also an example of exclusion. You can do something about that, but those are drops on a hot plate.”
She gives examples: “For eleven years I made theater with women in Cambodia about the aftermath of the genocide. And I made performances about the war in Vietnam and about Spain under the Franco dictatorship. Also recording a instructional film about self-chosen death was political: taking a stand.”
She has been dealing with death all her life, she says. At the time of that instructional film, almost ten years ago, she herself had been diagnosed with lung cancer. She then made the theater production about that experience dead and stuff (2017). “I have not suffered terribly. At my age, dying is an option. I’m used to that. It was a precisely defined growth in my lung. It has been irradiated. Didn’t feel anything, I still had two shooting days in that week.”
As the visitors depart, a gust of wind slams the door shut behind her. “I don’t have a key,” she concludes with some terror in her eyes. A moment later she is already out. “I know someone who can help me.” And she strides into the light-blue hallway, on her way to a game of good neighborliness.