Animated drawing by Joost Bakker with live music by Hans van Koolwijk (Bambuso) and Rianne Wilbers (voice and electronics)
A mesmerizing and extraordinary interdisciplinary show that combines animated drawing with the enchanting live music. Joost Bakker’s organic, almost living drawings take center stage on the big screen of the Grote Zaal, forming the foundation for a unique and unforgettable audio-visual experience. Using charcoal and graphite, Bakker sketches out designs that exude “essential lightness and tender fatalism,” resulting in stunning visuals that are simply breathtaking. Bakker animation moves from abstract to figurative drawings, and from geometrical lines to living organisms. His charcoal and graphite technique give the images a tactile, yet ephemeral feeling. The result is an atmosphere of serene beauty that transports you to another world.
But it’s not just the visuals that make this show so captivating. The music, performed by Hans van Koolwijk and Rianne Wilbers, adds another layer of complexity and intrigue to the show. Koolwijk’s Bambuso instrument, an enormous and modular pipe organ with bamboo flutes, produces powerful and tangible windpipe sounds that create an unforgettable auditory (and visual) experience. In perfect synergy, Wilbers’ vocal improvisations add a new dimension to the music. She multiplies her rich voice with electronics, weaving tight and complex sound structures that add layers of depth and humor. The combination of these three artists is nothing short of incredible, creating a show that is truly unforgettable.
Hans van Koolwijk is self-taught as a sound artist, and he is a designer-builder as well as a composer-performer. “For me, sound is a material and I work with it the way a sculptor works with stone or clay. I have always felt the need to visualize sound in images: sound becomes something you can see as it were. I connect seeing to listening, in a non-theatrical way. I like to mix the lower arts with the higher, combining banal crudity with sophisticated ethereal qualities. It’s okay if it clashes. My pivotal work, the Bambuso (1991) is an unpolished music instrument that intricately combines the visual with the auditory.”
Singer Rianne Wilbers loves to take on challenges. The kind of challenges you find in contemporary music, in the groundbreaking new repertoire brought by the ensemble VONK, which she initiated. She has world premieres to her name from Mayke Nas, Gerard Beljon, Anthony Fiumara, and others. She was admired at events including November Music, Rotterdam’s Operadagen, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, Transit Festival, and in the Concertgebouw Brugge. In 2019/2020, she was selected as a new young talent at Music Hub Brabant, where she explored the limits of her voice and her classical background through improvisation. For more information: www.riannewilbers.nl
Joost Bakker is an artist with a focus on drawing and moving drawings / animations.
The themes in Bakker’s work vary, but phenomena such as time and timelessness as well as non-dualism are recurring topics. These express themselves in various forms and ways from monumental architectural designs to simple plain drawings with a strong suggestive character. In addition, language has an important role. Quite often words and titles are used in the work as images where they regularly fuse into a semiotic play in which appearing meanings seem to be constantly changing.